New MvC2 tech in 2019: stopping guard breaks

Every once in a while Matrix would ask about why the hell Storm was able to attack after blocking the guard break in this video:

Nobody knew why and we just keep chalking it up to the randomness of the game. That’s now changed: we now know how you can stop guard breaks.

People have been replacing music and characters colors for the game, playing with the character files, extracting audio, and extracting images, including using camera hacking to zoom in/out on visuals.

Recently, understanding of the game stepped up a significant notch. Instead of just that previous low level hackery, anotak, mountainmanjed, and others have been debugging and dissecting the implementation of MvC2: understanding the code that makes the game work. While there have been a number of interesting discoveries (such as the internal game mechanics of unfly, etc), one of the most interesting so far has been Super Jump Install. An “install” is when you grant a character a certain power up temporarily. Super Jump Install (SJI) grants your outgoing character super jump mode from when they leave the screen until the next time they hit the ground.

Since guard breaking incoming characters relies upon you using up the single block a character gets in normal jump mode, SJI lets them avoid being guard broken.

A detailed breakdown can be found here:

Magnetro wrote a very helpful video here:

I’m impressed that people have just now found something this useful after almost twenty years of this game being out. It’s not necessarily the most intuitive thing to do in a match, but it’ll save your ass against Iron Man, Cable, and others, so seems like a damned good technique to start using.

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