Yeah I hesitated at first 'cause I was envisioning flame wars but an international player report is a great idea. I’m thinking if you could find a representative / team captain (or two: one to drop knowledge on old school, one for modern scene?) and hit them up with an interview/questionnaire that might be a good approach? We would need a local liason or some other third party to translate. Tianyuan (Fist of the North Star God) said he might be able to liaise with chinese and hk players. It’d be a big project. Probably warrants a new thread for brainstorming? What other countries are sending SBO HSF teams?
Made a blog post re: those nagase movies.
btw - SBO is going to allow character switching this year (I think.) So Tokido telling Arcadia writers that he’s using Claw doesn’t mean much. heh
Elsewhere…
ABC (CE Ryu) and Six (CE Dictator) won the SBO qualifiers @ Nagase UFO, besting some of the top Kansai players. Those two are already looking like one of the teams to beat.
Is/will there be footage of SBO5 qualifiers within the upcoming weeks? This Nagase UFO qualifier looks good. Who else played in that qualifier?
My avatar is the kang! :lovin:
EDIT: I’m making the assumption that Nagase UFO took place on the 8th. Is that place the same name as Play Spot UFO/Long Shoal UFO? Any idea who won the Play City Calotte on the 14th?
Sanjuro - I think those are classic only but I’m not 100% sure.
psycho -
No vids this time it seems.
Finals were:
1st ABC + Six
2nd Otochun + Komoda
Team name: Beauty and the Beast
3rd D + Aniken
4th Kachu (DJ?Claw?) and Kuni (Gief?DJ? don’t know)
5th Tasaka (Cammy) and Inro (O.Chun)
These two got first in their block beating Kusumondo/DanjiriDhal and Macky7/Gunze along the way. Not bad.
There are some pics. Aniken and D looking mighty serious. (2nd pic, sitting down on the left)
MORE Vega. This is the best Claw player I’ve ever seen, period. I used to think that Claw vs Boxer was an unwinnable fight for Claw. I fought him 20 games in a row and didn’t win a round. He also decimates Dictator players.
Chun Li:
Akishima. I saw you mentioned he retired?? Please say it ain’t so. My sempai :sad:
Blanka:
I don’t know his name, but he’s a very very famous and good Blanka player in Tokyo (I met him around 1999). He had a very detailed Japanese web page on Blanka. He has (or had) long shaggy hair… kind of looked like Blanka
T Hawk:
I’ve forgotten his name, but I’m sure Japanese players will know who I’m talking about. He was staple of the Shibuya Kaikan arcade, along with Yoshimi and Tencho. Student at Todai. We’d play Hawk vs Hawk for hours… always a fun match!
Ken:
Yoshimi. How in the hell can Yoshimi be missing from this list! I remember explaining to the American delegation how brutal new ken was before SBO1. No one believed me! And then Yoshimi/Akishima/KKY made it to 2nd place. Yoshimi went from a random Ken that one day told me “Mou dame. Kattenai. ZETTAI kattemasen” (after I’d beaten him about 10 games in a row with Boxer) to someone I considered lucky to win a round from. I also consider him a great friend
Dictator:
Makoto. A clothes designer and another staple of Shibuya Kaikan. A great Dictator player, who played tirelessly with Yoshimi and Tencho. I must have played at least a thousand games of Dictator vs Boxer with him.
wakeupsweep - It’s a photoshop (not by me) of a still from an anime called Akagi.
zass - Thank you for a great post. So cool to have a scoop like this.
I’m pretty sure these three weren’t active in 06. People on 2ch love(/hate) Tamashima so they keep his name in circulation even when he’s not playing but other folks don’t get discussed that much.
Kind of crazy that you mention this, because a Blanka strategy guide with Harahi’s web page as a base is a future project for my blog. Moreso than Komoda vids that Harahi page was my inspiration for trying to put together a serious Blanka game.
Inomata? He might have been the third O.Hawk (w/ Toutanki and K) but couldn’t make it to X-Mania 7 because of a schedule conflict.
MIT produced the dirtiest boxer players in the world!
