Street Fighter 4

[Pikachu]

I'll just put this up as a really early start. Supposedly, there is a machine over at SJSU for SF4.

The game is shaping up to be pretty offensive from what I am seeing. The videos we watched a week or two back at Alvin's are already really old news. There are just tons and tons of bread and butter combos to hit right now, with an emphasis on hitting fast and safe supers rather than doing short short short into them like in CvS2.

The B&B combos are ridiculous. Seems like using a Saving Attack into a B&B is the best way to go, rather than looking for supers constantly. Dumb shit so far:

1. I've seen Ryu hit a Saving Attack, and on the crumple, go c.lk, c.lp, c.lp, c.hp, hurricane kick on Gief.

2. Ken's f.mk, c.mk link is equally ridiculous.

3. Vega has a B&B with c.mk, EX Wall Dive, Air Suplex followup. Vega gets a crossup setup by corpse hopping with f.hk afterwards too.

4. Gief gets mixups even during combo attempts. He can Splash crossup, c.lp, c.lp, c.lk, EX Banishing Punch. During blocked attempts in that, there are tons of opportunities for him to tick throw into SPD. I've seen this combo almost fully blocked, only for the c.lk, EX Banishing Punch part hit because the opponent got scared, jumped after the two c.lp's to escape the tick throw. It also doesn't help that Gief's desperation attack is 0 frames.

I'll continue posting up random shit I'm seeing as time goes on and the videos show how the game evolves. Lots of El Fuerte recently since people have figured him out. He's like hella fast Guy/Maki mix, with crossups and real damage.

Edit:

Guile is apparently good. I think his Sonic Booms may just look deceptively slow, or my own initial expectations of him being able to walk behind his Sonic Booms SF2 style are too much. He seems to be able to zone with them just fine, contrary to my initial thoughts on Saving Attacks being able to nullify them too much. Fireball zoning is still viable, just not as insane as ST. That being said, Guile seems to have what his old prized attacks were (his old close Roundhouse for another anti-air option, now done with df. Roundhouse, for instance) and new tricks (f.strong overhead punch, like Ryu's). EX Flash Kick is one frame from what I've read. That's also kinda fucking neat.

El Fuerte has an infinite. Waiting to see if he's good enough to always hit it. It basically comes down to him landing a Fierce into his qcf+lp, cancelling a run portion of the move, and continuing the sequence. Lots of bitching about this, naturally, but touch of death combos and infinites have existed for a long ass time, and we'll have to see how this plays out.

Chun still has a good standing strong. It can trade with super fireballs. Not a good trade in terms of damage, but that's some priority. She has this flip kick that can be useful for crossups, a weird juggle kick starting from a normal, and has a good wakeup with EX spinning bird kick.

[phetus]

I need to play this game. I'm so fucking pissed. Those 20+ games I played in Japan were such a fucking cock tease. It's like getting to know a hot chick and she's like... tomorrow you can stick it in me.... and then she goes on a period.... for half a year.

[phetus]

Like Chan said.... supposedly there's a SFIV cab (actually dual side by side cab), but what he neglected to mention was that it's 75 cents a play. While steep.... I'm still down to go watch/play a couple games. Lemme know if anyone has interest.

[phetus]

I underestimated the new sonic boom. The start up still appears to be one of the fastest of projectiles in the game. I have done zero reading, but chan's completely wrong. Guile's brand spankin' new f.strong is nothing like ryu's. While shoto's have a wind up lag (at least used to... I see them using it in SFIV as much as they used to.... which is to say.... once every 10 matches give or take), guile just donkey punches you in the face. I mean it. SB->Frontal Donkey Punch=almost guaranteed damage. It's fast enough to mix in after a c.short. It makes me hard. That is all.



p.s. I lied. Rufus also scares the balls out of me. He literally looks retardedly boring to play, but with amazing payoff. Everyone has to work for damage in SFIV more or less, but fat boy gets more damage by spamming a smaller list of moves/normals than everyone else. That dive kick make's yun's look like high definition gay sex.

