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Just received my copy of Super Street Fighter IV today. My 360 is expected to arrive repaired on Tuesday…
edit: I might as well update this post with something a little less inane. Was just playing some TvC online and had a guy who rematched me probly 15 times in a row, which is always cool. I’d say I won about the first 11 in a row with fairly little problem. Even though he was more highly rated than me, it was clear were we in the same league, but I was considerably better. But then he won. 4 times in a row. (I’m estimating). All because of one move he kept exploiting: Zero‘s sentsuizan crossup. This thing was just destroying me over and over again. I don’t know why it took him so long to bust it out. The problem with it is it’s a crossup, which, by definition, makes blocking it extremely difficult. I have to think about how I can prevent this in the future… I’m not exactly sure how to work on it. Maybe I can find someone online who’s willing to cross me up all day long I guess.. I don’t want to leave this untended to though.
Also, so as not to sound like I’m being excessively negative because I’m always focusing on what I lack, I will say this: While it’s a long (infinite, actually) road ahead, I do think I’m getting fairly “good”. At this point, there’s almost no one who beats me for free. Even pretty much top players (online at least) have to work for it. That was actually my original goal. To be, at least, competitive against anyone in the world. Maybe not quite there yet, but getting quite close.
Slowly getting better at Imperishable Night [Normal]–specifically, the Forbidden Magic Team (Marisa/Alice). For a while I put off on using this team due to them getting Reimu for the stage 4 boss, who for the longest time gave me way more trouble than Boss!Marisa. Otherwise, I would be exclusively using Magic Team; straight shot + high speed suits me better than wide and homing shot + moderate speed.
I finally got around to taming Boss!Reimu, thanks to focus mode hiding the yin-yang shots, learning how to deal with Reimu when she’s in fly-off-of-one-side-of-the-screen-at-high-speed mode, and learning that on the “Duplex” spell cards that I can go across the bullet portals (for a lack of better term) safely.
The Stage 5 boss, Reisen, still gives me trouble. I often bomb spam when the bullets go back from being red, out of fear that I’m on top of a bullet and I’ll have lost as many as 3 bombs.
Overall, the Boundary and Magic Teams are the only ones worth using; the other two are too gimmicky for me. I don’t use Youmu/Yuyuko because I’m baffled by the idea of having a wider shot in focus mode, and I don’t use Sakuya/Remilia due to Remilia’s difficult sentry gun-like focus attack.
With Homura and D-Force behind me, I was finally able to move on to new challenges.
The main one I’m dealing with now is Batsugun on the Sega Saturn (normal game). This babe starts easy, gets a bit taxing on the 2nd boss and soon enough hits a blazing hard plateau with enemies and bullets sweeping faster than your eye can actually see. I’ve reached the 4th boss so far, and have yet to establish a consistent strategy for the 2nd and 3rd bosses.
On the PS2 I have started to fly the upper route in Darius II, which can be found in the 1st volume of the Taito Memories II compilation. Whoever said the upper route here is easier – and I think this is mentioned in the game’s documentation as well – is undoubtedly joking. And I still hate Yamato’s guts. I decided to bypass stage K because of him and face Leadain in L instead. Yes, Yamato is definitely my nemesis in Darius II.
With the release of Söldner-X 2 upon us, I’ve been lately maturing the idea of getting the 1CC in Söldner-X Himmelsstürmer. I don’t care what the crushing majority of the hardcore community says about it, I enjoy this game a lot. I’m not bothered at all with the euroshmup traits, I see them as a different kind of challenge. Last time I played this game I remember I finally got to a decent strategy to deal with that pesky 2nd boss, and hopefully he’ll give in faster when I resume playing.
Some quick credits on PSN’s After Burner Climax have also made into my latest gaming routine. This is an awesome port, it’s really really close to what I remember from the real arcade machine. And the option to blast everything while listening to the After Burner II soundtrack is just irresistible!
I was just thinking about how I really, truly, absolutely suck with everyone in this game except for Ippatsuman and Saki. It just goes to show the power of practice. The main issue is that these are the only two characters that I can do exactly what I want to do with when the situation arises. When I play another character, like Ryu, it’s like “an opening! now to just… wait… no, not that”, I end up getting like 3 kicks in or something instead of a proper combo. I’m not particularly concerned, just a passing thought.
