I haven't posted in too long so I'll talk abotu something I (think I) know a lot about. Makoto gets a lot of flack for being random. I think that goes a long way in itself to show that Makoto can make people feel like they can't THINK their way out of her offense. That is in part true for every mixup, but because Makoto can get a lot out of a single mixup it feels like this perpetual loop. One of the things that seems to help my play is to think of everything as a mixup.

In the previous Makoto strategy post I talked about getting in. It was a piece of text I had written a long time before I posted it and I don't know how much has changed exactly. Looking at the options I put down you can look at dashing in as a mixup with a lot of outcomes. You're 'mixing up' a dash with a delayed dash or with a Hayate. The same goes for jumping in, guess ony our opponent's most likely reaction and choose the option that counters it. That's all I'll say about getting close for now.

A strong point of Makoto's mixups is that many of them lead to another mixup. Landing an EX Oroshi and you can mix up again. For a regular Hayate, same deal. For an EX Hayate there's some character specific followups that again lead to another mixup. Instant EX Tsurugi, more knockdown action.

Makoto has many places where you can turn your failed guess around into more win. For example by parrying after your Oroshi gets blocked. More frame neutral situations like this happen all the time. If someone jumps out of your tick > Karakusa, depending on the tick and the strength of the Karakusa you will recover to parry any jump-in they might attampt (character specific).

Some tactics I'd like to share today are the following: When you're playing SA2 you want to be on your side of the screen to land the super combo. After an EX Oroshi or EX Tsurugi, you have enough time to jump over your opponent and have them all of hte sudden be on 'your' side of the screen. Yun and Yang stand up rather quickly in which case you'll have to be quick about it. The nice thing about this is also that people buffering a DP will have to wait longer and so players that suck at adapting will have a hard time doing so. Another tactic would be to use a crouching LP at the end of your dash as a tick to shorten the recovery of the dash. Nothing special? True, a ton of Makoto players do this, but I say specifically a CROUCHING jab because you can input a Karakusa by doing DF, D, DB, B+K. So sticking the stick in the diagonal down helps this form of execution. I prefer it over the standing jab and F+jab. Against Chun parrying low (then buffering Karakusa or what have you) after a connected Hayate is a strong miuxup option due to how many Chun players try to beat your followup with a crouching jab (2-framer). Against Ken this can be useful in three scenarios where either he tries to low jab/short you, does jab DP, does fierce DP without super canceling. In the last case the second and third hit will hit but not knock down.

Against Yun I have found that dashing is not as risky because of how confident Yun players are that they don't need to stop it. Dashing into a shoulder or croushing strong spam looks like it should deter you from dashing, but it's not as bad as all that. Sure, try to not dive into a 90% meter Yun, but when he's building meter and playing coy, have at him. If he jumps and divekicks as you dash it will be shallow and he won't be able to combo after it unless you don't block.

Another offensive tool I'd like to mention: Blocking. Yes, that's correct. Block at impasses where you are expected to keep attacking to observe your opponent. Not only will this give you information. But you can get lucky and block a reversal super, a DP or just sit there as they do a neutral jump which you can then easily AA.

Not to be too misleading, this is just another way to get progressive ~60FPS captures from a ~30FPS interlaced source. It does NOT involve dinterlacing. Much like the other method I came up with before, this method actuall acquires both odd and even lines of the original frame.

Well actually there are two methods, the second one would (possibly) work for any game you can pause. Both require machine assistance. The first one applies to CvS2. When the game is paused video keeps being sent but because nothing's moving you ge the perfect progressive frame as it lies in the PS2's video memory. So, what you do is you basically pause the game every frame, choose "Window off" from the training mode menu and you get the frame like that. The second way actually is simpler and you might as well do it this way since you're using some kind of tool anyway. Basically you pause the game and unpause it an odd number of frames later (depending how you count) meaning you get odd field of frame you're pausing, next set of fields contains part of the pause menu, wait another in-game frame, unpause and next field should contain the even lines of the pause frame. That "should" work. These methods, unlike the one I demo'd before, avoid having to record something twice, however now you have to write a pretty complex script to get only those frames you want. As the smileys sorta indicate, it's not exactly practical. I, for one, definitely can't do it, because I don't have the tools (p-pad) and I'm not sure if there's one that operates at a perfect speed (synched to the game's speed) to accomplish this.

