ok so considering changing my name on xbla to scrubby mcbeal on account of my skill. Not to cut myself short but yea I am pretty horrendous at this game. been playing since it came out on xbox live (sept 2011) and just recently got myself a stick (about a month ago) and while my combos are getting slightly better, I am still not inputing… reliably… and as such this is one small element to the many reasons I get… annihilated.
so yea I would say I lose about 90% of my matches on this game (that beening a generous figure). I play this game to the point of masochism and yet i cant seem to get better. admittedly I took time off from online play to get accquainted with stick… and thought I was getting quite better… sigh I was so wrong.
I know the only way to improve is practise but I just dont see results from it u know… its simple things like when I do B+B cr.mk > lk tatsu > hp shoryuken can do that fine offline but online I either slum it and just do cr.mk or I cr.mk > mk tatsu…
was thinking if theres tutorials in how to input on a stick ( *I have a sstf4 TE ed… yea. really wanted to get good at this game) *so thats one problem that might be ameliorated from review… but its also game strat… was gonna upload a play of me VS a chun li player ( videos dont appear on my youtube page… urggh… ), and all they did was hp punch all the way through the match (and punches with a long reach)… and they won effortless all the time … yea…
wish I could have shown u as its a perfect ( or shall i say imperfect) example of my skill… sigh… i’ll try and get samples somehow online to show u guys what I mean… but yea basically I think I will be here quite often so any tips will be appreciated… thanks… T_T
well, it sounds like you’re trying to do two new things at the same time: learn a game, and learn how to use a stick. it’s normal to feel helpless in a scenario like that. i think the best strategy is to boil everything down to its simplest components and focus on those.
stick: training mode. read the akuma threads, understand what combos you need depending on (1) meter and (2) whether you’re hit-confirming or punishing hard. just break it down to the important ones and make sure you know when to do what.
game: boil akuma down to what’s useful. c.mk, s.mk, low ticks and chains at close range, kara throw, air fireball, etc. read threads and watch videos of the best akumas to see what’s being used often. tuck everything else away for a while until you get a better feel for playing people with what you’ve practiced.
when i’m learning a new game i break things down like that. make categories like jump-ins, anti-air, air-to-air, close range (typically meaties or hit-confirms), pokes. make a list of the best tools for each of those, and build a simple but strong foundation with them.
ok ok good example only one combo i cant do with stick and thats combo trial 3 with the hp shoryukens cancel to metsattsu… been practising all day for about 4 hours… yea… its maddening… any tips with stick such as angling the stick in anyway to do it?
if you can do each of the individual moves, you can do the whole combo. there’s no trick except the generic super cancel shortcut (dp+p, qcf+p). this video shows the guy’s hands. that might help some people, i guess:
[media=youtube]5mXwRhaC5C0[/media]
also i just noticed that the big combo thread has some mistakes. kara uoh isn’t holding forward and doing uoh since that’s impossible. you need to be in neutral for uoh. and some meaties that i like aren’t there and stuff, but otherwise it’s a good place to start. don’t worry so much about the trials.
dp is the motion of a dragon punch. Which goes like this - forward, down, down-forward
If you have problems executing it try to do it like if you would a fireball, just add a forward tap before
jesus this seems impossible … well 5 hours a countin… gonna probably go off and pratice till I get it… determined to at least pull it off once before the night is through
Well first let me preface this by saying, I don’t consider myself to be any kind of expert at ANY fighter, nevermind this one. That said I picked up this game fairly quickly, having gone from zero fighter background, to crushing all of my local friends with extensive backgrounds in the FGC. Suffice it to say, my methods worked for me, to allow me to obtain the skill levels I wanted, in a relatively short period of time ( < 6 - 10 months).