Because I don’t want to look like a liar, it’s time for the Anti-Ippatsuman post. It is vitally important to understand how to defeat yourself in order to plug up those holes and improve. Please refer to my Ippatsuman Gameplay post, as this is a direct rebuttal to that post. I will be talking about some Anti-Anti-Ippatsuman strategies as well.
The first section of my Ippatsuman gameplay was the most generic as it focused on different ways of setting up combos, something that the vast majority of TvC characters are looking to do. 1 Ippatsuman (screw this, for the rest of this article he will be referred to as “IP”) has blocked an opponent’s attack string and is ready to counter. The best way to deal with this situation is to cancel into a special move that will either require another block, with enough time to recover from the attack string afterwards, or a special move that will place your character out of harm’s way. I’m not sure that every character in the game has such options, but I know that at the very least some do (IP, Soki, Zero). This is a great maneuver as it seriously limits the risk of having your combos blocked. Probably one of the best examples of this technique is IP himself. At the end of attack strings, he can cancel into a quick upper. I usually go into a light quick upper. More often than not, the opponent (in this case, also IP) will try to jab on reaction to my blockstring ending, whiff, then I will immediately come down into a new combo. Once the opponent starts to learn my combo finish, I can instead go into a medium quick upper to change the pace on him, or even a light baseball projectile, which is almost guaranteed to be blocked, but puts IP at a safe distance. I really wonder about how many characters have this kind of versatility. I’m not so sure because it’s a little bit of an advanced technique, so it’s not something I’m aware of for characters I don’t often play or play against. Anyway, for poor characters who don’t have this technique to escape trouble, their options are much more limited; they basically must either be much more careful about attempting combos, or sacrifice their recoverable life for a BBQ. 2 Rushdown attack. The answer to (2) is basically technique (1) from the first article. If IP is rushing you down, you must block then punish. But as I just mentioned, IP is particularly capable of rushing down with near impunity thanks to his canceled specials. Probably the best defense against this kind of sustained rushdown (of which I certainly utilize at times) is to advance guard your way out of it. Break IP’s rhythm, reset the distance and start over. Very few players seem to do this, even reasonably good players. I think this is because during typical blockstrings, we are so accustomed to just waiting it out and punishing it at the end. Against a character like IP, you’d be best off not staying on the defensive for too long. 3 This point was too vague to rebut. It’s about 50 entries worth of strategy summed up as “etc”.
Baseball projectiles are not a particularly big thing. Just block them and close the distance. Their main function is to be able to punish projectile spammers. Don’t projectile spam IP, it’s not worth it. Unless you’re Zero. The straight fly is good at catching opponents off guard, but it’s far from unpunishable. Just be aware that it can happen (it requires a chargeback, so you should have a decent idea of WHEN it’s possible). Block the straight fly and punish it. If playing as IP and having your straight fly blocked, your options are combo into a final reversal breaker anyway (cost 1 hyper. you can still be punished, but it’s far less likely), BBQ (cost red life portion. Unpunishable and pretty likely that you will catch the opponent off guard with this!), or simply taking your punishment (cost possible death). As it happens, I don’t overuse the straight fly as eventually opponents will learn to expect it. As far as the anti-air final reversal breaker goes, don’t jump in too much. It gets overused in TvC and I, for one, frequently expect it.
I guess that’s about it for the anti-Ippatsuman gameplay. Of course, this is very generic and your particular characters’ abilities are going to weight heavily on this, but this is a generic roadmap to rebutting the strategies I laid out earlier. Overall, you want to keep a lot of pressure on IP. Blocking his attack strings provide minimal opportunities. Grapplers should also be OK against him as they like to get in close (which he’ll generally allow) and then attack with throws and holds. Pixie characters like Zero or Yatterman can also be effective as they can beat him to the punch. Long-range characters are usually in trouble as he can hold his own at a range and is very good at closing the gap and punishing up close. Giants also have trouble with him since he can straight fly right through them.