I don't have any magic tips on accomplishing the amazing feat that is staying cool under pressure. I just managed to pull it off last Saturday (September 8) at the fighting game tournament I held at the WZZRD in Utrecht. I won the CvS2 tournament and finished running what I thought was a pretty successful tournament. Unfortnately there were downsides, but I'm still convinced most people had a good time.

The CvS2 tournament had 20 registered competitors that widdled down to 10 on the actual day of the competition itself. In the end I'm was happy about this. With fewer people there was less racing of the clock to finish before midnight. Of all competitors the only person I've played before was OKDHAB. He plays a very offensive style and I often have trouble just AA'ing and doing basic punishment. My first match is against him in a 5-man group. Our first match is a draw (double KO) which in itself was an omen. He wins our followup match quite handily. I then proceed to lose to a newcomer who I should have easily beaten were it not that I was still reeling from my loss. I Just barely scrape by a win against the other two players in my group and there is a three way tie for second place. One of those cyclical win situations that cause three way ties. Before I realised this I was reflecting on my losses and I realised it's because the pressure of running the tournament that I'm unable to remain calm and actually see what's going on. I reverted to my pattern-style playing which basically means I will do what I do regardless of what you do. I'ts the bane of my existence. When I saw the chance to get back into the tournament I realised what I had to do. Drop my very unexperienced A-Maki and revert to A-Vega/Haohmaru/Blanka. I proceed to beat the two other players quite handily in the tie breaker. Onto the semis where I believe my biggest advantage was playing Haohmaru which seemed to work out really well. Not to mention Blanka, but he's probably my strongest character. So, no big surprise there. In the finals I play against OKDHAB again for the 3rd time that tournament. I can't say exactly what caused it, but he seemed to have caught the jittery impatientness bug I had just mentally shed a few minutes before. He jumped a lot, tried to DP out of poke strings ending up getting hit by Haoh's far fierce. AA customs were landed left and right making it a pretty convincing win in the end.

I ended up not competing in 3S because of the large number of participants. It ran smoothly with the system I used. I made 6 groups of which only the winner would proceed to the 8-man single elimination bracket. All 6 second place finishers were put in a 6-man single match group. After all 15 matches of that group were finished the top 2 players were put in the last two spots of hte 8-man bracket. In the end I think it was a very fair system considering the IMO best players made it into the quarter-finals. I beleive I learned quite a bit this time and hope to be a better organizer for it.

I was doing pretty well keeping this blog filled with a new post every week. That is, until recently. I can't say much has happened worth writing about and I especially haven't done any video related work. So, just to fill up this space a bit and move my sucky previous entry out of plain sight I'm making a nonsensical post. I'll just mention a few things that are FG related.

The next Drakenslag.com tournament is scheduled to happen this saturday in Utrecht. Read about it here. It has a whopping 39 entries. I'm hoping some people don't show up because the venue is very tiny and I'm worried it won't be able to house that many players. Either way, some ppl won't be able to watch the finals. Also, with the 3 games, I'm going to have to run a pretty tight ship in order to finish within a reasonable timeframe.

Three big combo videos were shown at Evo this year and I was credited in two of them. That is a huge ego stroker for me and I really appreciate their appreciation. Majestros' multi-game guile video is one of the few 60 fps combo videos out there, and I can proudly say I helped make that possible. As for the content, I have to say it was truly innovative. The bonus stage infinite combos were an eye opener for me. It just showed me how not creative I am. The editing gave it an all-business look. No fancy transitions and useless clutter, just crazy crazy combos.