As far as I can tell, the biggest issue you have right now, is you’ve fallen into the trap of “practice makes perfect”. This simple isn’t true, and what you should instead aim for is the amended version, “Perfect practice, makes perfect.” This stems from muscle memory, and how we build/develop it. Every part of execution, comes from muscle memory. You hit training mode to develop and build and hone it. However, if you are working against your physiology, and how the brain stores this “muscle memory”, you’re really doing more harm than good. Keep in mind there is much controversy and information to still be found about how muscle memory truly works, but for the purposes of trying to help you, assume for now its “mostly” correct. However, be sure to take all this with a grain of salt.
In my mind, your biggest problem is you are focusing far too much on QUANTITY of practice, and far far too little on QUALITY of practice. It doesn’t matter if you practice hitting a golfball with a toothpick for 20 000 hours, you’re still going to be shitty at golf. If you want to get good at golf, you need to practice golf properly, and focus on trying to ensure the practice you put in, is as close to perfect as you can get it/tell. This applies to street fighter. After 4, 5, 6 hours of practicing a combo, your muscles in your hands would likely be so fatigued, any kind of fine motor control is completely lost. What happens then? Well, you get sloppy. You drop combos, miss easy inputs you normally hit, etc, etc. What’s worse than this however, is once you start to lose that fine motor control you’re trying to perfect, you being teaching yourself to do these things, THE WRONG WAY. Think about it. How effective is it going to be, if you do 50 perfect reps of Gouki’s BNB. Probably pretty decent right? Especially if you keep that practice up over many weeks. Now what if you did 50 perfect reps, and then 600 sloppy, incorrect ones? Which motions do you think will be deeper ingrained into your motor skills?
So, what to take away from this? Well, first and foremost, practice LESS! You need to break your practice into highly effective chunks. Not huge marathon sessions of masochism as you yourself said. Try practicing for periods of about 30 minutes, up until around 60-90 mins. Don’t lock this number down, as everyone is different. I say 30-90 minutes, because this is what I’ve found works best for ME. I played a few FPS’s semi-professionally for about 5 or 6 years, so I had PLENTY of time to find out what worked best for me in terms of practice. This is what you need to do. Feel out your learning range. See how long you can play before you notice your execution goes to complete shit. How long before you start to slip mentally, and get frustrated, feel defeated, etc. These are your learning “boundaries” so to speak.
I have to run, but I’ll be back to continue this shortly! In the mean time check out the series of articles hosted here at SRK, “6 psychological tips to help you level up your game faster”. A bunch of what I plan on talking about/have already mentioned, is covered in some depth in those articles. Also they’re just generally very helpful!
SuperFresh… that totally makes sence… wow, tbh I didnt expect anything to be this helpful besides the usual “just practise…” platitude. I’ve noticed that one day I could do the hp> lk tatsu > lp > hk tatsu quite well one day, then for some reason a few days later it was completely down the sh***er , not sure why at first as I practised as much as possible, which is what most people advice right?. But from this perspective it pretty much makes sence why I fail to get any better and just seemed to stuck beneath a glass ceiling in terms of how my technical moves can work… it’s probably the desperation to get better takes over the need to refine the skill and thus my memory of the most intense sessions due to desperation will stick out more because there have been more times where I was desperate to improve over taking my time to do it.
ok… I’ll definately call it for today then and maybe practise starting with 30minute chunks or until I feel drained then maybe break the training up into more managable sessions through the day. Thanks Superfresh, kind of nice to see some depth applied to something simple as a video game.
ok so nearly a week on and decided to condense my training reigme slightly. This is what I am doing now so please let me know if this is too much
at the moment I do three thirty minute sessions a day that are spaced out morning, afternoon and evening. Atm I am just go through akuma’s move list doing the basic of basic moves ( gou hadoken, gou shoryuken all the way through to kyakkishu) and see if I can do each ten times in a row (that also includes both sides left and right). each week i am going to increase the number so i do from ten in a row this week to fifteen next, then to twenty and so on so forth.
