TWINBLADES

SF6 AT HOME LETS GO!

Akuma trailer is amazing, holy shit.
 
Also apparently Mena put hands on everybody? Goddamn.

Mena is an exceptional player. I always felt he never got the respect he was due. Hopefuly that's changing now.
 
Edit: Akuma Blog Post is up.
 
https://blog.playstation.com/2024/04/29/akuma-rages-into-street-fighter-6-on-may-22/

Akuma might just be the best looking character model in the entire game 

Yup this dude just looks cool. His CA is brutal 

Third Strike finals was great
 
 
 

Bizzarre part is that in spanish language countries Rodriguez is a common surname, there are more famous people than Ricco with same surname, think director Robert Rodriguez or actress Michelle Rodriguez lol
 
Apparently they changed/canonized his name as RodrigueS, not RodrigueZ in KoFXV including western version, from SNK wiki
Rodrigues was always referred to as Khushnood Butt in the West until 2021, when SNK officially acknowledged him as Marco Rodrigues in the team story for Team Art of Fighting on the website for The King of Fighters XV. In the English version of their team ending, Takuma nearly refers to him as Khushnood before stopping himself and using Marco, referencing his rename. This was also the first time in which his name was spelled as "Rodrigues" instead of "Rodriguez", as the former spelling is much more common in Brazil, due to it being a Portuguese-speaking country, while "Rodriguez" is more common in Spanish-speaking ones. SNK made the same mistake with the character Bandeiras Hattori, whose first name was changed from "Banderas" for being a Spanish word instead of a Portuguese one, said mistake caused some outrage among the Brazilian fanbase.  
PS: In all of this mess of spanish names they still never realized "Garcia" being a retarded name for an italian fighter lol
But tbh japan FG ever had problems at find italian names: Rose, Brad Burns, Patrick Dulton, Leon*, Pielle, Johann 🤣
 
*give this freepass because they likely just ripped off Jean Reno's movie char lol

the GAWD Marco is confirmed. This is literally all I ever wanted for City of the Wolves. I'd like to see Akuma topping this!
 
edit: I also hope this means they're keeping his name Marco for all versions of the game. I know his name was changed to uhhh, Kushnood Butt for some reason in the localization, I just think M A R C O R O D R I G U E Z sounds a million times cooler
 
 

Game looks beautiful
Preecha was a mistake
 

the scaling is wild in this game. This combo probably would've done hella damage in the first garou.

Lol they added the cyber Akuma wings? 

Some Akuma content via datamining after the latest maintenance work. 

Don't worry, SF7 and Tekken 9 will be a true return to form 🙂
 

Watching niggas lose their mind over Tekken 8
 

This whole podcast makes everybody here look like the worst type of smug asshole.
 
There's some level of zero self awareness from top FG players that's makes me not wanna be involved with the whole scene TBH.

The issue with top players is that they can't sort out whether average strength of characters is better so they're running into more mid players with better tools than they used to. Because character parity is getting better, and mid level players are better equipped overall (say people like me running the cast rather than top players but at the top too), then the information you need to succeed becomes larger. That information is making games feel random. Funny enough when I tell people smaller casts are better and they flip, this is what I'm referring to.
 
The situation now too is far more perilous because a mid level player like me has significantly more, and better, practice. I'll have better understanding of match ups, I'll have more practice in them (because online got better), I'll have more access to higher end tech. The skill floor is a lot higher in some ends. That means that when a top player fucks up, they are really going to get railed hard. This wasn't necessarily the case before. Even when SRK was popping, the people who had access to the tech and access to a scene with enough quality players to prepare for match ups was a different issue. Justin is the King in MvC2, Justin also benefitted from being in a hyperbolic time chamber compared to the rest of the country in that game (this is not all dismissive of the GOAT by the way).
 
When it comes to Japan vs USA, there are some things that Japan does better overall. Had a homie who got stationed in Korea and got to play a lot of SF5 online over there. The way he talked about how "low level" players over there played compared to over here was wild. Before that though, Japan had a bigger edge in geography. The world vs Japan was really, for the most part, the world against Tokyo. Tokyo as a city had better facilities to get good at these games while having a higher concentration of players than a lot of the planet. For the older games, that meant a lot. Netplay has done a lot to make the world flourish (Japan included in this too, in respect to Strive, Verix won and the guy is from Africa...fucking wild times in FGs).
 
Yeah, older games are hard. But they're hard because they were trying to figure out how to make these things half the time. The other they were trying wild ideas which sometimes panned out, some times didn't. Games now a days are waaaay better designed overall than older ones. I love the old games too. But like Justin Wong told somebody in some interview: "In older games, a character just sucks because they have no way to combo into super." that situation doesn't really happen now a days.
 
Where things get really weird is when certain tools become too punishing that they warp situations. For better or worse, Marissa is a scrub's best friend. Marissa/Abigail/Etc type of design is basically built to carry people. They may not want to admit it in their souls, but it leads to more fraudulent wins than not. Zero in MvC3 was a career maker. Zero is easily the most fraudulent character in any VS game. There are people who got farther in tournaments playing this character than they probably had any right of doing. But hey, that's what we signed up for. Once a character can disproportionately do damage on common situations, real randomness happens. Marissa did 80% on a reversal, you got outplayed I guess.  Even in MvC2 if you still follow it, GeneralThrillah put in time with Iron Man/War Machine/Cable and grinded it out. But a lot of his wins were from random hit into 300%; that type of stuff is where things truly get random. We know there are people who are carried, we just don't talk about it. The FGC just don't have the vocabulary, insight or wisdom, to kinda talk about those things.
 
So there are a lot of factors. Drive Rush and Drive Parry are still big iffy mechanics. I don't know how you fix Drive Rush because it means reworking a lot of frame data. Don't know if you can fix drive parry at all TBH. But it can't possibly be that the games have gotten easier yet the same people are still on top.