Yes! Harahi, that’s him!! A really nice guy with a perfect knowledge of Blanka. So quiet, so unassuming, and yet he rips through people like wet toilet paper. That’s so great that you know who he is! This sounds silly, but it makes me really happy to meet another person who knows about him!! I really feel that he is an unsung hero of Japan. Boxer vs Blanka is one of the easiest fights for Boxer to win, but Harahi wins it!
Now that I think about it, I think I always called him Hirahi. I guess he was such a nice guy that he never corrected me.
More Balrog, yes. A very quiet guy, and despised (in the Shibuya Kaikan crowd). But an amazing Claw player. I don’t know the nickname Sky High Claw. He was called More Balrog.
This player (that I’m thinking of) played new Hawk. It’s very possible he’s not active anymore.
Thank you for the post. I can’t tell you how many memories this is bringing back. I feel this fire in my belly… I have this absolutely burning desire to play ST now. I wish there was a place I could play it. In Seattle, arcades are dead!
Well, when I lived in Japan, playing Claw or O. Sagat was considered “weak”. I guess it’s pretty close to being considered “cheap” in the US.
Time out
Way back in the mesozoic era (1994), there were big debates on a.g.sf2 about “cheapness”. After many many arguments, it was agreed that nothing is cheap, and no character is cheap, except for Akuma (for reasons outside the scope of this post). I agreed with this philosophy, and happily repeated tick threw opponents over and over again over the years.
Time in
When I moved to Japan, I found to my suprise that no one played O Sagat! There was a couple of new Sagats, but no old ones. Also, no Claws! None except one who was really good at MORE arcade.
For my first year or two in Japan, I didn’t really speak to Japanese players or know them very well. I played some A3, some A2, a bit of ST, but most of my time was spent playing Everquest :). Finally, after several years, I found a little arcaded called Shibuya Kaikan, safe from the ravages of Kurahashi and More Balrog, and I started playing there regularly. I know this sounds like a scrubbish thing to say, but at this arcade I could win 5 or 6 games in a row without too much work, unlike MORE where every single round had to be won from blood, sweat, and tears. Anyways, I started to recognize the players there, and they me. The first one to talk to me was a ken player called Yoshimi, who kept trying this incredibly annoying trap based on jumping jab.
After a few weeks, I knew most of the regulars by name, and I started talking to them. I also noticed that if I played Boxer, Hawk, Chun Li, or Ryu, people would play against me a lot. However, when I played Claw, I didn’t get a lot of competition. Usually I’d win and then people would play on another machine (there were 2-3 head to head machines). So I’d win the game with Claw, and then move to another machine.
I finally asked Yoshimi what was going on. When I mentioned the name “Claw”, he got this grimace on his face. He explained that Claw was an easy character to play, and not fun to play against. I thought this was a little wierd, because I don’t think that ken’s jumping jab, low short x 2, and then either DP or knee bash trick is very fun either. And I actually thought that Claw required skill. After all, I won a tournament at Game in Namiki with him.
Time out
To this day, this is the achievement I am the most proud of in SF. Not B2, or B3, or Sunnyvale Golfland tourneys, or any of the money matches or road trips or anything that I did in the US, but winning the weekly ST tournament at this arcade called Game in Namiki. I’m sure no one has heard of it, but this was the arcade where I met Tamashima, and he worked with me on my Boxer. It’s the arcade where Akishima showed the US delegation how to do walk up, low forward, super with Chun li. This arcade had weekly ST tournaments, and I usually finished smack dab in the middle of the pack. But I won it once!!
Time in
Anyways, I felt that Claw required skill. Especially when I saw More Balrog dominate matches that I had thought were impossible (Claw vs Dictator, Claw vs Boxer). But I was also a stranger in a strange land, and I didn’t want to disrupt the “wa” with my play. I was happy that I had found an environment with dedicated ST players, players that knew me, talked to me, and discussed strategy with me (Unlike MORE arcade where I was a quiet observer). I did not want to jeopardize this just to win more games with Claw. So I quietly retired my Claw and focused on Boxer, and, with the help and encouragement of the most amazing Chun player (Akishima) I had ever seen, Chun Li.