Now should I do this three times a day or should I vary it, and do like basics in the morning, SAs in the afternoon and combos in the evening. might be simplisic or over doing it but wana keep doing this so it all becomes second nature before I do advanted things. I’ve noticed that after doing shakunetsu my hands feel strained ( I know only after 3 moves left and right… ) so I might just do a set of three moves in the morning then a set of three in the afternoon then a set in the evening. so basically breaking like this:
Morning
Gou hadoken ( left and right)
zankuu hadoken (left and right)
Shakunetsu hadoken (left and right)
Afternoon
Gou shorkyuken(" " )
Tatsumaki ( " " )
Evening
Ashura Senku
Hyakkishu
I also dont want to do too much as any tips on how I should organise my time with training. Not sure if this alittle silly (though tbh most of my losses right now is trying to do a move but whiffing it ALOT >.>) so wana perfect the basics before anything else.
it may seem simple but I think if I can do the basics without any strain or even having to think (I.E the concept of muscle memory I suppose) then I can move on to combos. Also should the speed I pull of each move be a factor too ( like maybe see if I can rhymically do a certain moves ten times at a certain speed). Thanks guys
Alright, what you’ve posted is pretty much what I was going to tell you you should try out, albeit my “training regime” has some variance to the one you posted.
In my mind, your execution is a toolbox, and the specific movesets and whatnot are your “tools”. The process of going through training mode, is to make sure that no matter what happens, if you decide to use a specific tool, you can without worrying about whether you’re doing it right or not. That way, you can focus 100% on when to use it, as opposed to having to concentrate both on when and how. The idea of practicing multiple times in a day seems solid. I personally only ever used a single training session. Usually 60-90 mins in training mode, then the rest of the day just playing games, trying to implement what I’d be working on into actual gameplay. Here’s the training schedule I used when I first started playing
*Note, everything needs to be repeated BOTH from 1P and 2P sides, don’t get lazy on one side! Also don’t count a rep, unless it is successfully executed. Going for an SRK and getting a hadou obviously doesn’t count.
Grounded Specials Hadou - x50 various speeds (jab, strong, fierce, doesnt matter, just mix it up to get used to using all 3) Tatsu - x50 various strengths SRK - x50 Various strengths (notice a trend here?) Red Hadou - x25 (Reduced reps because you’ll almost never use this, good to know, but not mandatory)
**Super Arts **- x50 (Just pick one and do it 50 times. This is to get used to the super input, so you can have an easier time learning to hit confirm. I was really shitty at the super input for some reason when I started, so this was more tailored to my needs I suppose.)
Air Based Specials
Now, these are kind of a bitch to deal with, simply because almost every type of air special you can do (air fb and tatsu, minus demon flips) can be done neutral jumping, jumping towards, or jumping away from the opponent. Unfortunately these being all different (yet similar) movements, means they all get their own set of reps.
**Dive Kick **- x50 Super Jump Dive Kick - x50
**Air FB **- 3 x 35 Reps (105 total) (1 set of 35 for Neutral jump, 1 for FJump, one for BJump)
**Air Tatsu **- 2 x 50 reps (Neutral Jump, FJump), 1 x 25 reps (BJump, less for this because you wont often use/need it. Might as well be able to execute though)
**Demon Flips **- Demon flips are kind of a weird one to train, because there are like 23897298374 different options for them. You can do whatever you think is best, however this is what I did;
Demon Flip Kick - x25 Demon Flip Punch - x25 (Although you won’t often use this, the 25 reps brings you to 50 total for the DP input of the demonflip itself, which most people find to be the harder part) Demon Flip Throw - x50 (This has the most reps, because it is the hardest to land consistently, and is also an insanely useful tool in akuma’s overall demon flip mixup)
**Empty Demon Flip **- x50 (This is another tricky one, because timing varies depending on context. It’s a good idea to get a feel for empty demon flips in general though).
So that pretty much sums up the “Basic Execution” Regime I did for several weeks when I first picked up the game. Overall you may notice that it tends to stay around 50 reps, or more for most inputs. The reason for this is because as far as I know, Muscle memory begins to set in hardest around 40-50 repetitions of an action. I can’t source this information, or even guarantee it’s true, but it was a good enough guideline for me when I was learning.