Earlier tonight I watched the three highest scoring replays for Raiden IV (X360 mode) on the XBL leaderboards. I only watched the highest scoring one all the way through (the 2nd loop.) When I did, I took notes on sticky notes. Where’s a fucking notebook? It’s okay, I didn’t take many notes.
St. 3
-1 panic bomb?
-p.b. big ship over bridge (p.b. is point blank)
- Herd in middle of screen arriving 1up area with Wide
-2 turrets 2nd last form
St. 3 Boss
-Due to delaying in earlier forms, last form time-out early (don’t have to deal with harsher final patterns? also, for score.)
St. 4
He bombs the suicide-bullet-pods at home stretch
-laser for boss (I prefer my assassination technique with Wide shot and 1 bomb)
St. 5
-p.b.s big ship near end
-bombs boss when it spins for early KO
St. 6
give space for tap-dodge between bullet gaps from the ships that shoot wide spread V-shapes.
-bombs suicide bullet pods at mid-stage
-be wary of THOSE SUICIDEBULLETPODS! (check replays again)
St. 7
Did he die on purpose there?
-uses missiles
-tiny dodges last pattern tlb
-bomb the shit out of tlb
- – -
I also noticed many of the 1st to 10th rank replays used Homing in more stages than I did, only using missiles for certain occasions. That’s something I may need to adjust to if I switch to homing. Otherwise, I think the outlook is positive for me ALL clearing Raiden IV. The notes here expressed most of my biggest concerns as far as survival goes. I found out that the TLB at 2-8 (I guess the purple crystal has his own mini-stage) is actually very easy with the usage of 3 bombs and point blanking and doing some simple dodges in a few patterns. That excited me as I thought that would be a big hurdle for me as I was slaughtered in my first practice attempts against ‘em.
Also, one of the top ranking players used the photon beam for the alternate DLC ship, I don’t know its name (not the fairy.) He kicked some serious ass with it, but all the fucking wiggling wouldn’t suit my play style, I decided. And the way he played with it involved a lot of jittery movements to manipulate those things for maximum damage. I was impressed as I think I would have a lot more difficulty. But hey, I haven’t tried (or PAID) for that ship yet, maybe it’s dece’. Also, I think he may be using a pad. Fuckin’ pad jitterbugs.
Expect to see me in the top 10 in the US Raiden 4 Leaderboards! I’m getting into it. Yeah, I’m pumped.
Looking for excuses to spend more time with my Seimitsu-modded FSTE, I decided to pick back up some Kenta Cho(u) games.
I’ve mainly been playing Parsec47, as well as its antithesis rRootage. Whereas rRootage is boss-oriented and about careful slow movements, Parsec47 is about waves of enemies and zipping around like a Scout on five cans of Bonk!, especially in Extreme difficulty where everything–bullets, point items, and you–move around at very high speeds. I do like that you rack up craploads of points in P47 rather fast; compare to NOIZ2SA where it takes longer to accumulate items and it’s all too easy to slingshot items through the top of the screen, forcing me to build back up my multiplier.
Survival in P47 seems to be about, in addition to finding gaps in patterns, moving sideways as well as resisting the urge to pick up that cluster of point items in order to tap-dodge through a wave. Unfortunately, my brain, being the piece of shit that it is, likes to do what is the least sensible tactic in any given game situation, whether it be prioritizing score over survival, trying to melee Pyros in Team Fortress 2, and barging into a goal zone defended by 6 players by myself in S4.
Back to rRootage. I’ve mainly been playing IKA, GW, and PSY modes, and am currently stranded on the eighth tier of stages on each of these modes. In the past I almost exclusively played PSY mode because I liked the graze shield mechanic (except when the shield meter builds up during mercy invincivility causing me to waste it), but I’ve also warmed up to IKA and GW modes. GW’s reflect attack, like that of Giga Wing and Mars Matrix, turns dense bullet clouds into opportunities to take several thousand HP off the boss; as a balance, the main shot is weaker. IKA mode, like Ikaruga, is an exercise in tuning one’s eyes to distinguish what bullets are currently absorbable and what bullets mean instant explody death. Thankfully, unlike Ikaruga, I don’t have to chain enemies to get an optimal score.
