Most speed runners tend to play games in japanese if there is a japanese version of said game. This is because japanese text appears and scrolls faster (as each character takes up less space than a word of equivalent meaning in english would), allowing speed runners to skip dialogue more quickly.

This comic was quite fun to make, as I love metal gear solid.

Anyway onto news. I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been streaming so much (randomly gaming mostly). However, I did get the chance to play Airtola (the guy who won shadowloo showdown qualifier) because he plays at my friend’s store in Long Beach.

I knew he was going to beat me, but I didn’t realize just how bad it would be. And now I understand how he could win a tournament with some solid players there, especially since his team is unique. You also don’t see the big dudes like nemesis and hulk winning that often.

So how his team works is just mad scary. His hulk comes in and has some scary opening powers. Armored standing heavy is an obvious one, but his low light is actually REALLY far range (it’s a good 2 character’s length low attack). If he gets an opening on you from midscreen, he can do over 1 million damage guaranteed (1-2 bars required, but he builds 2 bars in the combo). If he just pushes you to the corner, then he does this scary Hulk mix up where he does standing heavy (3 armor hits), into gamma charge up (invincible), into gamma charge downforward (you are still in blockstun from the gamma charge up and he has frame advantage on you now). If you try to retaliate here, he can standing heavy you and 100% you. IF you try to block, he can throw you. If you try to jump, he can low light you. 

Pushblocking the gamma charge down-forward and then getting out of the corner is pretty much the only escape. Even if you escape though, it’s scary to push buttons because of the HUGE arcs that Hulk and nemesis have, and the armor they have. So even if you get out of the corner, you still have to do about 3 combos to kill one of his characters due to their health pool (Hulk/Nemesis/Taskmaster, which is 1,200,000, 1,150,000 and 1,100,000), and he only has to do 1 combo to kill you. 

His nemesis and hulk in that respect play somewhat similarly, though I didn’t realize the power that nemesis has on people jumping in. He does the jump loop that puts you in block stun, and gets the wesker style mix up of command grab or low light, again, the damage is huge, especially if he still has Hulk alive at this point.

So pretty much the team throws a bunch of mix ups in his favor against you, has a ton of frame advantage on you, and you have to open him up at roughly a 1 to 3 ratio (depending on your character and your willingness to blow level 3s and x-factor).

It’s a REALLY scary team, and most games I just died. Regardless though, I loved it. I really haven’t played anyone recently that has beaten me that hard, and all I wanted to do was play more and more and learn. It was very refreshing, and I want to play him more. I hope he does well at Shadowloo showdown and doesn’t get cheesed out. As Gray fox says “Hurt me MORE!” 

I was inspired by this recent 3s tournament to hit up some training mode:

http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2012/mar/22/street-fighter-3-third-strike-roundup-3-3-tournament-combos-against-urien-and-msf-speedrun/

Glad to see 3s is still going strong in Japan. 3s is too sick.  

Also guys, I’ll be posting on my twitter mostly if I stream and what not, feel free to follow it:

https://twitter.com/#!/black0utgaming 

Stream link:

www.twitch.tv/black0uts 

http://mwomercs.com/

Me and my friends were huge battletech/mech warrior nuts back in the day, and I still love the series but just nothing has come out over the years that has made me go back (though I did recently re-play Mechcommander 1 and Mechwarrior 4: mercenaries).

While I loved the games, I always felt that limitations in technology kept them from being even greater. It looks like the devs of MWO are aware of this too and want to make the mechs feel a lot more like mechs. I hope they work on updating the controls so they are really intuitive with today’s standards, but still keep the clunky feel of piloting a huge ass war machine. I can’t wait.

Also, Baldur’s gate enhanced just got announced. I was hoping for Baldur’s gate 3, but Baldur’s gate enhanced can be really cool too if they do the right things with it.

Overall, I’m a really really really picky gamer, and I pretty much only play fighting games, League, and Starcraft 2. So when I mention games that AREN’T those games that I’m excited about, I’m generally very excited about them.

Resident Evil: ORC, MWO, and BGE… pretty awesome.

yesthatsmynaturalcolour:

So, a new game, and there’s lots of hype behind it. I haven’t gotten much actually versus time with it as no one within 30 minutes/1 hour of me plays the game that I know of, but I sat in training mode for a bit.

One of my friends said Tekken is a knowledge based game, and I’m feeling it now. A lot of the Tekken characters are about memorizing their strings (some of which are so weird like if you do standing mk with Julia or forward + standing mk, she will do the same move, but she can only do a target combo off of the forward + standing mk), and a lot of fighting against them is knowing what they can do after certain moves in certain strings.

Overall too, a lot of moves are REALLY safe in this game. Zangief’s green hand, Ryu’s donkey kick, they are way safer than their were in previous games. This makes attacking back a much different beast than in other games. I feel like I should have push-block sometimes T.T

I did end up playing online a bit yesterday against my friend of Arizona, Danimitsu. I was actually very happy about the netcode. One of my other friends said that it uses a rollback feature like ggpo. This is the feature where it will get data from both sides of the connection (both players) and match them to what happens after the fact. A few weird things happen with this like people losing health but not actually, or the KO screen popping up before someone is KO’d (happened in 3s sometimes). This is because on one side of the connection, the game thinks something happened (ryu got hit), and on the other side of the connection, something else happened (ryu parried the attack instead), so when the roll back occurs, the game will eventually register that Ryu is not dead and that he parried the attack, but the previous message it received that Ryu got hit and KO’d is taken back slightly, but the message still stays. At least, that’s how I think it works.

