SF4 is slow but yeah I think it’s all about the fast weird jumps, actually in previous SF’s you can’t anticipate a low medium attack and jump on reaction and combo like in SF4. It’s the only game where walking up and poking with anything besides jab will let you eat a jump in combo.
hi there
first of all this thread rocks!
we can easily divide SF to two and border is ST. before ST capcom ppl has made guile most powerful. btw two similar level players guile wins 9 out of 10. come on Jeff guile was the beast. he has had counter for anything. but with the help of meter in ST chances are more or less equalized.
btw you were terrific against daigo but he is great player anyway. has he lost desire to play? he is not that bad at all but you really beasted the beast. mike and jeff dont you have tape of those beastly games especially with the Tomo?
finally i think tournament organizers will pay up for a match-up “tomo, jeff and mike” vs “daigo, aniken and gian”. what do you think?
^I think something like that would be a pretty good idea scrubdom, we’re getting a nice amount of docus now thanks to SF4’s popularity, but the only real documentary we have dealing with players back then in depth is Bang the Machine, which a lot of people still haven’t seen due to the circumstances that happened with its production.
Would be great just to get interviews, stories, etc from the players who were on top back then.
Fixed.
Also, yes, I am in agreement, it would be nice to have a tier list from the opinions of the Best players at the time for WW/CE/HF. Many of us here today have tried to make one ourselves, however too many disagreements and more importantly, most of us were not playing at the highest lvls at the time to validate our assumptions of the game more thoroughly.
I don’t get it. you’re comparing tomo in his prime and footage that was cherry picked/specifically produced for a video to actual tourney footage of an out of practice Mike Watson in 2007? that’s not a fair comparison at all. Also I think anybody would be able to air throw raw on reaction if they were a top player.
If that was the case, then why don’t we see that happening with current Top Guile players today with any consistency (SFII specifically)? I believe you undermine that notion here, some of the things that went down back then strategically, is rarely ever seen today in SFII even amongst the best current SF players. The mentality of play has changed.
To be completely honest, I haven’t seen anyone footsie like the OG SFII players of old, they were just absolutely ridiculous at doing this.
I agree on one thing, comparison to 07 Wats to Prime Tomo is unfair, however if we watch vids of Wats from 94 in the Super Tournament, that’s a pretty good comparison imo of their Guile’s. However, I believe Tomo and Wats played Guile slightly different from one another, if I’m not mistaken.
well I could definitely be wrong. I just imagine that in HF you would have to have impeccable footsies and godlike reactions in order to be a pro level player in that era so it wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary to be able to do an air throw raw. and what top players are you referring to? like muteki guile and kurahashi? or maybe some people that still play HF at mikado or something.
i dont get how my air throw is less reactions than his? his is in a freaking strat vid where mine is in real game play? anyways, his guile was always much better than mine for sure. guile was his main character while ryu was mine. there is really no comparison needed here imo. tomo is not only your hero but mine as well 
Hey i play Guile too. If i record some matches against CPU Shin Akuma (on used VHS tapes bought from a garage sale of course), can i be included in the air throw comparisons?
I agree that landing an air throw like that isn’t that amazing. I learned a similar air throw technique and perfected it in not even one day. that was also after coming out of a state of extreme rustiness
If they allowed pad ports back in those days the scene would’ve been twice as big.
I would have chose the 94 tournament. I was there in the 2007 one, and I got the 3rd place behind watson and Eric Choi (The ken player in that vid). It was a fun little 1 dollar tournament, but c’mon, competition wise, it was a joke for watson and was more than free. Watson just played whatever character was still on the screen when it was his turn (basically random selecting the whole way). The reason why it shined was because nobody else was good or an OG in contrast to the 94 one, where SSF/ST was the main game for everybody attending. I think your video was pointless. Doesn’t represent the skill of either player. Best to leave it alone.
Eh…
Airthrowing like that is pretty cool but it really isn’t uncommon at all at high level play. Also, there is a setup here…by playing footsies like that, you can limit the player’s options. There’s a fairly limited amount of things that the Ryu could have done that Tomo would need to react to, and one of those things was to jump. In fact, it’s not necessarily an unexpected thing to do, because the Ryu could have been anticipating a sonic boom after those footsies, which is common for many Guiles to do.
Well I have…but either way, there’s a few reasons why it might be harder for them to do that…their opponents are a lot smarter than the ones Tomo was playing in that video, and so Kurahashi and them would have to consider more things in any given situation. More things you have to look out for means it’s generally harder to react to any particular thing that happens.
Highly unlikely, as good as Tomo may be.
Ok…and what about those rediculous dizzy combos?
As good as someone like Kurahashi or Muteki is, from what has been told by Top Players who competed against Tomo. Both those players reaction time were not on the same level as Tomo.
I don’t know of anyone today currently playing SFII who’s considered a Top Player and can literally punish Guile’s pokes with Ryu’s sweep on reaction. Nobody. To have a reaction/footsie ability like that is absolutely insane. This literally can blow the advantage heavily into Ryu’s favor if you can do this.