Once I began to have a solid execution record for all the basic stuff above (around 80% or better) I switched over to a dynamic execution routine for these basic inputs. What this means, is that instead of only counting successful inputs, and ignoring misinputs, I began to put a punishment system in place. For every 1 missed input, you lose 1 count of your “successful” inputs.
For example, Say you were doing 50 SRK’s. You do, 7 in a row, then mess up 1. Instead of your total being 7, it would be 6. Mess up another and it goes down to 5, another, 4, etc. etc. What this does, is FORCE your overall success percentage, to be larger than 50% (or more, depending on how much you penalize yourself.) Once that becomes a cakewalk, you can up the ante. Missinput is -2, -5, -10, etc. As far as you want to take it. In doing that you help simulate higher stress/pressure situations that you’ll experience in game. Executing against an opponent is never as calm and stress free as in training mode, until you train yourself to not think the two are any different. Eventually basic training like this isn’t needed, and you only do a few reps of each just as “execution maintenance”.
If you want, feel free to add me on PSN (assuming you are a ps3 player). Like I said I’m by no means an amazing (or even good) Akuma player, but at least in game I can see your gameplay directly, and offer a bit more custom tailored advice.
I dunno, some times, doing a move leaves your current hand/joystick in a sub optimal/awkward position for the next move. I recommend also practice doing the basic motions starting from positions that are not neutral. (But only practice what is necessary)
that’s true, but if you look at many top japanese players (like daigo, as a popular example), they barely even apply pressure to the stick when it’s not being moved. i think going to neutral between motions and keeping your commands as clean as possible is a good practice unless it’s not optimal to do it in a particular situation. an example of that could be cancelling a charge move into a super, where going to neutral just complicates it unnecessarily. but on the other hand i think an actual training regimen and counting reps is really over the top and sounds more discouraging than anything else. if i was a new player i’d go crazy doing that shit.
btw superfresh, we’ve played a bunch of times on psn lol. good to know i can now say i’ve played somebody from manitoba.
I can see how one might think that about the training regime. In a lot of way it takes the “fun” out of it, because you have to accomplish very specific things with all kinds of rules blah blah. I personally have no problem grinding out execution practice in training mode. Put on a few albums I haven’t listened to yet, and time in TMode flies. My reasoning behind the specific regime though, was that I wanted to improve as quickly as possible, while spending the least amount of energy possible to do so. Having a set regime allows you to do this. You get the required practice, and nothing more. Instead that extra time can go to whatever you want (playing games against people, playing other games, gardening idgaf).
Also that’s funny that we’ve played before, what’s your PSN? I’m hardly the manitoba akuma to play though, that honor goes to Shane (ShinAkuma204) lol. Hopefully my gameplay backed up my advice/pointers rather than refuting my credentials to offer such help to newcomers haha
Superfresh: aww man I so would add ya, but I am a xbox player =(. but yea defo gonna try this regime for a few weeks and see what happens and btw thanks for taking the effort super, really appreciate it =). Also found that while practising the basics like this, I’ve seen some improvement in my combo execution when i go for a normal game, can even pull off a new reset which is cool. think another thing, this may sound very callous but I need to find a weak player online who wouldnt be hard to hit, so I can take the pressure and wont feel pressured to execute combos online. Once I feel comfortable in landing stuff on them I can move on to trying more advanced players
btw my handle is Patashnikk ( SHOCK OH its that noob PATAERATEREASILYASSKICKEDNICK =O) surprised no one has nicked named me Cowpat-ashnikk yet XD
ok so you think while doing this I should perhaps take a break from online play ? I donno, I been playing recently and noticed, that I am a open book with strategies where players even counter practially everything I do, air and ground, to the point I am liek "oh s*** I am damned if I do and damned if I dont… I might take some more time off and just concentrate on combo work, but I guess I go online to break the montony…
ok so getting better with most combos, cept for one of the most powerful resets ( and in theory one of the easiests) and that is resets ending with mettsetsu gohadou. Idk why but I can do 3/4 of most combos into it fine, BUT I cant seem to get the mettsetsu gouhadou in at all. this is even with simple things like hit confirm c.lk, c.lk, it just will not come out =/. I can do the move fine on its own but combo it or input it to anything else and its a trail in paitence… I use a stick but are there any buffs I need to be aware of inorder to do it (tried doing the normal gou hadouken cancel into a mettsetsu but cant even get the normal out which is weird as quater circle punch isnt exactly hard, but when comboing it … huh well lets just say I can even combo srk way better…)
First and foremost, sorry for the lack of replies lol, been busy as of late.
