Well, to steer this topic away from that path (because this is a dead horse that’s been beaten to dust at this point) Chun isn’t too bad. The majority of Chun’s in America suck and a vast majority of dudes just don’t know the matchup. She’s beatable. Most Americans just learn low forward into SA2, the HK/Throw OS, b/HP, cr.LP on wakeup, her Kara throw, and EX Spinning Bird Kick and think they’re MOV.
There’s no kinda broken. You’re either broken or you’re not and Chun is probably still more fair than some of the mid tiers in Second Impact. I still have a low threshold for what is broken. Unless whatever it is the character is doing stops the game from playing or cuts out all of your options like ST Akuma bad, it’s really hard to call the broken card for me. You can’t have something be fightable and winnable against in a meta, yet call it broken. Just doesn’t make much sense.
Outside of Igloo correcting me somewhere here, I feel the highest level of Chun is pretty technical also. She has a lot of little technical things like close s.HK SJC super and dash legs that will keep your Chun from being too rudimentary and have more options. It’s just unlike SFIV you don’t have to be doing those things the entire match. The good buttons still get you far on their own.
Overall though people thinking 3S Chun is broken is why people whine about everything in SFIV. If something is barely decent its a huge deal. I don’t think a lot of the people that got in during SFIV would last during the Dark Ages. The shit you had to put up with would be considered criminal compared to the sheltered gameplay/meta of Dimps era SF. Yet there were still less characters that regularly disrespected the poking game at the same time.
I think the bigger problem is that there is no one else even close to Max’s level of Hollywood with the knowledge for people to say “hey, maybe this guy knows a bit more than Max here”. If you don’t go to tournaments or post on forums Max is pretty much your Washington Post for fighting games.
Shit, Chun is low tier when compared to top tier in other fighting games.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg for Chun and is not in totality why she is top tier. IMO it’s hard to really understand why Chun is the best in the game until you’ve played vs a Japan-level Chun player. I didn’t really get it until I played Ryan a bunch (he’s one of the best Chuns in Tokyo and posts here semi frequently).
To state it in a roundabout way - there are hundreds of Chun 3s players in America and most of them are not strong. Yet most of them can low forward or back fierce super confirm, many of them can kara throw, all of them can do the things that people say “this is what makes Chun strong.” But they don’t win. It’s because what makes Chun strong (and what makes any character in 3s strong) is not something that simple, and you don’t fully grasp how hard they are to beat at high level until you’ve played those high level people.
Also it’s easy to come to an armchair analysis conclusion when you already have the answer. Say hypothetically, Urien was considered the best character in the game. I think you might write “of course Urien is the best, he has unblockables, incredible high low mixups on Aegis, tackle combos take more than half your life and give you another Aegis, he can put it right in front of you and just hit you over and over for more meter and damage and not even bother with the mixup. That’s very strong and dumb simple to do. Anyone can put an Aegis in front of you then hit you a lot.”
Saying “this character has X so they must be cheap” is not a good way to look at a matchup or a character’s strength. What it comes down to is how the matchup is played. So if you wanted to analyze Chun vs X character, you would look at how their tools interact, what each character needs to do to win, how easy it is for each to put the other into bad situations, stuff like that. If your analysis of Chun vs Dud is “wow confirms into super are so strong, that’s just what Chun does, that’s why Chun is the best character in the game” you have missed the point. This is the analysis that an uninformed player gives. It’s a hallmark of someone who hasn’t given the matchup a lot of thought.
Not that Max has to be an expert in every match. He’s just playing 3s casually online for his fans But since he gives the impression that he’s at least good to some level, his fans are likely to assign more credit to his thoughts than they are worth. It probably sounds trivial and like I’m making a big deal out of nothing, but I think 3s more than a lot of other Capcom games has had a LOT of misinformation repeated about it for a long time. It damages the game. Every time someone hears “you can play 3s, but ultimately someone is just going to beat you with Chun low forward super” and they decide not to bother, we lose a potential person to what is basically misinformation. It’s why I argue about the game on SRK as much as I do. What people believe and what they repeat to their friends eventually ends up impacting who we get to play the game with in three years.
If you talk as much as Max, you’re bound to say stupid shit in between the honest stuff.
That stuff happens to me all the time as well.
He just doesn’t think enough before opening his mouth.
Yeah I agree. That’s why you can’t hold this stuff too hard against him. Having been stuck on commentary before for like 10 minutes and having no idea what to say, I definitely appreciate the challenge that is being basically “on stage” in front of thousands of people, having to think of things to say and react to situations on the spot. Of course you’re occasionally going to say something wrong, or silly, or mildly offensive, or whatever. It’s not really a big deal, and it’s understandable. He certainly handles being in the limelight like that better than most of us could. So my criticism should be viewed through that lense - that it’s not a big deal, just something I would like him to think about for the future (hypothetically anyway, I have no delusions that he is actually reading this thread).
This sums up exactly why I don’t really like Max. I know plenty of people at a local I go to every month that take his word as the word of God when it comes to fighting game information. And they will argue with me to death when I try to correct them on certain things regarding a game. Dude is definitely a hero to those who don’t know any better.
I had a SFV match against him back in beta 1 and of course it was laggy as all get out most likely due to distance. I went back and watched his stream archive the next day and all he did was talk shit about me trying to lame him out with our bad connection. Which I feel is a terrible example to set for people getting into fighters. He could have just said something along the lines of: "Well too bad this was a bad connection. Me and the other guy could only do so much. That’s just online for ya."
But no instead he had to act like an Internet tough guy for his audience. Lol
He ended up winning the match and he was still like “Get better fucking Internet,asshole.”
I literally thought to myself “Wow that sounds like some shit you’d get in hatemail.”