[Pikachu]

I meant like Ryu's as a description. The fact that he can't link a knockdown or c.forward after it makes a world of difference. Definitely faster than it, so it's a good free hit, but it's a different payoff.

Matches against Rufus need to evolve. When the situations become a lot more clear (in other words, when his optimal mixups are set), I don't think it'll be as zany as it is now.... unless the payoff increases to some unreasonable level. For now, I see Rufus mostly doing one of three tricks in those damage moments: low hit, throw, jump attack (I think roundhouse? The double kick thing) into a juggle using Ultra or EX fagfists. As good as the Dive Kick is, though, people are learning how to keep him out. I've seen Sim zone him out completely. Rufus may have good zoning options, but that doesn't seem to be developing at the same pace as his close-up game. Nothing that makes him a bad character by any stretch of the imagination though... Rufus is a mean fat fuck.

Dictator is what's scaring me right now. EX stomp beats wakeup Shoryuken. Combos to scissors are like CvS2. A juggle into Ultra like he had in ST. Saving Attack payoffs are great. He can run and he can rush. He has a lot of positives and few drawbacks right now.

[buhwhyen]

kaqn plays sf4. Also, this game has many scary resemblances to 3s, minus Yun's genei jin.

[Pikachu]

Kaqn has a funny Chun li and Ryu. Looking forward to more of this because he sometimes plays this game like it's Guilty Gear.

Gouken is in the game, after nine million April Fool's Jokes saying he'd be in. He has a fireball, Ken's MvC2 Hurricane Kick, a demon flip (though not all the details of followups have been discovered yet), an anti-air fireball, some shoryuken type super move, and a shin shoryuken for ultra. At this point, no idea whether he is top tier or anything, but some early videos are emerging on SRK.

For those who don't know who Gouken is, that's the shotos' master, who got killed by Akuma. This all took place before Ken bought his sports car, which was depicted in the first SF movie.

[Pikachu]

They showed Sakura in SF4 at the Tokyo Game Show. Good motherfucking times.

[dyuman]

www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/new-japanese-street-fighter-4-trailer

New SF4 trailer.

[Pikachu]

Here it is - the achievement/trophies for the console version. They're... pretty damn easy because even scrubs will attain these with enough time. We'll get most of these within a week. Here are my ideas/comments on how to get some of the achievements.:

10 Years Too Early - 20 - Win 50 Xbox LIVE battles.

Easy.

10 Years Too Late - 50 - Win 100 Xbox LIVE battles.

Easy.

All Dolled Up - 10 - Set your Title and Icon.

Out of the way easy.

Arcade Rat - 20 - Clear Arcade Mode with one character on medium or higher difficulty.

Easy.

Challenge Expert - 30 - Clear all challenges in Challenge Mode.

I dunno what the challenges are. I am going to assume a set of combos of some sort you must try. If that is the case, many scrubs will cry over these.

Challenger - 10 - Clear a challenge in Challenge Mode.

Should be easy.

Color Guard - 10 - Unlock all colors.

Retarded.

Crowd Pleasing Master - 10 - Perform 10 Personal Actions (Taunts).

Dan is in this game. That's your motivation.

EX-cellent Master - 20 - Perform 100 EX-Moves.

Get into fireball wars. You'll have this in no time.

First Victory - 20 - Win 1 ranked match.

Play Bison and Psycho Crusher until you win one.

Focus Master - 10 - Perform 100 successful Focus Attacks.

Harder to do against button mashing scrubs, which I propose learning El Fuerte's dizzy combo and landing it 100 times so you can guarantee your Focus Attack. Otherwise, if live multiplayer counts, just plug in a 2nd player and Focus Attack them to death. Or you can just play Bison.

The Gold Standard - 50 - Earn gold medals in all challenges.

Again, unsure about challenges.

Hard Fought Battles - 20 - Play 200 Xbox LIVE battles.

Don't even have to win. Easy.

I Got Next! - 30 - Win 5 ranked matches in a row.

