GetTheTables

Long weekend + wife working = time for animu! Hopefully I can get a little training time in on this and hop online a bit again. Its a really fun way to take a break from SFV while still playing fighting games. I also want to start working on May in Rev2 but I'm anime torn between that and UNIEL with only so much time to go around. @misterBee If you end up with time maybe we can get another batch of sets in.

That is super rad. 🤘 I always wanted to get a custom stick made but I never had any ideas that stuck with me enough to commit to it. Closest I ever came was getting my MvC3 TE1 stick modded to work on current gen consoles.

Yeah the new stick will hopefully help with that and be very nice to look at in between rounds and matches. 😄 Hey guess what

RIP John Candy 😦 Thinking about it, marriage is a lot like playing SFV sometimes. You think you're doing everything right and things are going well, then you guess wrong and get hit with a big CC into dizzy into death. The training and analysis feels like it is starting to click. Didn't get as much time to play yesterday as I'd hoped for but I did get a chance to play a couple of sets and those felt a helluva lot better. Even with the wins I still made plenty of mistakes and definitely still have stuff I need to drill into my head, but it did feel good to have things pay off in match. Hopefully I can get some longer sessions in this weekend to continue to work on this stuff in matches. @Bea_Iank I totally hear you about the connection quality. The matches I played yesterday were the first all week that weren't hiccupy or rollbacky. Its possible to play through a certain degree of it but damn is it frustrating, especially when goofy stuff happens because of it (like getting back thrown out of a 3f gap pressure string). Keep fighting the good fight! Online in this game is a fucker between the connections and how some of these folks play. Practice and mental fortitude will deliver us all eventually. 😃

Shine on you crazy diamond. 😄 Though I'll be honest, I like FFVIII a lot more than a decent chunk of the post VII FFs just because it is such a big mechanical shake up.

Counter : FFVII is one of those games that has been blown way out over the years because a) it was one of the last big things Square made that really resonated with people, and b) at least in NA it hit at the perfect time for an entire generation to have that be their first JRPG experience (and for a lot of those people it was also their first real exposure to Japanese gaming media that way). Point 'a' has led SE to trot it out over and over because its an easy way to make a buck. Point 'b' means that SE can keep on making those bucks for a long time. I try to have an even mind about FFVII but I came to the series really early (technically at FF1 but the one I really played was FFIV) so FFVII has always to me been the pretty okay game where the series started to turn away from what I like. All that random shit aside, this makes sense. Namco has already been collaborating with SE on stuff like getting Noctis into T7 so the door is open. And for as much as I don't give a fuck about not-Guts and his shitty bishi rival I cannot deny that including those characters in the game is an easy way to double? triple? the sales of the game just by pulling in the fanboys. Heck you can already see Namco doing it with pulling in Geralt. If you're going to tap guest characters, make 'em count. And look on the bright side: destroying shitty Cloud/Sephiroth players online would be really satisfying. 🙂