Which reminds me: Radiant Silvergun, like its spiritual successor, has that annoying “shoot 3 enemies of the same color” chaining mechanic. So why do I want RSG so much?
Harmony of the Silver Star: it’s been something like 9 years since I played the Silver Star Story Complete on the PSX. I remember when I got the game and it left such an impression on me (being about 15 at the time). After the spark of other classics I played at the time: Final Fantasy 6 and EarthBound, Lunar defined the ‘classic’ fantasy RPG feel to me. With a big heart that came through in the voice acting, cut scenes and music, I fell in love after finishing it and picked up Eternal Blue later on.
Anyway. I’m enjoying Harmony of the Silver Star. I was worried that the game would fall flat to me in some aspects in my later years, but the teams behind the localization did a good job keeping the humor and spirit from the original. In a town named Reza, the whole joke between the dialogue with these NPC hicks — is that they are a dinky incestuous town. Puns and sexual innuendo are frequent and the dialogue with your main characters is playful and you grow attached to their distinct personalities. I don’t remember Alex being so ‘silent protagonist’ in the PSX version. He hardly ever speaks beyond the opening hour or two. But I’m remembering why I like the silent protagonist — a modest hero with few words. Kyle steals the show with his wild and reckless personality, and Nall talks a lot! He’s a coy mother fucker, I like ‘em.
The presentation is spot on and though the game is easy, I find some difficulty in advancing quickly through, which gives me some fun to hurry along. I figure the more I hurry, the faster the challenge will meet my party.
I’m on my way to the Red Dragon Cave but I’m currently chasing a pink fluffy thing in a stream-filled meadow area.
Onto Raiden IV.
I’ve been spending more time than I thought I would with this one. I’m not a huge Raiden guy aside from my time with Raiden Fighters Jet. The first one pisses me off to all hell. I liked Raiden III from what I played of it but I didn’t get too dedicated. After I cleared the first loop in Raiden IV, I thought it didn’t take that much time to accomplish. So I’ve been exploring the 2nd and final loop. And I gotta say, it’s a blast. With the 2nd loop, you have to get even more serious with memorizing how to handle yourself throughout the game. The bullets go at least doubly faster. I’ve been practicing the stages and the bosses in boss rush, primarily. Dying early on in a real attempt can be frustrating, so I’ve limited myself to the amount of real runs I’ll do for the sake of saving time for practicing.
Right now I can reach 2-3 in X360 Mode. My goal is to reach the true last boss. Defeating him, I am not sure, yet. No one has accomplished this feat on the NA Leaderboards, Arcade nor X360 Mode I believe. I wish more people would play this game, it’s just fantastic and the more I play it the more I like it. That spread shot is so damn satisfying.
Also, playing this game with my HRAP has been a real joy. The two feel like a match made in heaven, it must be the slower ship speed or something. Though I have accidentally tripped my bombs off, multiple times. Dang you, Ultra Sensitive Sanwa buttons! *Yay! Ultra Sensitive!*
Avid gamers frequently bump into periods where they play more because of pure challenge than because of the gaming pleasure itself. It’s in these moments that one reaches his/her performance limit, from where any further playthrough serves the sole purpose of perfecting strategies and/or overcoming very difficult situations. It’s in these moments that some people, despite being beaten, tired, sleepy, worn and angry, insist in playing the game. Instead of success, however, what generally sets in is frustration and ultimately the loss of some preciously needed moments of rest.
Even though we all strive not to do it, eventually a game will put us in such a situation. It’s inevitable.
I admit it, I used to be one of these suckers who sometimes went beyond the thin line that separates fun and frustration. Eventually I learned the value of time gaps, rest spells, quick strolls and… bad games. I do believe that bad games serve the noble purpose of putting things into perspective, simple because the more you play them the more you learn how to properly value better games, as well as how to spend time with them.
No progress on that 2nd phase of the last boss, no matter how hard I try? Now is the time to stop and give a chance to that neglected title no one cares about. After all, all bad games also deserve some love. Without them we would never know how exactly good the best games are.
Case in question: Homura (PS2 – still…) vs. D-Force (SNES).