Play Bison and spaz Psycho Crusher, with some EX ones here and there.

Icon Master - 50 - Collect all Icons.

No clue wtf this means.

Last Man Standing - 20 - Clear Hard Survival in Challenge Mode.

Potential pain in the ass, but doable with your fav character. Or Psycho Crushers.

Legendary Champion - 50 - Defeat Gouken and clear Arcade Mode on the hardest difficulty.

Yay. Really?

Lobbyist - 10 - Create 10 multiplayer lobbies.

Pft.

Medal Collector - 10 - Collect 100 Medals.

Dunno what any of the medals are like. Possibly challenges.

Medal Hunter - 10 - Collect 500 Medals.

Medal Master - 30 - Collect 1,000 Medals.

Medals Get! - 30 - Collect all Medal types.

No Challenge Too Hard - 20 - Clear Hard Trial in Challenge Mode.

Dunno.

No Sweat - 10 - Unlock all Personal Actions (Taunts).

You have to unlock this shit?

Playing To Win! - 50 - Win 10 ranked matches in a row.

Read some David Sirlin and win this shit. 10 in a row online should be easy.

Proof of Battle - 20 - Play 500 Xbox LIVE battles.

Play... 2 days?

Rapid Fighter - 10 - Clear Normal Time Attack in Challenge Mode.

Learn jump in combos. Ought to work.

Save Your Quarters - 30 - Clear Arcade Mode without using a single continue on medium or higher difficulty.

Psycho Crusher.

Simply Perfect - 10 - Achieve 10 Perfect victories.

Psycho Crusher. Or plug in 2nd player. They aren't thinking these achievements through. Should make this online only and that'd be a bit of an achievement given how long each match can be in SF4.

Special Move Master - 10 - Perform 100 Special Moves.

Using my super secret 9 year old Psycho Crusher techniques gets you this for sure.

Speed King - 20 - Clear Hard Time Attack in Challenge Mode.

See above.

Storied Reputation - 30 - Clear Arcade Mode with all characters on medium or higher difficulty.

Some of us will struggle with doing this using Fei Long, Gief or Dhalsim. But medium should make this more than doable. Just time-sink-tastic.

Sunny Daze - 40 - Perform 365 flashy background finishes.

I assume this means a round finished by super or ultra. I've actually never seen a round finished by supers before because they simply aren't used too often. Bison fits the bill here because he can finish rounds with j.mp x2 into Ultra. Ryu does it well with SADC Shoryu into Ultra. Chun has EX SBK into Ultra in the corner. Rufus has a million ways to do this. Viper can anti-air electric punch thingie into her Ultra. Gief just straight up grabs you. Too many ways to do this. I can't possibly see this one as difficult.

Super Combo Champion - 10 - Perform 50 Super Combo finishes.

I wonder if Super Combo just means supers. In this case, this achievement is harder than the above, because there is just so little reason to use supers. You might be able to justify using Shinkuu Hadoken against scrubs, Dhalsim can use Yoga Inferno to boost damage, Bison can cancel into Scissor Super, and Rog should be able to do Buffalo Rush in similar fashion. I actually see so few supers that I dunno what the supers even are in this game because EX moves do similar damage after hit confirms. Setting it up to have to be a finish will be a pain.

[Pikachu]

Gamestop has a tourney coming up. It'll be held in 3 qualifying rounds with a final double elimination tourney in SF to determine the grand prize winner, who gets a SF4 cab. That's the sweetness right there.

There will also be around 2800 stores (max 64 each store) holding the first round tournies. Winners of each tourney move in to district tournies, who determine the regional champs, and get to go to SF. Plus, Top 16 get a paid trip to Evolution 2k9.

This is fucking great that Evolution gets this kind of exposure. so what's the bad news?

The tournies are all played on XBox360. And the players must use whatever controllers are provided by the store. So they COULD be sticks, or more likely WILL be dpads. XBOX DPADS. As if they didn't think through the minor details enough, the matches are best of FIVE, with up to 64 participants each store. I doubt they'll use more than one XBox per store. And they start in the afternoon. GJ.

