A bunch of great games with guys I met in Silver Spring, MD.  Getting there was a little challenging, but it was a great night will some chill guys, and I look forward to playing them again.  I definitely slept on Sakura, I knew she was safe and had a really solid anti-air, but putting that together with lots of combos and the Ultra setup, it adds up to something pretty scary.  I also considered Abel one of my best matchups, but I think I’d just never played an Abel that was really solid and didn’t rely on gambling on unsafe situations.  Matches against Ryu and Sagat are still hard for me, and there was a Gen that opened my eyes to how the character can be played.  I did better than I thought I would, and got the Ultra  setup I’d been practicing, but still a long way to go.  Traffic in this area makes the travel a little rough in the evenings, but it’s always worth it for good competition.

This Sunday is going to be the start of a big push to get back into VF, so I’m looking forward to that.

Haven’t been posting that much, but I have been playing, mostly.  Some notes for myself.

• Vs. Sagat, the best place to be is just outside his sweep range, but inside mine.  A lot of pokes will just beat his options, and there’s less risk of being psychic Tiger Uppercut into Ultra or something.  But it’s still inside the range that he’ll feel comfortable throwing Tiger Shots.
• Keeping him at full screen is OK– threat of Ultra will keep him from throwing Tiger Shot, but Chun doesn’t have many great options if he plays rushdown.  My best anti-jump-in move, standing MK often gets beat cleanly by the hitbox of his jumping roundhouse.
• It seems like Chun-li’s juggle combo into full Ultra works on some  characters, but not on others.  This would be very, very lame, since I might get left at disadvantage if the final hit whiffs.

Great matches Friday, couldn’t play yesterday, and looking forward to more on Monday.

Played a bunch more SF4 and VF5, more people coming over, and we’re slowly getting back into the rather complicated business of playing VF5.  I need to start taking more elaborate notes about what to do in certain situations.  Also, as Pai, I think Bokutai into nothing is probably a good option, too.  I’m watching how the top Japanese Pais play at SBO, but they all tend to lose really early on, which is not really heartening.

Took out my M. Bison, which is really rough around the edges.  I sometimes turtle a lot, which doesn’t help things, but at least without XBL lag, I can poke out c. mk and scissor kicks when I have to.  I also need to do a lot more of c. mp into psycho crusher.  c. mp is slower, but has great range.  Like I was saying in the earlier post, I think running to my secondary instead of learning a hard match-up is sort of a cop-out, but it’s nice to have another character in reserve.

So last night I was really tired and drained and decided today I wouldn’t practice SF4 at all.  Which meant that I played VF5 for a handful of matches and then SF4 for half an hour.  Still lost a lot, but am now doing a lot better in this new ranking class.  At any rate, I got to thinking about tiers and matchups in SF4.  I think if SF4 dies, it will be because high level play boils down to counter-picking.  Well, that’s not entirely true, the scene won’t die, it will just stagnate like MvC2 has, or post-breakage CvS1.  It’s about 3-4 years too early to tell if SF4 has staying power, but I like Third Strike and VF5 because it’s purely about knowing matchups, even if you can get away a little more with not knowing fundamentals.  I’ll continue to learn SF4 if that’s what people play, but I won’t really bother going to tournaments if it turns out that you can know a character matchup like the back of your hand and STILL be at an inherent disadvantage.  I don’t expect the new KOF to be an incredibly deep game, but at least the structure of 3 vs. 3 gets you past the issue of those disadvantages.

Also, I was watching the SBO 09 videos of Virtua Fighter 5 R, and now that I’ve seen an amazing Eileen, I think I’ve seen impressive high level play with every character.

Last night was a great time both for SF4 and VF5 play, some matches I wish I could have caught on tape.  Chefboy is back in town for the summer, so I foresee a lot of good VF5 leveling up in store for everyone.  SF4 was a dry run of the M. Bison I’ve been saving up as my secret weapon.  It really doesn’t work online due to slight lag ruining the timings of getting knee press between blockstrings and abusing headstomp.  The flying purple fist attack is also somewhat unsafe if it doesn’t hit, but lands you next to the enemy, unfortunately.  I was playing through my G3-A grade online Championship matches and doing pretty well.  Only problem is that now that I leveled up into G2 rank, I’m having a really hard time as Chun, let alone my secondaries.  Yesterday was a really good day in terms of games and practice, today has been one of hitting a brick wall, one of those sessions where you win two matches, total.

Had a pretty good string of games going last night with some friends, both old and new.  I think there’s some value in choosing random select– knowing every character is crucial to learning every matchup.  I can play every character in 3S, at least to some extent, and yet I haven’t even come close in Virtua Fighter or Street Fighter 4, probably to my detriment.  I saw some promise in Dhalsim, a character that caught my eye this time around (who I probably won’t play) and Rufus, who everyone will agree can be quite fearsome.  Blanka also continues to be scary, but baiting the slide is probably the key.

Trying to play Dictator, but changing gears is pretty hard.  I saw a really great match involving Bison that I’ll try to put up.

For the first time, I realized that Street Fighter 4 “worked.”  As in, Capcom’s aim of using it to get people back into 2D fighters was effective, even on people like me who never really considered themselves as having left the flock.  I realized I hadn’t played since the 3rd Strike community died out around here, and now it’s almost trivial to find casual SF4 meets in your area.

Also, Vega’s bad, but I’m hesitant to say he’s as bad as the tier list says.

So after my previous post, I won two more matches by default, and one more to make it to the finals.  The final tally is that I won 4 matches, 3 of them because the other guy never showed up.  Similar to what happened at North East Championships, I basically got put in a really easy bracket.

The main reason I entered this tournament at all is because I tend to get pretty nervous before tournament matches, so I wanted to get myself used to that kind of pressure.  After a week of wasting my time waiting for no-shows, it was off to the semifinals.  My first match was against Yosuke, who Lau walked all over me.  I don’t think anything I expected to work worked, and I had to learn the matchup on the fly.  2 games went by really quick, but he was really cool and played a bunch of casual games afterward.  We played something like 17 or 18 matches, and I won about 5 rounds total.

Semifinals was double elimination, so I went on to play Shag and his Goh.  He took the first match, and I took the second.  I was one round away from taking the third set, and he came back to take it from me.  We also played a bunch of casual matches afterwards, and I did pretty well.  I think I lost as a combination of nerves and a more experienced player adapting to my play style.  I’m hesitant to blame my loss on anything but lacking practice: I needed to capitalize on my momentum, and had to push a little harder to make it.  Great games to Yohsuke and Shag, before the semi-finals, I was convinced this whole WCG thing was a waste of time, but what I learned from them alone was worth it.