Probably was having a bad day or something. You’d think he usually wouldn’t express such an emotion.
The fucker deletes posts that expose him and constantly spouts misinformation. Why is he being defended again?
Didn’t know he was caught lying as well, not surprised though given what I have seen him do in the past. My biggest gripe is the phony likable guy character he uses to get views and donations, but when things don’t go his way the real asshole starts showing. Did I mention he wears sunglasses indoors and thinks DmC is superior to DMC3?
Yes, yes you did. About 2 pages ago
I wear sunglasses at night, indoors, outdoors, anywhere I choose and any time I choose.
OMFG HE HAS AN OPINION THAT DIFFERS FROM YOURS ON A VIDEO GAME HOLY SHIT KILL HIM WITH FIRE DESTROY DESTROY HATE HATE HATE.
Didn’t Max win some sort of Award at Evo, called a Canon award? What was that for/what’s a Canon award? Anyways.
I crushed Gootecks in like 10 seconds near double perfect my Q vs his Urien, watched his vids just to see his reaction, wasn’t featured.
It’s lame I know haha, but they are admittedly not very good at 3S nor take it very seriously.
I guess what annoys me most abt Max-the-toilet-man is he started off as this corny guy that was easy to ignore who paid his friends and some people off craigslist to dress up as mvc characters for his silly little youtube videos. Then he just kept getting more unignorable and now hes some kind of figurehead for rhe community despite being terrible at fighting games.
I guess it irks the shit out of me that more people respect and listen to Max than JWong, the GOAT US FG player. But JW isnt exactly pumping out youtube videos desperate to make money off of views so he doesnt have to get a real job, so I guess thats what Max has over him (fuck “youtube personalities” too, but thats a rant for a different day)
I’m subscribed to the guys channel, and I like his vids.
Seems like people forget quickly how Justin used to stream all the time with his followship goals and shit, before he scored a job with Nvidia, basically begging for money every time he had the chance to.
Also seems like nobody ever notices the dumb advertisement shit Mike and Gootecks do on Excellent Adventures or when Mike uses a whole Capcom Protalk episode to advertise Gootecks book or whatever the shit it was.
I don’t judge those people for trying to pay their bills though. Those guys dream is it to make money off of video games they love to play and it’s nice that they’re able to do so without having to work a 9 to 5.
Thing is fighting games don’t even come close to being as popular compared to Dota 2, League of Legends and Counterstrike Global Offensive, so you see those people do shady shit like that just to keep their necks above the water.
Seriously the only reason people shit on Max specifically, is because that despite fighting games being a ghetto “e-sport” right now, he’s still more successful than anyone else in that niche and even pulls people to his videos that don’t give a shit about fighting games in general, even though he’s “bad”.
People also don’t respect Max’s skills as an entertainer.
If it was so easy to make money off of youtube and twitch, then people like Chris G, FChamp and PerfectLegend would actually do it, instead of delivering these awkward displays of idiocy they do when they actually stream.
Believe me these people like money but they’re not capable of entertaining outside of saying weird shit and being pissed of by people in their stream chats.
Okay thats nice and all but i still dont like the fact that some random dude who played 3rd strike at home a few times before became a voice for the FGC. Thats really what it comes down to for me. Dude comes off as corny as balls to me
If there’s anything I can appreciate about Max’s content, besides raising interest in fighting games among regular folks who haven’t touched one before, is the quality that said content is delivered with
Usually when you have somebody else in the FGC - it’s either some dumb idiot like LTG or DSP, who just make a joke out of themselves and represent fighting games in a wrong spotlight (remember Viscant’s grudge match? Yeah that kind of spotlight)
Or it’s some nerd that can’t put coherent thoughts and the whole video is made without any sort of scripts and lots of stuttering, errrs and uhhms
Or it’s somebody who just curses all the fucking time (which is common for quite a lot of FGC streamers - Wong, Champ, Valle, etc)
Unlike them, at least Max makes the videos (note - the videos, not livestreams) with
- a script
- with high-quality audio
- with high-quality video
- with some nice topic-related music in the background that doesn’t annoy the crap out of you (like putting Sakura’s SFEX theme)
- and just generally well put thoughts about certain things like recent Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s discussions
That alone already would potentially attract me as a viewers towards seeing more of this person’s content than somebody else with shitty camera, bad mics, poverty setup and rare content delivery in general
Nevermind that Max also has a job and he puts out new stuff almost daily, and I don’t think combining streams, YouTube uploads, work, and organizing your daily schedule in general to fit all of this is an easy task
yes max does actually have decent production value.
In a perfect world we would have clear definitions for something broken (ie. a character or strategy that invalidates large swathes of other characters and/or strategies) and cheap (ie. a character or strategy that gives relatively big rewards for low amounts of effort. Unfortunately, the words have been abused to the point where they basically refer to anything a player can’t beat or even finds annoying.
It’s the same thing with the word “scrub”. It should really just be used to refer to players who adhere to an arbitrary set of additional “rules of engagement” that don’t exist in the game itself but nowadays the word is abused into a generic word for “bad player”.
Funnily enough, Max got me into fighting games. I used to watch his videos religiously, thought he was a god in every fighting game he touched, and took his statements and opinions as gospel. I say “funnily enough” because I haven’t watched his content in years and can’t fucking stand it now.
Gradually, he just started to annoy me more and more as I watched him. And eventually I realized that it was because, as I got more exposed to the fighting game “community” as a whole, I learned more and became more knowledgable in general, and it started becoming clear that Max didn’t really know what he was talking about and that he wasn’t actually a strong player. So, basically, I definitely appreciate Max getting more people into fgs, if nothing else. Max is like the minimum-wage job of the FGC; I only pray that his viewers can eventually succeed that vortex.