So what's the good news?

Here's how I see this saga playing out. With so many SuckBox D-pads, there will not be many pros playing. There was already such a shitfit over John Choi being beat at a Gamestop tourney (for the same reasons... controllers) I doubt pros want to deal with this idiocy.

What this means is that some greedy, fairly good players will still want the cabinet. With online hype (which Gamestop is gonna whore with Evo's help), the footage is gonna be posted for each round of the tourney. Toward the end, the footage will be half-watchable because we'll see more than j.hk, land, sweep, or hurricane spam into shoryu. Casuals will kinda follow it a bit because they might start getting competitive, and when the mediocre top 16 step into Evo...

They'll get massacred. I have no doubt at least one or two crazy good players will try for the cabinet because they happen to have dpad skills, but on the XBox, that's a huge stretch to think we'll see all sixteen be skilled players. Then the eyes of the rest of the world will be opened, and they'll either step the game up, or cry themselves to sleep.

Or, I could be ballbreakingly wrong, and this is an unspoken conspiracy to get a real top player to win the cabinet, and let Evo borrow it, while getting tons of sponsorship and exposure.

[buhwhyen]

EDIT:
Lol. No wonder they made it easy to cancel special -> super. It literally does the same damage. cr.fwd x low/high tiger shot xx tiger genocide all does 440 damage. It does 420 damage if you replace tiger shot w/ tiger uppercut.

On the other hand. If you're playing Ryu. Cr.fwd x hadoken xx super does 380 damage, where as cr.fwd xx super does 370. Even better, the old cr.fwd x shoryuken xx super does 470. Pretty well worth the effort there. I guess its character dependent, more like super dependent.

-------------------------------------


This game IS 3rd Strike rebalanced.

Random stuff:

Why did they put a male Maki in this game?


A lot of random lag in the menu interface and a decent amount of loading time everywhere.


Getting interrupted in arcade mode until I changed the settings so people can't join is very very annoying.


I can't fucking get the dash timing after saving attacks. This should be really easy.


Wake up timing is weird. I constantly get thrown out of reversal attempts (I think I'm just doing moves early/late?).


Can ultras be used as reversals? I assume not all ultras have good (if any) invincibility, but I can never get them to come out where I would normally dragon punch reversal. I get reversal message but I get hit, don't see anything come out (like the start up of the ultra) and no meter is used.


You can't cancel into ultras, right? Only a few random places where you recover in time to link into one? (I know Sagat has one of forward+roundhouse, and Ryu off of the EX shoryu dash cancel thing)

A lot of random strings from CVS2 work pretty well as hit confirms (particularly Sagat, interestingly enough). The moves overall are slower and cancels/links are much more forgiving.


Motions are buffered for hella time. Too long, I think. I randomly buffer moves, pause, then try to throw out normals and get random supers and shit. Or if I miss the timing for a second tiger shot (I get say a st.roundhouse instead), and try to throw another one out I get a super? Wtf.


EX moves come out way too easily. Almost every time I piano for an uppercut, I get an EX version. Similarly with supers and ultras. Though I have a harder time getting ultras to come out when I have full super meter.


On a related note, they made special canceling from normals and special canceling into supers ridiculously easy. They basically removed the need to do an awkward dragon punch into 1 more quarter circle or alternatively 3 quarter circles to get, for example, cr.fwd, strong shoryuken, super and made it so this comes out if you only do a single, SINGLE dragon punch motion. Bullshit. Mother fucking bullshit.


Are supers really used in this game? (Outside of situations where you just want something invincible) Or does super meter get used more for EX and the special cancels into dashes? I'm leaning more towards the latter at this point.


I understand why Ken is low tier and Ryu is high tier. Ken has almost the exact same move set as in 3s (minus his air EX hurricane which now sucks male taint), but all his moves don't link well (outside of moves that naturally chain) and more importantly dash, is now slow as fuck. Where Ryu also has the same move set, but is fast as hell and has most of his traditional links/chains.