Grats B. 😄 And you de-ranked a Ken in the process. Also good on you for protecting the identities of the fallen. Time for my online report. incoming. So I've been able to stick mostly to the training plan I put together. 30ish minutes of working on stuff in training mode, then 3-5 online sets to try to apply. Overall, still a lot of ups and downs. The ups are that my AAs are better and I think as an aggregate I'm doing better against Ultra Silver/Gold players than I have been so far. The downs are that I'm not doing as well as I thought/wanted to be against the Ultra Silver/Gold players, and I'm still getting tilted/flustered under pressure. Yesterday started off on a banger of a note: an Alex player who played like Jokee's advice was real (Lariat4Lyfe) with serious teleports periodically. That was a perfect combination of all the stuff that sets me off, and I really should have taken a break after it but I played straight on. Didn't do nearly as bad as I probably should have - especially since nerves and frustration at that point led to me dropping all kinds of stuff - but I really need to enforce a hard 5 minute break rule after matches like that. It does me no good to try to immediately hop back in. Playing this game is a rollercoaster. One day I'll finish up and feel pretty good about myself even if I lost all my sets. The next day I feel like shit, even if I go mostly even (which is what ended up happening yesterday). I know one of the things that is frustrating me is the lack of what seems like progress, but I think I'm looking for that too soon and I think I'm expecting too much. Working at it isn't going to get me to 2-0 sets against players I was having problems with before overnight. I have to keep at it until enough lessons click into place to where that starts to happen. The other thing that is sort of discouraging is taking a good hard look at how I'm playing in reviews. I thought I was doing okay there for awhile but it turns out I'm mostly shit. 🙂 The list of things I have to work on feels long, and that is without even getting into the really fine grain stuff. Speaking of that, I think one of my bigger issues is that at a high level I don't really have an offensive plan. I just kind of sort of poke away and take what damage I can, turn things up when I get an LP Bolt or decent blockstring in, and sort of wait it out. That has served me well up to this point and it still works well against some of the crazies, but against the more defensive or even minded players I feel like I'm not doing enough to dictate the pace of the game or put pressure on my opponent. And it leaves me open for a lot of dash up stuff because I'm just sitting there waiting (though that is something I need to train; its on the list). Despite discouragement and frustrations I'm sticking with it. If nothing else I'm getting more and more match up and general player tendency knowledge. I'm dipping back into Ranked on Weds to see how things go there, though I also don't want to de-rank too much if I can help it so I can keep getting experience against US/Gold (which is where I seem to need it). Also has the connection quality been particularly shitty for anyone else? Out of the last couple of days of me playing only around 1/3 of the games I've played didn't have noticeable rollback. Granted I'm running into plenty of PC/PS4 crossplay (which I remember having issues) and fuckers keep showing up with Suzaku Castle and such for stages, which doesn't help. I was thinking the other day: for the way I naturally want to play this game, maybe I should have picked Birdie. Not that I'm necessarily gonna do anything with that, just a random thought.

Pretty much. The last time I saw him post was about lewd pics. So I know he is still alive and fueled by tatas. Everyone raise your lewds to the sky to give him your power!

I've seen him post in the discord recently so he's still kicking around so far as I can tell.

That is damn funny. Not that I can talk too much shit because I still jump too much. But damn. "Surely he won't expect the 11th dive kick!!!"

I feel like there will probably be a few more, but I could totally see them being really conservative. SCV has sort of a miasma around it and part of what you hear is that people didn't like the new characters (or at least that is what I've heard). Since I'm sure Namco is trying to push SC towards a Tekken 7-style renaissance I think they'd be sort of conservative with new characters anyways, and I think SCV being close-ish in the rear view would probably make them even more gun shy about including too many new faces. This is going to me more of an SFIV sort of launch where you want as many people as possible saying "oh cool my favorite character is in this one, I'll give it a shot". That said, SC is at it's best when it is introducing new characters and hopefully they know that. Just don't give us another batch of shit kids and everything will be alright. 😁

Yoshi helicopters onto the scene:

Meditation helped. As did the advice of folks across the various SRKs. 🙂 Thinking about it, I need to meet my SFV training time in the middle. I benefit a lot from reps and structure; just the way I’ve always learned most effectively. However I also need to get out there and actually apply what I’m learning, as well as work on the stuff that you can only really work on in matches. And I need to keep throwing myself into Ranked to get more used to the mental pressure and the…unique approach players take there, as a challenge. To be a dork of a different stripe for a second I see it similar to how you train martial arts drills: introduce the concept, work it in partner drills, try to apply it with various levels of resistance, then see how it works out in actual sparing. The SFV analog would sort of be training mode time, BL/Casuals, and Ranked. Sort of. Ideally the final step would be a tournament/local but hell if I know of any of those near me. Plus at this point I’d be the old weird white guy there and I don’t have Highlandfireball’s rugged looks or accent to pull that off. I’m going to try to play 30/45 minutes a day when I can. Won’t always be possible but its a good goal. That time is going to be rotated between training things I need to work on, Casual matches to build some confidence with it, and Ranked matches to pressure test it. And when I can get longer stretches I’ll hop back into Ranked to do more mental training and get more data to work with. Today I’m going to go back through the last batch of Ranked matches and get Training/general practice focus ideas and hopefully get some matches in to practice the general stuff. Having a direction is exciting, and I’m looking forward to getting to it. I also want to keep banging away at muh anime games, so having some dedicated practice time for fighting games in general will give me time to keep at UNIEL, Rev 2, and/or BBxTB (god help me I keep getting drawn to it like an anime moth to a waifu flame).

Vita meant life. 😢 Definitely time to make sure I have some choice games before they go out of print.