Strangely enough, I still have problems dealing with the 1st form of Homura’s 4th boss, even though I can beat its 2nd form without bombing. If I manage to reach the last boss with at least 3 lives, I die stupidly because I’m not intelligent enough to use whatever bombs I have left. Three credits in a row and I fail miserably in all of them. Further credits end in stupid mistakes in the 2nd and – yuck! – 1st stages. …… What now?
I don’t deserve to play the game anymore.
I deserve to be punished for my incompetence.
Enter D-Force for the SNES, a notoriously bad vert that tries to copy Twin Cobra and Firepower 2000. Huge hitbox, hideous frame rate, cheap deaths all around. Cheesy, cheeeeesy music. Initial recognition done, and I keep playing it. I hate the mode 7 effects when starting or ending a credit and all the annoying delay with the HS table, but I endure. For the sake of practicing, I raise the starting lives to 9. I learn how to deal with shooting and exploration stages. On the next day (during another break from Homura) I find out stage 3 is unfair, a lot more difficult than stage 5. And the shooting mode option won’t let me play stage 7 after I beat stage 5. I go for a real credit with default settings and get to the 5th boss. I think I can beat the game.
As one would expect, after the bad game break I felt my gameplay in Homura during the next day was more polished. If I had insisted in the punishment of playing it, most probably I would be stuck in the same previous skill level. I appreciate the game a little more because of this.
Maybe this is a warped way to say I enjoy playing bad games. In my opinion doing it like this avoids burnout on good games, makes for better shmup appreciation and increases my overall knowledge of the genre.
I just hope I don’t beat D-Force before Homura.
Hopefully not.
I feel perhaps it’s proper to give you some kind of idea where I’m at right now. I play free play (as opposed to ranked) almost exclusively, and my win rate is currently 55%. I’m slightly over 1,000 wins now, so I’ve played roughly 2,000 battles total. Ingest large grains of salt when looking at these numbers. Win rate is affected by many thing (do you ragequit? do you rematch better opponents or run? do you play your mains all the time or branch out a lot? is the community mostly hapless noobs or seasoned vets?). But still, if you’ve been following my progress, I figured you might want a general idea of my current status. Now let’s get wacky. If I am to estimate my “production” win rate, by which I mean mentally adjusting to only include the past month or so, ignore ragequitters, and only include my main team, I would estimate that win rate to be somewhere in the 65-75% range. Now chug a salt shaker.
Technical development in TvC can be looked at as three stages. There’s the R&D stage, the very initial stage. Here is where you (almost certainly in training mode) move around, try things out, read about what other people are doing, try that out, tweak it, etc. Then there’s the practice stage. While it’s all “practice”, what I mean here is that you’ve decided on what you want to do (i.e. the exact combo), and you’re trying to drive it into your muscle memory via repetition. I seem to be talking about this in a very combo-specific manner, but it applies to some other things also. Practice is also done in training mode. Then there’s the production stage. I consider a technique to be in the production stage once you’re consistently attempting it in real battles. Even if you don’t have it “under your belt” yet, at this point it becomes a true part of your gameplay. Repeatedly using a combo in the production stage obviously doubles as practice for muscle memory, but at this point it’s real. Tournament players would probably also have a fourth stage, a tournament stage, which would be techniques that you truly have under your belt and have very high success rates in.
As players, we must progress through the stages. If we don’t spend enough time in the first stage, our gameplay will become stagnant. If we don’t spend enough time in the second stage, our techniques will be sloppy. If we don’t spend enough time in the third stage, then you’re not really playing and will only have theoretical skills.
Now let’s talk specifics, specifically, Ippatsuman specifics. I recently talked about my Ippatsuman gameplay, but this is about my technical progress with him. For starters, I have become reasonably consistent with his combo. There’s still a lot of room for improvement, but I think I’m fully completing it over 50% of the time. My most common problems are missing the launch (holding d or f instead of df), or mistiming the jump directly after the launch. However, I’m pretty consistently pulling off the more difficult aspects, being the dragon punches near the end. It’s interesting, the fightstick has helped my combo with Ippatsuman, but made non-main characters that I used to be able to pull off combos “on the fly” much, much more difficult. This combo has been in the production stage for some time now and is serving me quite well. Some readers might recall a little while ago, I regressed this combo back to the R&D stage, removing a hit to reduce complexity. Now that I have a good production combo, I am going to go back and see if I can’t improve his combo a bit. There are three things I want to try and compare damages and complexity, they are:
- Adding the second jump before the DP back in. This was what I removed before and I would like to attempt it again now that I am doing the rest of the combo more easily and have even changed controls.