Inventive Flow made a video called Variable Atmosphere that showed some of the lesser understood and, to me, totally unknown sides of the MvC2 engine. It ended with a very impressive 3-character combo that I can not begin to understand how it works. The 3D Kobun rush at the end has to be historic. I've never seen anything like it before.

Desk showed his Vid of Dreams which again showed me how little I know. I'm not a FG veteran in the sense that I've only truly been interested in game mechanics and the science of fighting-games since a year or three. Games like ST and older SF's have stayed below my radar for a long time. VoD introduced the apparently region specific floating character glitch, which results in never before seen combos. I particularly liked the dissection of the SNES version of A2. The editing was slick and very creative making it an experience unto itself.

Dudes been goin crazy yo! That's my way of introducing Evo as a topic. A lot of stuff went down at Evo2k7 and I'm really sorry I couldn't go. Something about an ocean in between. I tried to keep up with what was going on while it was happening using the first ever Evo live stream. Perliminaries were broadcast without much indication of who was playing, but the live chatting made me feel like I was part of something bigger. The cherry on top had to be the Justin v John 5 game money-match. You can still watch it all here. I was really impressed by John Choi's 3S play, since I had never seen him play that game before. CvS2 was really close. I didn't expect John to play Guile, but it worked out well for him. The exact same goes for Justin playing Chun. I want to see more of his Chun, since I hear it's really good.

Anything else happen? Let me think. No, that's it. Hope to have something more substantial next time.

I posted on SRK about how I thought I had found something novel, but which turned out to be common knowledge. I can't help but feel that I'm pretty creative but also just really slow. I called it a variation on SGGK because it relies on the same principle of the first move out of a parry freeze doesn't get kara canceled. Only this time it's a defensive technique. I'll spare you the motivation and reasoning as to why this is good, because I'm sure if you're interested at all in reading this you're either doing me a favor or already know why you'd want to do this.

Someone jumps at you, you input a parry then karathrow. If you parry, the move you intended to kara cancel comes out and hits the attacker probably while still in the air. If they don't attack and land, they'll probably go for a throw in which case your karathrow will ensure you tech the throw. It's a way to defend against deep jump-ins mixed up empty jumps followed by throw. It's an option select in the same way as the original SGGK.

Now another thing that is SGGK is to retaliate with a strong combo if you manage to correctly guess the parry on wake-up. Often parry followed by a throw is not very rewarding considering the risk you just took. In such a case you can parry then kara throw and buffer the follow-up combo in case you actually parried something. If you didn't parry something there's a chance your opponent will try to throw you, which you CAN tech if you did the karathrow fast enough after your parry input. When you guess wrong and you parry the wrong direction there is a small chance of the attack being a tick-throw in which case depending on the timing of that whatever your followup for the combo can be finished. In case of Ryu, you would parry low karathrow with HP and follow up with a DP. If you parry, you combo for two hits and a lot more damage than a throw. If you misparry then just finish the DP and hope it's a tich throw in which case you'll DP whatever comes next.

Another parry trick I came up with is another form of option select where you go for a relatively safe empty-jump throw. In case your empty jump gets AA'd I'm sure many players just tap forward right before they land to defend against such things. However, if the AA is a multihit DP you'll get hit. My solution? Parry again. It's that simple, it's really nothing special, but you gotta do it for it to work. The throw you input does not actually come out as anything if you parry something. Make sure you input the throw DURING the time that there would be a parry freeze. For some reason attacks input during an air parry freeze don't come out later like with a regular ground parry. So jump, input parry, throw then input parry again and then possibly throw again. If nothing happened, you land and you throw. If they multi-hit AA you, you parry the first and the second hit and by the time that happens you'll hopefully have realised what's going on and parry the third hit as well. If a single hit AA happened, you will have parried it and landed at about the same time as you input the second parry, this would be a good time to throw again.