I plan on writing up a comprehensive post on my opinions on all of this. But until then, I’d like to respond to a few of the comments so far
Ha! Ask EA Megaman what he thinks about that match-up. RH flash kick has a terrible whiff if he misses which leaves him open to a free throw/combo. And since R.Honda can much more easily cancel his normals into HHS this can lead to a very quickdeath. It’s an extremely risky move for Guile to try.
This highlights a problem I see with many of these complaints about HDR. They tend to compare changes theory-fighter style to how they’d pan out in ST. But this isn’t ST. There’s a lot exploring that needs to be done with the changes made in HDR to really appreciate the new opportunities and limitations in matches. Sadly, it seems like some of the old-schoolers aren’t interested in doing that.
This seems to be another common angle that people use when griping about HDR. It’s easy to pick on him since we know him and we know who he played in ST. I do find it ironic though that people bring this up when griping about buffs to Bison/Honda but then neglect to mention it when discussing the nerfs to Honda or how he nerfed Vega, which he also played in ST.
We could use this same line of reasoning to suspect the designer(s) of ST of being biased Vega players. But what’s the point? Instead of arguing about a person’s perceived biases, why don’t we focus our discussion on whether any of the characters are too good or too bad now. Are there less or more bad match-ups now? These are more interesting topics IMO.
Without an arcade release, I can’t really see HDR ever having a chance to become the successor to ST in the tournament scene over there. And that is unfortunate. I also can’t fathom why Capcom didn’t officially release this game over there. Still, I have played quite a few of the Japanese guys on XBL that I used to play on GGPO. So, some of them are playing. But I hear ya, it’s light years away from becoming a tournament standard over there.
On the flip side, I don’t live in Japan. And while it’s sad to see the most historically active ST community not playing this game competitively, I’m extremely happy with how it has resurrected the US ST/HDR community. I live in Los Angeles and a year or two ago a couple of us made a thread on SRK to try to get people to meet up and play ST. In a years time, I met up with people about 5 times. And each time it was just one or two guys. It was really kind of sad. Flash forward to today. I can get online and play really good people any time of the day I want. A few of us have been running HDR ranbats up at Denjin every other week and we get a decent number of entrants. The US ST/HDR scene is much more active right now than it’s been in many, many years. And that, IMHO, is far more interesting to me than whether Japan is playing it much or not.
1000% agreed. If this were the mid 90’s, all our local arcades would’ve simply replaced the ST machines with HDR machines and you’d play your damned HDR and like it. I really do fear that if people get too hung up about wishing ST hadn’t been remixed that it will be this scene’s undoing. And that would be sad, especially since it has brought in a lot of new players.
I disagree. I think HDR’s changes make it easier to break into this game, but not to win. I’ve been to a bunch of HDR tourneys and I haven’t seen a single person scrub their way into placing well. While HDR’s execution barrier is a little easier than ST, it’s still way more exacting than almost any other fighting game out there.
It’s funny you bring that up, because I thought those matches exemplified why Honda needed some tweaks. Kusumondo is arguably the best N.Honda player in the world and those matches seemed like a text-book example for how to completely render Honda impotent. It’s not that it’s easy to do. But when Ryu is played to the level of Alex and John, I don’t think Honda’s character design really affords him much of a chance to win in ST. The Japanese match-up chartlists it as 2-8 in Ryu’s favor, and I can see why.
Wes outlined precisely how Fei got better in HDR. Then add to that the fact that many of the characters that were really good in ST got nerfed. It sure seems like he got better to me!
The changes to Fei are like the changes to some of the other characters. He lost some old tricks and gained new ones. People don’t seem to like that. They really wish that they could still do all their old tricks and a bunch of new ones too. But guess what? If all of that came to be everyone’s favorite character would’ve had a distinct chance of being too good.
As it stands, I think that Fei (and Cammy, Hawk, Gief, Blanka, etc) are all quite competitive in HDR. If people can’t make due with their new arsenal then I think they need to re-think their strategies…or, ya know, try harder :wgrin: