Hey Jeff where was this World Finest arcade or event located?
Check out these threads.
http://forums.shoryuken.com/showthread.php?t=68090
http://forums.shoryuken.com/showthread.php?t=103126
They’re both very long so you’ll probably want to have the search function pick out the ones by a specific poster for you.
real cool shit!
I felt all nostalgic. I feel the same way as Jeff. After HF the game slowly declined. Super and ST were cool but I didn’t enjoy them as much as the earlier SF’s.
I popped in a quarter for Alpha and it was just garbage. Didn’t feel like SF at all. Not to mention MvC, that has to be the worst SF series ever, IMO. Alpha and MvC were the reasons why I left the SF scene.
LOL, not to say that I was anywhere near as good as Jeff and the old school crew, just speaking from a OG SF player’s perspective.
SF4 feels a lot like old school SF, which I instantly fell in love with. That shit is like crack! I’m 29 now and even though I hated the crap out of the Alpha series and MvC, SF4 has ignited something in me.
I’m actively trying to get better (and I am!). I’m participating in tourneys. I have SF buddies…lol, which is fucking awesome! Anyway, thanks for posting the vid.
Is this a joke?
Some kind of invincible setup into juggling an ultra that you earned for getting beat up on instantly negates any possibility of this retaining the “old school SF” feeling. The risk reward is so retardedly skewed from the old SF games that I can’t believe it’s even supposed to be the same series sometimes.
If you like the game, that’s your business, but this is CONSIDERABLY farther down the road to retarded than ST or Alpha ever was.
But…but…Tomo said that to win at Street Fighter, I must think like a Street Fighter!
[media=youtube]5gAh9PHQntk[/media]
Damn, Valle, Jeff, and Viscant (ewwwww) in the same thread? This almost feels like alt.games.sf2 all over again! :looney:
Jeff, Alex thanks for gracing the thread and dropping some nostalgia, always great to hear from the greats…
Jeff have you ever considered getting back into the scene? just curious.
Not in the manner you describe it. Not including the juggles/ultras, SF4, to me, feels similar to SF.
Feel like dropping knowledge?:looney:
+1 to this!
Awesome. Keep it old school, or to be more technical “new old school” since it is ST and not HF. However you want to call it.
So do you prefer playing Super Turbo as opposed to HD Remix?
I myself love ST but hate HDR but since more ppl play HDR online I’m stuck playing HDR with the old school graphics of course.
I do like the idea of “Small Mistake = Small Punishment and Big Mistake = Big Punishment”, seems quite right to me. But then again Small Mistake = Big Punishment, can be unfair but if both players can do that, then its a bit balanced. Well I assume.
Really great stuff to hear.
hey jeff shaefer, i noticed you’re an avid gun collector and also listed yourself as a marksmen for occupation.
i know that you’ve mentioned that you have better reaction time than most people and i can see the correlation between the two hobbies.
i guess my question is how good was your reaction time compared to other sf players and has playing sf2 helped you in other hobbies (particularly shooting) and vice versa?
lol, like FPS games were the first thing EVER to make use of fast reaction time.
I would like to know how fast jeff’s reaction time was though. Didn’t he mention that he took a test for it?
K, I was just about to post this. I saw these videos within a few weeks and I know Schaefer well enough to know that he embellishes sh*t. I thought it was crazy to see the same old Jeff after more than a decade. lol
The clearest standout was the claim of beating Alex in A2. I talked to a friend, to laugh and vent after the nonsense in the vids(I was there peeps). I pointed out that the b3 tape clearly disputes this supposed A2 victory. When I’m interviewing Alex, Alex says something like b3 will make 4 in a row or something of the sort. Even more obvious is that people would’ve been hyping a Choi vs. Schaefer match if Jeff was the reigning champ at the time of B3. That was a pretty big fairy tale on Jeff’s part. The closest story I can think of is when Jeff retired. It was the A3 tournament before the National one and there were only 11-12 people in the SHGL tournament and Jeff gets second and calls it quits claiming that he quit as the number 2 guy in Cali. Let’s not forget that the NorCal crew were winning the early SHGL A3 tournaments so the claim of number 2 after a TINY SHGL tourney had me kind of laughing but I also knew Jeff wouldn’t be able to quit any other way.
They’re nice vids and I wouldn’t have said anything aside from wanting to back up facts. I’ll also take this time to point out that those are Jeff’s memories. They are very… personal, more than they are accurate.
Just backing up this one particular fact is all. However, if you’re going to offer up the truth, Alex, I got my fair share in regard to Jeff’s stories.
I still encourage folks to watch the vids if you’re interested in SF history.
Apoc.
Ok all you OG’s, you should start making vids too. It is very entertaining and interesting to hear about the old days. I played since 92’ but i was only like 8 at the time. I was very good too but not high level. My playstyle was very basic, fireballs fireballs, you jump you get hit with a shoryuken. I didnt know about the high level tactics back in the days!
Alex IS a great player, still.
It’s watching vids like the ones posted that remind me of why I never leave the scene for too many years. It’s easily recognized that the scene is missed in these videos. The scene gives back as much as you put into it. I can attest 100% to this.
I will confirm that Jeff played more than anyone else I hung out with regularly. Jeff is very smart. If you subtract the ego from his thought processes you would benefit from his philosophy. It’s his ego(hey, I have a big one so I am one to talk) that detracts from his great mind. Consequently, like an egotistical scientist, when he makes a conclusion, it’s solid… until put under the scrutiny of newly obtained knowledge, lol. He got a bit famous for this type of thinking on the newsgroups around the time of A1. So, unfortunately, some wrote his theories off because one day, this character was the best, and then the next day it was different. I can honestly say that some of the most intelligent and thought provoking conversations I’ve had with regard to SF were with Jeff. Sure, he played a lot and was smart about it. He had a hook up at Camelot where he would get a LOT of tokens for nothing. He also would chum up with the smartest and best players. He spent little money and gained even more knowledge by understanding which players to speak and play with. In the end, for a long time, I would say that Jeff was a living library of SF strategy. I even have some of a copy of a strategy guide he wrote for old school and a blue tournament flyer with the top 3 rankings on ST he made.
I’ll also confirm that after HF competition waned. It wasn’t until Jeff and I had this idea to start a tournament community online. There was agsf2 but no tournaments utilizing the internet. We finally got together in Vegas in '95(where I technically met Alex for the first time) and that kicked off the internet era of the SF scene and the beginning of the rejuvenation. The next year was the first of the famous B tourneys that would evolve into what Evo is today. Even though A1 sucked, it was enough to get the ball rolling for a new generation utilizing the net to form competitions. Before Jeff and I got on AGSF2 the idea of SF being what it is today(along with the fighting game scene that piggybacked on SF) was lame to most. I even recall Mike Watson saying that no one would travel to play a game. That’s all just to say that Jeff had a hand in the beginnings of national tournaments when that idea was laughed at.
I will also confirm that supers killed it for many but SSF2 along with the Van Damme flick did most of the damage. We’re known as ST players nowadays but all of the times I played ST, Jeff drove down from Villa Park to grab me in Huntington Beach aside from a few WF tourneys. ST was the least played of the SF2 series back then.
One funny note. I remember being on the phone with Jeff when he was telling me about ST(I was temporarily in Vegas). He told me about Ryu’s super fireball. I said “hold up! You’re saying that Ryu can throw 5 fireballs at once… AND he’s invincible? WTF!? Oh! They don’t do normal fireball damage then, right?” See? Right there you can hear what ST sounded like to a purist. Everyone had a 50% damage shoryuken? An invincible move that does 50%?
Don’t get me wrong, I made the same argument of random jump in dizzies that led to TOD’s(touch of death=combo that dizzied and killed) being worse than supers. Heck, I can remember Jeff complaining about Rog on HF being able to jump in and dizzy in 2 hits… sometimes. Sidenote:on old school we DID know when the opponent was dizzy 99% of the time. There was a point system. Still, unless you were raised on old school, you don’t understand that subsystems toned the mental game down in exchange for skill. The OG’s were good because of skill, timing and MOST of all, strategy. As the games progressed, it seems the programmers wanted to award practice and so the games leaned more toward skill over strategy than the other way around. That should’ve made me suck since I hate practicing and play only for fast paced strategy, lol. From a playing perspective, one wants the practice rewarded. From a strategy perspective, skill shouldn’t offset solid strategy. That’s like having to balance chess pieces on marbles for a move to count.
sigh Now if we can get a new SF that doesn’t rely on subsystems for balance:)
maybe SF4 with the speed cranked up, smaller playing field… something? Should’ve skipped CE and SSF4 and gone straight to SF4T. Yup, in a couple of months it might be time to play.
Apoc.
Tomo did move on to play CS. I would have liked to have seen his skills in that. I wonder if he played in pro leagues.
So there reaction times were measured?
Yeah exactly, I walk to play the game vs ricky ortiz vs my Guile in which I tried to play old school and I get killed on like 5 seconds by an invincible setup in juggling ultra by Rufus and chunl li. Game over BS lol combo after combo rush down bs to hard to zone in that game
After that I walked away from the game and laughed on how non old school that was And I am an old school SF2 purist myself as well
Also in regards to HF Guile getting easliy comboed by a ryu player. According to the Abikka SF2 guile, for those who dont know Guile in HF has 5 frames added recovery on his booms, thats just as bad as ryu. Thats why ryu can just jump in for free in that game and why guile most of the time cant back hand most of assorbed fireballs that he could in SF2 CE.
The Tomo interview was great. Always heard about him but I thought it was more gossip than anything. I wonder how the new generation of top players like Wong and Ortiz would compare to old ones in terms of reaction.
Whether Jeff’s descriptions are embellished or not it’s nice he’s still taking the time to give us a glimpse into SF history. Most of us wouldn’t be able to tell whether it’s entirely accurate, so it’s nice to get second accounts like Apoc gave. He sounded pretty humble to me as he reminisced getting owned by some other top players. He could of left that out otherwise. It would be cool to see some of those guys like Tomo, Watson, Valle, Schaeffer getting interviewed together.
I have a lot of respect for the OG Scene but I also think fast reaction time advantages are the WORST part of Street Fighter. If an SF game is going to reward someone a shitload for having a .2 ms faster reaction time then its not even really testing skill, its just testing genetics. Many people like to compare high level SF to a chess match. Chess requires no reactions, though. (Maybe its speed chess?)