Dime and I could definitely do JoJo stand battles, but with words instead of chain punches. When I have something really on the brain it really rattles around in there and leads to me to having a shitload of stuff to type out. The upside is that it means that I'm excited about and interested in something. The bad side is that anyone around me has to deal with my essays. 😁 The UNIEL thread is basically just me doing this to myself and misterBee being nice and making that thread look like I'm not talking to a mirror. 😝

Missing inputs like that always crushes my soul a bit. I still have the issue where I sometimes don't complete the very end of a QCF if I'm on 2P side. I think its a lot better than it used to be but every once in awhile it still comes up. It makes me sad when I miss a LP Bolt confirm but it super hurts when I throw out st.HP instead of HP Bolt.

Another online session, another Rough night online yesterday. Ended up losing more than winning, though once again at least managed to end on some winning sets. Trying to look back on it and figure out what went wrong is proving difficult (all mental right now, haven't had time to watch replays). I think one of the biggest things that got me was that at some point I definitely got tilted and that had me playing sloppier than usual (which isn't exactly immaculate to begin with) and autopiloting a bunch. Identifying what caused the tilt is something I'd like to do so I can maybe mentally brace against it better in the future. I know I definitely get frustrated when I feel like I understand what the opponent is doing (especially when they're really rote about it) but I can't figure out a solution or implement it. I lost a set early on to a Gold Alex *fistshake* like that and I think that started the mental spiral. Then some Bisons and a Mika finished me off. Another thing I need to work on is being more comfortable actually poking against rando onlines. What tends to happen is that I poke a bit, then if it doesn't work I start jumping or do something else bad. I think the CCs or yolo specials you run into (at least at this level) have me over-shook. It makes me feel like I'm playing most games off the back foot because I'm letting them attack as they want. Maybe that's just a symptom of Laura's little arms but I think its more my approach to it than anything. I also need to work on being more willing do try stuff again if it fails. Like I'll try an off-book attack or sequence once but if it doesn't work I won't do it again. Which means my offense goes right back to being really straightforward and easier to deal with. And damn it all I really need to use Laura's st.HP and cr.HP more. I had that as one of my things to work on this past session but that flew out the window pretty early on. And double dammit I need to stop trying to interrupt pressure so much. It doesn't really work in this game outside of obvious negative situations and Laura's pokes sort of suck for it anyways. I need to either just continue to block it out, walk it out, or backdash. I sort of know this one but that definitely flew out of RAM once the tilt hit. Some positive notes: I ran into a decently good Falke player and we had a great back and forth. Learned in this set that if you Draw a game in Ranked both players lose like 17 LP and you just go again. Lost this set when I started panic teching in the corner and died. Another thing I need to work on. And my last set of the night was against an Akuma that thought it would be cute to teabag when he got a stun in the second game. I returned the favor in the 3rd game then killed him when he wiffed his spite Demon attempt. So that was nice. Despite how discouraging and frustrating that was, I'm eager to play again. Part of me thinks that I overall need more exposure. I've played a relatively small number of games of Ranked and I think part of my problem is just playing the actual game enough to learn more what to expect. I definitely feel like in a lot of matches I'm going in blind. In drowning my sorrows yesterday I was reading online and someone mentioned playing 45 mins a day split between training and some matches. I'm not sure how feasible that exact plan is, but it would be good for me to play more often. Not just for reps; part of the problem with me playing one or two "long" sessions a week is that I sort of build them up in my head. I think that adds to the frustration when they don't go well. Also, reading reddit (just to show how desperate I was) I came across a guy that was trying to encourage someone else to keep at it. They mentioned how they are a shit player but through playing a fuckload of games they managed to get to Diamond. "Huh, that sounds a lot like Twin." *checks the username* "Twinblades89" 😁 I still feel kind of lost and flustered as to where to go next to try to right the ship but hopefully some more meditation on it will help.