Good thing I didn't want to play Guile in this game. His normals seem to have a lot of recovery? Or they just don't link to anything in this game. He really does play like Remmy in 3rd strike (booo). Knee bazooka and Sobat are like...useless. I guess my real beef here (no homo, damnit) is he plays really differently than I'm used to. Totally different than any other Guile incarnation I've played.


Balrog (boxer) seems surprisingly good. Though pretty different than his CVS2 and ST forms. Overall, if I didn't want to play him in ST still I'd consider playing him. He seems pretty good, though his normals have way different properties, even though they're visually identical.


Random LOLOL I have forever to hit confirm with Sagat. Only works in the corner. Otherwise omit the super and do a fierce shoryuken.
-cr.short, st.jab, cr.forward, strong shoryuken, super.


For EX dash cancels...I forget what they're called. You cancel a special with mp+mk and it takes 2 bars of super. Is the dash input supposed to be immediately after the mp+mk input? I get the dash somewhat inconsistently.

[Pikachu]

Dash cancel timing varies I think, but I haven't played any training mode to really sit myself down and learn specifics. The guide on eventhubs says you need to hold down mp+mk during your dash input to consistently get the FADC off Ryu's uppercut so you can ultra. While playing last night, I just forgot to FADC many times while playing Sagat, so I stopped doing so until I could develop the tactile feel for the motion.

Jon was pianoing 360's while piledriving Dyuman (haha homo) last night and usually got EX's for his trouble. Not that this was totally bad.

You are absolutely correct about Supers. They are like Guilty Gear supers... completely dependant on situations. I've only seen Iyo's Dhalsim use supers with any regularity. My belief is to save everything for EX or FADC.

Random thought: FADC > GCFS. I'm so glad this game isn't as bad as SVC:Chaos.

Wakeup timing is weird because it varies between characters and what your opponent is doing. As a general rule, outside of quick recovery, the wakeup times are just longer... like everything is a delayed getup from CvS2. I don't mind it too much.

Links, for me, seemed slow at first because I relied on the graphics to give me an indication of when to hit things, which was a mistake for me because that was deceptive (3D graphics look slower). Instead, I used sound, and I found myself hitting stuff a whole lot better.

Ultras are linked. They stink as reversals as a fault of their startup time. All the hit confirms I have seen for them are juggles:

Ryu - FADC SRK -> Ultra (Holy acronyms)
Chun - EX SBK/Lightning Legs in/near corner -> Ultra
Gief - Wait, exception to the rule here. Tick -> Ultra
C.Viper - One of her many EX moves -> Ultra
Sagat - FADC TU -> toward+roundhouse -> LOL
M.Bison - j.mpx2, land -> Ultra (hella easy to do)
Rog - EX muhahahah -> Ultra
Rufus - j.rhx2, land -> Ultra
Vega - Opponent jumps (self-launch) -> Ultra -> land -> cry about yourself because you still won't win

The characters I played at any length last night were:

Ryu - Obviously good, just like a C.Ryu that's high tier who doesn't need to worry about his fireball zoning. Really freaking solid.

Ken - Agreed that Ryu is better, but Ken is fun in his own way. I think he is hurt without short short super (well, one that does damage), but f+mk games are quite amusing.

Dhalsim - I am rethinking playing him because I was drilling way too much last night. This isn't a habit I want to kill because of ST, so we'll see. Relearning a lot of anti-airs might be bad for me as well. He is otherwise surprisingly good.

Sagat - Usual antics. Tiger Shots are so good. Tiger Knee is rofl. The empty jump into Ultra kinda works like how we used it in HDR.

M.Bison - Played the most Dicktator last night. CvS2 style links, easy to hit Ultra, ST level ambiguity on crossups, EX Scissors to go through fireballs, EX headstomp to wreck wakeups. This equals good.

[sumason2]

WTF??? SF4 is that a game or something?

I'll just do my usually butt-mashing... SJSU special uppercut for the win.

[sumason2]

OMG Pink Taco?!?!? WTF!!!!