No need to take a break from playing online, just keep in mind that playing offline is not the same as playing online, and a lot of the things you learn online, might not work offline at all, or the same. In terms of being an open book, that is simply the result of your meta game. If you plan an obvious, repetitive easily read game, you’re going to be countered. I could speak at length about meta game, but I’m not really prepared to do so lol. You need to do some research and read into these things yourself unfortunately.
Generally speaking though, SF (and most fighters) boil down to, “What will they do, What can I do to beat that, and What do they think I’ll do, so that I co do something better/different”. It’s a game of deception, making them think one thing is going to happen, while in fact, something else does. Randomness is your friend, and through experience you learn what options are best in which scenarios, so that your “random” is actually a very precisely controlled set of advantageous options you choose from.
I assume the reset you’re talking about, is cr.mk xx lk. tatsu > st. lp > sa1?
It’s difficult to assess where exactly you’re having difficulty with that reset, but almost guaranteed it’s a matter of you simply not inputting two quarter circles in time. You can basically do this in whichever way is easiest for you. For me, I learned it simply by doing it all at the end. Thus, the input I use is just;
qcb.lk > st.lp > qcf > qcf.p
For me it was simply a matter of making sure I was consciously counting the quarter circles. After the reset, moving the stick down, then qcf to forward, and then just a hadouken. I supposed you could buffer the first qc in the tatsu, although I’m not sure if that actually works, as I don’t buffer anything in the reset to get the sa1 to come out.
Hit confirms are different, and there are a variety of buffers you can use for them. Often times hitconfirming is just something you need to grind out in training mode. Set the dummy to random guard, and go to town, only trying to super when you CONFIRM (either visually, audibly, some combo of both) that it is hitting/has hit.
For c. short x2 hit confirm I use the following;
cr.lk > df.lk > f > qcf. p
So basically, do the first crouching short, then move the stick to the downforward position, followed by the second short, then roll the stick up to forward, then just do a hadouken. Other versions include buffering the entire qcf in between your cr.lk’s;
cr.lk > qcf > cr.lk > qcf.p
There is tons of this posted all over the forums already however, so just look for those threads for more info. As with most things it usually comes down to needing to work on it more. If you’ve been trying something one way for a few minutes and it just isn’t working, try something different. Worst case scenario, you are exactly where you started.
Also, sorry if my notation is off. Not often I have to use it lol
Bring it to this level. Learn the execution. Get comfortable with the execution. Then, all that’s left is to test your execution in the middle of a match. If it doesn’t come to you, don’t worry; no money’s on the line. Dust yourself off and try again.
Breaking it down:
Learning the execution. That’s about as easy as reading a book. You learn what to do in order to input the combo. Yeah, that’s baby shit.
Comfortable with execution. Get to the point where it’s muscle memory. You have no idea how long I put in to learn how to do Urien’s midscreen unblockable, but I spent enough time to get comfortable with it. But as stated, it’s muscle memory, and if you overwork the muscle, nothing good comes out of it. Give yourself rest.
Match execution. This is where it gets tricky. Now, you gotta teach yourself when to land the combo, etc. Where are the openings that you can land it? Does the opponent’s character’s crouching hitbox make certain things whiff? Range? Etc. Go from there.