In the interest of actually getting games in with UNIEL I tried an experiment yesterday. I know that UNIEL is waaaaaay the fuck less popular online than SFV and its even less popular than Rev 2 (which is already a ghost town compared to SFV). So its not the kind of game where you can just hop on and find a bunch of people playing Ranked or whatever. UNIEL has lobbies, though they're called Player Matches which threw me at first, so I figured that similar to Rev 2 that was going to be the best way to find people and get games. The million dollar question was if anyone would be around when I was going to have time to play. If they aren't, then I'm screwed outside of becoming a training mode monster (which at least in this game is quite fun). So at 5pm EST I fired the game up and checked Player Match options. 3 lobbies going, all with at least one free spot and decent connection ratings. I picked one arbitrarily and hopped in. The good news: even in a lobby with 4 people rotating through I managed to get 20ish games in the span of about an hour and fifteen minutes. All of the connections felt solid; the game reported ~2 frames of delay throughout and it never felt like the game really hiccuped or slowed down. The bad news: learning this game is sort of like learning Rev 2. There is a lot to take in at first and most of the people playing have been playing a far sight longer than I have. So there were *a lot* of ass beatings. The guy hosting the lobby had a fierce Wagner - if you weren't careful it was first hit into lockdown into combos into death - and another guy joined that played at least 3 characters at a very competent level. I knew he was a motherfucker when I saw he was on PS3; you know all he does is play UNIEL. 😉 The good news, redux: even when getting rocked this game is a lot less frustrating than SFV, for whatever reason. I think its that even when you're getting mauled you have 3-4 really good reset points where you can try to escape and take the momentum back, and they are easier to identify and act on than they are in SFV. Also, staying in that same lobby for awhile I saw a few other players rotate through so its not like I was playing the exact same couple of people over and over (though I don't mind that so much). And one of those guys was someone using Enkidu that was even more of a noob than me so I had someone I could get wins on. 😁 Quick capsule experience playing against some of these characters with people beasting with them: Wagner: I remember seeing her at the top of tier lists and I can see why. The one fella hosting the lobby was routinely converting hits into 30 hit combos and she seems to have a pretty good suite of normals and specials. I unfortunately didn't learn too much about fighting against her; it was more like surviving. But I think she is more of a rushdown, up close pressure monster. The times I did better were when I could keep her at sword's length and the only games the Wagner player dropped were to a Gordeau who murdered him from half/full screen. Gordeau: Speaking of, this dude has some reach. Edgelord vampire Dhalsim with a scythe. Seems like a pretty rad character though and honestly he didn't give me as much trouble as I thought he might (not that I did super well but I expected to die weeping in the corner without doing anything). Only got to play against him once or twice so I'm not sure about where he excels (other than "far") or what do to against him with Nana, but I damn sure watched this guy shred the other noob several times (they were all double Perfects, it was painful to watch). Chaos: Fuck that lizard dog. For as much as anyone in this game can lock you down, Chaos was the worst, primarily due to so much pressure coming from the lizard dog and me not having a great idea of how to deal with it. Of any character this is the one I feel like I'd need to lab against the most to figure out what in the hell do to in order to regain some momentum. The upside here is that he seems a little more binary: when the dog is out he can run some ugly game, but if you can banish the dog you can get a lot more aggressive. Carmine: When people think of anime, Carmine is one of the things they think of. I've seen very little with the character previously so having my first experience be against the PS3 guy was illuminating. I expected more of a rushdown character but he was sort of like a Lambda or a Nu-13 with some rushdown but also a fuckload of lingering projectiles and shit like that. Only played against him once so I learned almost nothing other than "block a lot and pray". Seth: Also didn't get to play against him a lot, but he is pretty damn cool. Works a lot of weird angles and is all over the place. One of the big things I learned here is that Nanase's DP covers her in both directions which is great against sideswitch mix ups. Hyde: Ryu ass Ryu. Still cool, but also didn't get to play against him a lot. This was another match where I learned a bit about Nanase's DP - although it doesn't seem as strong as a traditional DP in some ways, her popping straight up also doesn't leave her open in the same ways a traditional DP does. Just a weird little thing I noticed. Overall, very fun, and I'm glad I was able to get games in. I am garbo at the game and need to learn combos and conversions, but that is easy enough to practice when I get time. I want to do something similar with Rev 2 but I'm thinking that I need to pick a new character to focus on in that game. I'm not sure how much Ram is necessarily for me and I don't think going back to Slayer is the answer either.

You'll do just fine. 😁 Give em hell! Also goddamn that Kolin cosplay. The nose ring is....😵

I know, that is too much woman for you. It would be for most men. Thankfully I am not most men. 😎 Also j/k I'm staying on the Bonita bus. S4 buffs/some random ass universal change will only make me stronger.

Yeah the saving grace for me right now against most Guiles is that in this range they all go aggro at some point or another. Very, very rarely have I found one that will proper turtle up and make you work your way in. A lot of them will go in after you jump or block a couple of booms, especially if you can hang out in jump range long enough to make them nervous. And of course some of them are just balls out in a way that can be difficult to deal with, but is still way better than having to navigate Ikaruga just to apply a little pressure then get EX Flash Kicked into the 30th Anniversary Collection. As for Mika, @OldManRage has heard me go back and forth on that a shitload, especially at the start of S3. The characters are as close as they ever been in relative efficacy. I initially played Mika but shifted away from her after she got blown up in the S2 transition. Starting S3 I didn't want to do the same with Laura and just keep jumping chars every year. I was also worried that playing Mika a bunch would teach me a bunch of bad habits. But that is assuming I've developed any good habits playing anyone else. 🙂 I think Mika has much better burst output and her grab mix ups are way scarier, but I think Laura's overall kit gives her more flexibility and when she can get it rolling her pressure is awesome. That said, SFV is a game where burst potential is a big deal and Laura's is pretty mild outside of stun situations (and if you can't stay on someone's ass you're not getting the stun). I still go back and forth sometimes. I fucking love command grabbing people and killing them so Mika is always on the edges of the SF part of my brain. Maybe I should embrace the unga and return to her ample bosom. We'll see. Fuck now I want to play her tonight. 👹

Pretty rarely. The relatively high cost of ticket prices ends up scaring me off most of the time. If I'm flying solo it isn't so bad but if its my wife and I going, at that point I can probably buy it digitally/on Amazon for the same price as seeing it once. I'll make the trip if the movie has me really excited to see it - I've been in the theater for every John Wick and I'll damn sure be there for the 3rd - or if I think the experience will be seriously enhanced by being seen in the theater I'm willing to pony up.

The fucking Guile horde. I feel like every time I play I run into another variant of the strain. Last time it was a guy who figured out how to run serious pressure with him using the reduced Sonic Boom pushback. I got a decent handle on it and won a game (I think the first one) but instead of trying to backdash or do other things to reset pressure I resorted to contesting in place and ended up giving up the other two games. Special shout outs to the laggy as fuck Abigail playing on Kanzuki Beach who salty 1-1'd after I won the second game. The last set of the night was really satisfying though as I was able to wrangle a Mika into a clean 2-0. I'm still tempted by that character (the damage...) but goddamn if her player base isn't pants on head crazy at these ranks. I've run into exactly one that was sort of smart. All the others are living a YOLO life I can only sit by and be jealous of.

Yes, yes she does. Also congrats! 😁 Keep on climbing! warning. Posting these helps to keep me motivated so I apologize but also Ranked Session 2 Report: Managed to play for around 2 hours yesterday and I lost a dizzying amount of games and sets across it. The challenge level between the players I was used to and what I am running into now is widely different and I'm still learning how to deal with that. I was actually really surprised to end the session slightly up from where I started. There was a time where I dipped back down into Super Silver and I figured that I may be better off retiring to JRPGs and other old people games. I lost the majority of my initial sets, including my warm up games, and damn is that demoralizing. Thankfully I managed to turn it around. Apparently I am exactly 3800 LP worth of skill. 😉 The one thing that was nice was that anyone that I ran into a second time, I won the sets against. Including a Gold Birdie, which was satisfying, and making a Bison quit the set. I also think my pressure with Laura is getting a little better. It is so damn important to be able to make momentum count with her and previously downbacking would mostly defeat me. Now at least I'm able to keep pressure up more often with Avante cancels and some staggered buttons which I'm seeing result in more stuns and cornering. I still need to work on AAs. I don't use HP Bolt enough, I was still trying to jab AA (sort of had that beat out of me but I need to keep that habit dead), and I have a really bad habit of hitting back + MP to AA which results in MP Clap instead of st.MP, which in turn results in eating a sweet jump in combo. Also need to get better about just holding my ground and being patient. Most of the time when I get blown up I feel like its because I'm hitting buttons at bad times (often clearly bad times) or I'm teching when I shouldn't be. In general I think I get too nervous on defense and end up doing dumb stuff like that. Thankfully Ranked is full of psychos so I'll get plenty of practice blocking. The upside of ending on winning sets is that I feel more motivated to get back to it then if I ended on losses, even if I'm mostly treading water. Its going to be serious baby steps to get to Platinum. I need to be able to actually hang in Gold first, then slowly climb up the rungs. It feels doable, which is good, but I also know I need a lot more practice and will probably take a good number more beatings before I'll really start to gain traction.

You need to get to Grand Master before we spring for the cosplay package.