This is overall done to reduce lag and it’s the future of fighting games online imo. A few hiccups here and there is WELL worth the near lagless game play that rollback provides. I also found out how to minimize the impact my streaming program has on my internet connection, so I will be streaming more in the future.

Anyway, back to game play, I still haven’t played it enough to judge completely, but overall I am liking the game, even though it’s really really different. I think something that people will start doing more later is hit confirming combos earlier as combo damage pro-ration is really really harsh in this game (which is the main cause of time outs).

I also see the low damage of certain characters as a potential problem. At most I can do maybe a 330 solo combo with Asuka off 1 bar, but with Steve, I can do a 460 to 470 anywhere on screen off that same 1 bar. Hugo is already terrorizing people with his obscene damage output, a lot of which comes because he doesn’t do a bunch of jabs before a combo to pro rate it heavily. I saw a dude do a 3 bar 20 hit sexy combo with Asuka/Xiaoyu on the Comboratory stream, but it ended up doing like 350 damage or something =P.

The character variety is cool, and this is a nice introduction to the Tekken characters for me. I played Tekken games before but never got really good at them. I think they are a lot of fun, and it’s cool that they are mixing the 2 styles of games together. At first I thought they were just going to make all the Tekken characters “street fighter-afied” by taking away their chains and what not. It’s cool to see the 2 coexist, and it seems there is some decent balance between them.

Sorry I haven’t had any posts in a while, this is one of the longer breaks I’ve taken. I was actually working at Blizzard Entertainment up until that recent incident where they laid off 600 employees. I’ve been on the job hunt for the past 2 weeks or so, but I’ll update as more stuff comes out.

I’ll also end up streaming some Operation Raccoon City when it comes out.

So I’m sure like myself, at least some of you guys are watching Cross Assault pretty regularly. 

I’m sure some people were surprised by the picks. The obvious picks would have been a bunch of top players like Combo, JWong, Ricky, etc, etc. But it looks like they wanted to give some middle tier players a chance to shine which is completely fine.

However, I was thinking that if you are going to give people like a week to learn a new game completely and put them in high pressure matches on stream for 25 grand, you would think they should pick people who are used to pressure and are very quick to learn new games.

This is why I figured they would automatically default to top tournament performers (cool under pressure) and ones who are good at multiple games (to show they can pick up other games quick).

Now, some of the picks were totally cool. ReNiC is awesome. Nerd Josh is good. 200 Yen and Bronson seem pretty solid too. Hell, the fact that they brought on top players to do this Beat-a-pro challenge was an awesome idea shows that picking middle tier players may be a good idea.

But that elimination match yesterday, between Sherry and Hornet, left a really bad taste in my mouth.  That was about as good as my Day 1 (day 0) E3 play.

Here’s a facebook post I put on my friend’s wall recently about my salt:

I really don’t want to be an asshole to the competitors, and I know nerves can really *** up your play sometimes, but that elimination match between Sherry and Hornet was hard to watch. It reminded me of watching of a drowning puppies that you can’t help (analogy is from Family guy!)

This is why I was a little disappointed in some of their player selections. They claimed they picked people who could learn the game fast… That elimination match reminded me of Day 1 play at E3. 

Now, I can see that they didn’t want to pick like top of the top players (like wong and Fchamp and what not), which is fine (they probably wanted to give these more middle ground players a chance to shine, or wanted to leave the top players open for challenges like the one today), and I think some of the picks where good, like ReNiC is the man, Nerdjosh is solid… but they really should have picked people who could play under pressure and could learn the game fast. 

Would have made a better show imo. That elimination match made me wonder what they were practicing all these days leading up to this elim match.

These 1000 dollar title matches going on are AWESOME. Way more interesting than the actual show. They should do more special events like this.

I don’t want to rant too much and be too much of an asshole, and I know competing for 25k and being up on stream is nerve wrecking, but I want to be entertained by the show, and in that match, all I could do was cringe and yell at the screen.

Can’t wait for the last few days when only the good players are left.  

So I pretty much just re-stated what I said earlier, but it’s the truth. I watched this show to see people abuse the game mechanics and really break it down. I wanted to see high level play. 

Watching the beat-a-pro challenge was INCREDIBLY entertaining. The money matches afterwards were incredible too.

But that elimination match, and by association, a lot of the other matches, makes me feel that some of the contestants picked were wasted slots. I didn’t enter so I’m not salty about myself or anything like that, but there are much better middle of the road players they could have picked to make the show much more entertaining.

Get people who know how to actually play the game, because you know, that’s why I’m watching the freakin’ show. Every time I saw an uppercut punish in that elimination match, I cringed, and shouted at my screen going “WHAT THE ****!!!!!!”

That’s the kind of play you see people who went STRAIGHT from SF4 over to SFxT with no practice time. What the hell were they practicing this whole time if all they could do was uppercut punish when the opponent was left WIDE open on a huge recovery move? They had DAYS to practice. I understand they may not have wanted to do the crazy ass tekken strings that filthie rich and Ryan Hart did, but at least do the ULTRA simple Light, medium, heavy, launcher tag chains. 

In the end, it reminds me of the earlier brackets in tournaments. A lot of the time you just want all the chaff weeded out and then top 16 hits and then it’s all fun from there. Soon though, only the better players will be left and the elimination matches will be very entertaining.

This is why I love invitationals and exhibition matches.

Overall though, I love the Cross Assault Idea, and I like the show in actuality, just disappointed in the level of play at times. It’s definitely one of the better, if not the best (though in all honesty, the competition is pretty crap) video game related reality show. If they did another season, I would watch.