Here’s some random notes on some Japanese players I know and in response to nohoho’s post in the SBO5 thread, better to take it up here?
I’m not familiar with 2ch, can you maybe send specific links from there to what you read about sf players if you still have them/bookmarked? (I don’t even see a “search” button on the site). I’m curious to see what people said of Nomura or anyone else really in my local area. He may not be as good as Muteki, but his distancing is often very perfect. He’s definitely been “standoffish” in a social sense. I passed out CDs of the Wrectangles program I made esp for ST players and he didn’t even want to take a look, I couldn’t quite figure it out. Being good doesn’t give anyone the right to be rude, yokozuna or not.
Most of my interests in the past few years with ST (/AE) has been Dhalsim/Guile, because I feel that there’s practically some formula that dhalsim can employ to shut down guile for a guaranteed win. One of the things I found after playing Nomura the first few times was that I was typically merely intimidating guile players with yoga flame, but he could consistently nail it if I was too close- even top players won’t chance it often enough. He also plays a mean dhalsim, though rare, but he must know both sides of the match very well cause of that (my guile is terrible).
I probably can’t comment much on Blanka vs. Dhalsim yet- nothing comes to mind and I just know I’m forgetting some essential basics at the moment. For one I’m pretty sure I don’t employ yoga fire fb right or as often as I could. I think Shinryu (ST Blanka player) is our best player but he just got robbed at the qualifiers to rep us due to other players’ CE shennanigans. (fwiw I used to love the old HF and held it up as my favorite game, because it was so balanced but eventually came around to favoring ST for reasons mentioned in other thread.) You mentioned Blanka’s bite, hell yes, if you can get in with that, I’d say you’re way ahead of the game with Blanka. Several nightmares can be employed, the bite being one of them if Blanka can get in. If a ryu has your number, he’s probably got his low strong down right? and the fb to push keep you just out of range besides that. Precise positioning when trying to get in is key. fuck your charge, always value your position most of all, eg when fb thrown, walk up to block it if you have to, even if you get hit by it sometimes, just don’t get pushed too far back. After playing and watching Shinryu, it really seems like he’s got more of a zangief game strategy, even more than if he was playing as zangief and employed a typical zangief strategy, if that makes any sense- the point is, you just gotta get in, and most of the time you can’t but you gotta be patient. The opponent is up by 75% life? You’ve been blocking/jumping over 30 fb’s? That’s typically an even situation for a Blanka… never, ever underestimate that combo he’s got.
I think Shinryu really might be better than Komodo but it’s been so long since I’ve played Komodo and I am a lot worse than either one of them so that statement doesn’t mean much. AE’s CE bullshit prevented us from finding this year in any case.
I used to play Camera-ya just about every single day over the course of the year 2003. He and his ken were definitely the best, but I never heard/knew Umehara said he had that good a footsie game. He seemed to wreak the most potential out of that tiny extra window of ken’s dp timing and you’d watch it like, how is he getting away with that shit so often? Then you played him and it was like uh nevermind.
btw I just ordered anniversary collection for xbox and a PS controller converter- happy to play folks but in my experience so far with cvs2 and doau, the lag is definitely there. c’mon don’t let me play too much cvs2, dhalsim’s fierce doesn’t even go under guile’s sonic boom, makes me think I’m playing CE guile.
XSPR (my gamertag)
David Boudreau