Friday, June 29, 2007

Thursday gathering

I've starting setting up regular super turbo gatherings at my house. We had one yesterday, with record attendance of 12ish people. That's actually a bigger regular crowd than many arcades.

We've been doing round-robin tournaments, and this time we did it Japanese style, where everyone picks a character and sticks with it for the tournament. I went with Dee Jay, since I wanted to practice. I still can't seem to regularly combo his sabot kick, and I can't even understand why sometimes it doesn't even combo with itself. Nevertheless, he's a fun character, a lot more fun to play than Guile.

I'm really happy with my japanese super turbo cabinet. It plays just like my days in Japan at MORE, game in Namiki, Tri-tower, and shibuya kaikan arcades, my old super turbo stomping grounds. I'm actually very seriously considering getting a second one, for head to head play.

I played a lot of Hawk in casuals, and I'm really happy to say that I was doing his safe jump/release piledriver about 3/5 tries. I won several matches with the "unbeatable" series, where you do that in the corner and just repeat it, and it was tremendously satisfying. I get a sense of real pleasure doing that unlike other corner traps.

As an aside, the Japanese have a pretty name for corner traps. They call it:

鳥かご - "torikago"

Which means bird in a cage. Cute, isn't it? :)

I have a confession to make. It's ugly, and I'm ashamed to say it, but I'd only be lying to myself if I didn't just accept it. I can't reliably dragon punch on the first player side. It's shameful. I've been hiding this weakness for years, using sad substitutes like throwing backwards to get myself on two player side, jump up air hurricane kicks (with ryu), and other random acts of garbage.

For those of you reading that have no idea what this means, let me try to explain.

As you can see in the
picture, there's two sides to street fighter. The one on the right is called player two, and the one on the left player one. The characters start out by facing each other, so the moves for player 1 are mirror images of the moves for player two. If the characters jump over each other so that end up switching sides on the screen, then you have to do all of your inputs in the other direction.

So anyways, there's a particular move called the dragon punch, whose inputs on the player one side are:
joystick right
joystick down
joystick down/right + punch

when you are on the player two side, it's:
joystick left
joystick down
joystick down/left + punch

What I'm saying is that I can do the second one, but not the first one. Well I can do it, but not consistently. Not every single time. And in this game, if you miss one when you need to do one, you can lost the game because of that mistake. So not being able to do it is a pretty big flaw in your game. I've been covering up this weakness by having my character jump around on the screen and try to switch sides with my opponent when I'm on the side that I can't do the move on. Smart opponents of course figure this out and block you.


Enough. Enough is enough. If I can learn button release spds, I can damn well learn how to freaking dragon punch on the one player side, can't I? How hard can it be?

Well, as I learned last night, it's still pretty hard. I'll get there.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't be ashamed, although I can still DP/fireball on both sides I have a tougher time on the 1P side. It's a different wrist motion for either side and I find I'm more consistent on the 2P side. I try to force myself to stay on the 1P side when practicing so that I don't get to comfortable. I had a blast at your place dude, I'll be there next week but I need to step my game up. Dhalsim is too good but I just picked him up and I'm totally scrubbing it up with him.

Anonymous said...

I can't DP worth a damn on 1p side, I am almost okayish on the 2p side though.

I always prefer playing on the 2p side even when I don't use characters with DPs, dunno why but it seems more comfortable for me.
-Julian

Unknown said...

I'm just like you.

On the 2p side I'm doing a small circle on the circle and it's a pull motion and very fast.

On the 1p side I need to do it the regular way, push forward, then pull back and push down forward.

The push motion is definitely a lot harder / consistent than the 2p small circle pull motion...