I never saw anyone play Claw except for MORE Balrog at MORE. Whenever he did well at tournaments, I would hear a kind of “meh” reaction from other players. “After all, he’s playing Claw”. I didn’t really hear the same from O. Sagat, but there was only one O. Sagat player, a friend of Daigo’s. Maybe it was because he played with Daigo, or because he was a regular at a different arcade, but I never heard the same explicit derision towards O. Sagat that I heard towards Claw. But in general, there were no more than one Claw or O Sagat players at X-Mania, the major ST tournament.
Looking back, I have to say that this play environment was much more enjoyable than the US play environment. When I played in the US, there was invariably a Boxer, Dictator, or O. Sagat dominating the machine. I actually learned Boxer because I felt I had no other choice. Most of my ST play was focused on these matchups.
In Japan, the lack of O. Sagat was a very nice experience (for me). I felt like I could play Hawk and be “only” an underdog, instead of having no chance at all. I felt like I could experiment with new characters from time to time. Getting raped by Kurahashi’s guile was more of an educational experience like “Oh, I can’t use my stand fierce here because I get hit by this move”, as opposed to the US where it felt like “Yep, had to block a low tiger again. Now that’s an expected loss of 10% life before I can get a blocked rush”. I came to appreciate this “lower powered” environment. I felt like I got to explore the game space of all the middle tier and lower tier matchups. I liked it, beacause I got to appreciate how interesting and fun these matchups were, and I could pick a character without thinking about the O. Sagat factor.
O. Sagat was my bugbear, but I can see how Claw would be for others. I don’t know why people didn’t have this reaction with Boxer. When I asked Yoshimi about it, he said that it took skill to win with Boxer, a lot more skill than O. Sagat and Claw. Personally, I didn’t mind… it gave me a character I could win with when I was sick of learning with Chun :).
Sorry for the long winded answer! I guess it turned into more an old man’s diatribe. I can see myself in a nursing home, in my rocking chair, mumbling about ST and Game in Namiki tournaments from 1999
I realize that was a very long winded answer, sorry! I
I don’t know if cheap is the right word, but some match ups are more or less in the favor of a character, which means that one of the players will have to “work” harder that the other in order to win.
The way I define cheap is : easy to do/use and very effective. Claw’s wall dive tricks definitely correspond to that definition.
However there’s one thing that bugs me : AFAIK ST is the only fighting game that has had (and apparently, still has) soft bans on “cheap” characters (claw and o sagat) in Japan. In all the other fighting games the best characters and techniques are normally used, no matter how cheap they are. Maybe it’s because ST players are more old school, and new school players don’t care about playing cheap characters…
zass - Thank you for dropping more knowledge! Fascinating stuff.
I’m convinced that if O.Sagat were more popular in Japan players like Aniken, Mattsun, Muteki, Mayakon, Toutanki* would have all quit (or gravitated to Boxer, Dhalsim, Claw) and we – meaning the international ST community – would be worse off.
[* oh, btw he went by a different nickname back in 99. Tatanhontokanantoka… I forget. Could this be who you meant in the earlier post?]
About a year ago NKI made a post on Takiba’s bbs urging Muteki and co. to come to the EVO. Muteki said he can’t travel to tourneys much (even to go to Osaka) but why the fuck would he want to take that long flight just to play Guile vs. O.Sagat all day? Stay home and chill with Chamu, Muteki! Maybe someday we’ll figure out that O.Sagat is bullshit…
Could you post a little more Namiki scoop? Did you get a chance to play against Tanaka O.Ryu, Takiba Dhalsim, Bonus Blanka (how did he compare to Harahi?), Ken-O/Gian (how much has his Dhalsim matured since way back then?), Hamaki Honda, etc.?
Did you play claw vs. Harahi or Bonus Blanka at all? How did this go? Any tips for a Blanka player? (heh, I lost this match at the finals of a local tourney last weekend)
You don’t have any video from those days, do you?
Probably Kashiwagi? He and Daigo used to be Vampire Hunter rivals. More recently that guy had the dignity to switch to Ryu.
You know, I just found this forum again after something like 7 years of inactivity. I have this burning desire to play ST now. I now live in Seattle, and as far as I know, there is no place to play. It seems that the arcade is a dead thing, only alive in Japan.
Well in August if your willing to make the trip to Vegas, CigarBob built a B2B cabinet for all the ST fans, like himself. There is more info on this page. http://forums.shoryuken.com/showthread.php?t=128042