Not only that, but Jeff did state he could uppercut Sim’s fp on reaction, which again, you do not see today by current players. I also remember somewhere either posting here or in another thread that I forgot, but he stated Tomo could srk Chun’s fk on reaction as well (need confirmation on this). If that is true, this absolutely nullifies one of Chun’s best pokes in the game of SFII.
Case and point, smarter opponents or not, if you can do those types of crazy reactions…you are on a completely different level. Again, no current SFII player are does stated above even remotely consistently.
The only reason why I would say otherwise, is because Tomo personally does not like Super Turbo, due to things like the Supers. However his footsie, zoning, reaction and skill is still unrivaled today, which will be the biggest and largest factor.
To me, CE the game says it all about simply just how good this SFII player really was. CE. Dictator in AE ran all over tournaments in the US and Japan when it was still played back during it’s release and time. However, CE. Dic in AE was nowhere near as powerful as his arcade counterpart.
Tomo is the only player stated that I know of, who does not get locked down by Dictator’s bs. Remember, that this is a character who if he just gets you into one block stun, one poke, one connected hit…it’s game over for the entire round. However not only does Tomo not get locked down, but he utterly dominates with Ryu/Guile.
Personally, Tomo wouldn’t care to play ST, however if a in his prime Tomo played any of the top current SFII players today wether they be US/Japan/Korea/Euro etc, etc in WW/CE/HF. He’d flat out destroy all of them.
This is a current myth, that I feel current players today really need to stop spewing, because it is absolutely and completely false on so many levels. Firstly, dizzies rarely happened if ever within a match up during the height of the OG SFII games.
Footsies, zoning literally dominated 99% of the match ups, almost nobody took the risk of jumping in on players because you were asking to get punished. If someone actually did get dizzied or got hit by a dizzy combo, it was huge and usually lit up the place.
That’s how rare and difficult it was to get these dizzies to occur, and the reason why I feel current SFII players may say otherwise is because the mentality of the players have changed at this point.
Players today like to fish for the big wins, and the big hits. They also play far more aggressively which can result into landing these “dizzies” more frequently. However play like this back in 91-94, you will not survive period.
Like I said, it’s just a false and I’m sorry to say, poor excuse about the OG SFII games. When you play them even at just the moderate levels, this becomes exceedingly apparent, and the highest levels, it would be even more rare.
Dizzies were not a problem at all.
To put, people can try to say otherwise, but like I’ve said, Tomo was the greatest SFII player ever. He dominated in the most competitive SF era, the early 90’s, back you didn’t have 1093842098 other competitive games out there like today with fps, strategy vs strategy, mmo’s, etc, etc. Back then it was SFII only, and for Tomo to not only dominate from time to time, but to manipulate the Tier Listing with his characters, and to completely be above the competition says it all to how truly great of a player he really was.
People will probably read this and go “Wow, what an ass kisser”, however am I lying? He dominated WW/CE/HF so completely, I mean, name me another SF player who has done the same in such a fashion? Exactly.
My only sadness is that we don’t have any real videos to showcase how much of a monster he was, however oh well, the results of the competition and tournaments tell the tail.
Anyhow, I need to get to bed, I’m at a hotel at the moment and the router blows, keeps dcing me every 2 mins.
Well if that’s the case then why does Jeff and other OGers hate on SF4. Jeff says he hates the bullshit combos but clearly they were around in WW. You say just play better footsies and zoning. Doesn’t this apply to SF4 also?
sorry, the bold is pretty much all I got out of that post. I have no idea who this guy is, or if the stories surrounding him are bullshit or truth. not to say that to do what he did is impossible, but just… wow @ all that praise.
You know, there was a time in which people honestly believed ninjas were capable of magic…
edit: to whoever negged me, I don’t know if you get this or not, but I wasn’t insulting Tomo. I can’t insult someone I don’t even know. all I’m saying is, it sounds like bullshit legend. there are stories of humans rising up and conquering a bunch of other humans and remaining absolutely and utterly untouchable, but can we say this is the case here? where is the confirmation?
perhaps but really just look back to Schaeffer vs Daigo in AE. both players were handicapped but Jeff hadn’t played seriously in over 10 years, with different timing with AE and he still went even with Daigo.
Now an older, slower reaction Jeff playing a game with completely different timings than regular CE or HF gave a young, prime Daigo all he could handle. and Tomo beat Schaeffer in his prime every time.
Kuni who played both top Japanese and USA talent during that time says that he’d be a match for the to japanese players.
Go watch the schaeffer videos on what it was like back then. To get an idea of what it was like, and exactly how SF4 and SF2 are different.
are you people serious?
Jeff being older has no bearing on his reaction time, maybe when he hits 60 but certainly not in his late 30’s. If he had all the time to play games (like we all did at some point in our lives) he’d easily peak.
Would Tomo beat Daigo and most top Jap players we honestly dont know. Daigo isnt conclusively the best SF player in japan.
which is why many of the old players like schaeffer, watson, choi have noticed that their reactions have been getting slower and slower as time goes on.
hell I used to DP fierce blanka rolls on reaction, not any more though even though my execution is better my timing and reactions is all off now.
From my understanding thats also why all of the top FPS players are in their teens to earily 20s.
I don’t buy exactly that age = reflex. someone give some concrete data?