- Adding a BBQ before launch to restart the combo from the beginning. I tried this a little last night and it’s fairly simple, but seems to increase the damage by a surprisingly trivial amount. I want to get the exact damage outputs and try to figure out when this makes sense.
- Replacing the double-jump from the first variant with a DP(A), A, B, DP(A). This seems a good deal more complex, but I would imagine it probably increases the damage decently as well. I have not seen this in action yet, but someone said they were using it.
Hopefully I can update this post later today with reports on how much damage each variant deals.
Somewhat in line with my last post, yesterday I decided to upgrade Soki from one of my secondary characters to my only secondary character. The old secondary characters are now tertiary characters that I don’t plan on playing for a little while. I would like to eventually get him to the point where he’s a true third option against my most difficult of opponents and the only way to accomplish that is by focusing on him and letting the other secondary characters take a back seat. It’s a bit interesting that I gravitated towards him because he’s the type of character I typically stay far away from (big, slow, strong). However, it’s good to “spread your wings” a little bit and, when used masterfully, he can pull off some truly insane combos. I won’t get into all the nitty gritty details, but from the start I was doing a super simple combo with him, A, A, B, C, Level 1 Oni Tactics(hyper). It was very basic, but it started with a jab and ended with a hyper, which is always good. Right now I’ve regressed a bit. He has a lot of combo options, which makes his R&D phase a little more complicated than most. I’m not 100% settled yet, but I’m pretty sure the first combo I attempt to move into practice with him is gonna be this basic combo. There’s no hyper involved, but it deals a good bit of punishment and saves meter. I tried this a bit last night and there’s really only one part of it that I find tricky. The combo goes like this:
Jump(C, B), 2B, C, 6C, DP(A) (staggers), A, B, C, 3C, aerial rave
I highlighted the tricky part in bold. Going from C, to 6C, then canceling into a dragon punch requires very fast timing and I was missing it a lot. The good news is that the rest of the combo is pretty simple. I need to hammer out those 3 moves in training mode. Soki has much more basic combos into hypers (as mentioned before) that I could rely on instead, but I believe this would be a much better goal for bringing him into the status of a viable character choice against all opponents.
Edit after quick R&D session:
Ippatsuman
The first variant mentioned is still overly difficult and not worth pursuing. Same with the third. Concerning the BBQ, here are the stats:
Regular combo I’ve been doing: 23,469,000,000 damage
BBQ 10% Red Life: 24,079,000,000 damage
BBQ 20% Red Life: 31,240,000,000 damage
These numbers vary a bit depending on something (I think depending on how squarely you hit the last DP before hyper), but these are solid averages. At 10% red life, the damage is so minimal, it barely seems worth it in most cases. At 20% life, the damage increase is significant, but so is the amount of recoverable life you’re sacrificing. I’m still not sure how the trade-off works out as far as when it’s advantageous. I think the best thing to do may be to practice BBQing more and just try to feel out if it’s helping or not.
Soki
The very first combo I was doing (AABC,Oni): 8,035,000,000
A, A, B, C, DP(C), (wall bounce) 623AB(hyper): 15,006,000,000
Basic combo I’m trying to do: 21,765,000,000
These numbers are slightly difficult to compare because they can be mixed and matched. For instance, I could replace the first A in the first two combos with a jump(C, B), which would probably help a lot. But in any case, it would seem the simple combo is the most effective and without using a hyper. It’s also still quite difficult for me to pull off, but I have faith that a little practice phase should bring it into an Ippatsific level of consistency.
Dan Haigh
Ghegs
[DRZ] OTL-TIW
sikraiken
Alice
victoly
plasm0
Aquas
Raydere
szycag
BDA
bloocloud
Kollision