PSU Wednesdays - Thanks Guys! (April 18th, 2007)

This isn’t an official thread for the PSU group I played with yesterday.

But I wasn’t sure where to post this. I was lucky I was able to make it out this week, but I’m very glad I did.

This is Chanchai, aka Nick. Chubby asian (Thai) dude wearing black dockers and black shirt yesterday. AKA, that one dude who seems to only have VF on his mind for some silly reason.

I wanted to say thanks for the great times! You guys are an awesome group, lots of good people and a very fun atmosphere.

I can’t remember everyone’s names right now… But here are some shout outs:

Mackinzie: Thanks for reminding me about this cool weekly get-together. ShinryujinX told me about it awhile back and said it was pretty cool. Thanks for putting up with my constant phone calls asking for directions. And well, so far I’ve been having lots of great times with you at GT, Bamboo Grove (the Hawaiian joint we went to), Versis, and PSU. Looking forward to Friday!

@JS (don’t know what the former RacerX calls himself now): Andrew, it was so awesome to see you again! And you play good VF these days! But back to the most important part, it’s been so long since we last hung out! To the point that you forgot that I have seen your “new place.” We’ll be hanging out more soon, I hope. Though I know you’ve got school and interviews and all that jazz. GOOD LUCK! Also, thanks for coming out to Versis with me after the PSU night. All of those matches we had in VF5 were great and I had a blast. You’re Akira and Brad are driving me nuts and I think we’re helping each other out refining our fundamentals.

Sam Y: Good to see you again. I finally gave you a more proper introduction, as opposed to the barely “hello” I offered on Friday. Thanks a lot for coming down to fetch me as I got lost in Smith Hall. I really look forward to meeting up more and chatting. I also want to say that I watched a bit of your 3S (obviously everyone else has seen it), and I’m glad we have a few guys in your generation who are leading the charge to your style of play in Portland. It’s not really fair to call it a style, because you guys play with a purity. I think it’s doing great things in redirecting the crazy talent Portland’s always had into a very complete game. I hope I didn’t offend anyone in Portland with this statement.

Jetay: Sorry if I mispelled your name, man. Great meeting you. So far, I think you’re a fun, straight up, and sincere guy. Thanks so much for getting VF4:Evo up on the station (sorry to the A3 players, but I can’t resist VF, it’s a known fact). Thanks a lot for the matches. We’re gonna work on your game, but you do already have good game, definitely high potential. Also, it was cool seeing one of your matches, though we had to watch it in fast forward at some point. Any chance I can get a copy of the DVD?

Thomas: I barely got to know you, but boy you really have a nice VF game. Sorry Aoi’s become a “more demanding and expert class” characer in VF5. Aoi saw how I had to really relearn Aoi in VF5 because the stuff I was driving people nuts with in VF4:Evo just wasn’t flying in 5 anymore. I still have crazy faith in her, mainly because I’ve seen how top Japanese are playing her, but boy is she tough to use in VF5 now. I really liked seeing your Evo Aoi and look forward to more VF with you. On top of that, look forward to meeting up sometimes–another cool guy that I only talked to for a bit.

Kabuki: Nice to finally meet you Ross. Even if just barely. I like that you’ve been following your fighting games and seems like you read up on forums and play quite a bit. Let’s hangout sometime.

Mark: We just met for a bit at the end of the evening. Nice seeing your enthusiasm for Guilty Gear. That’s a game I’m going to eventually have to learn from the ground up. Thanks for offering up your place for some games in the future too.

Others: I met quite a few other people but can’t quite remember names if any were taken. But you guys at PSU have a great thing going, so I look forward to future get-togethers, hopefully I can make more of these!

-Chanchai

if i could get out of work before 6pm, i’d go down to psu.

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yeah it was nice meeting you too, sorry I couldn’t play more vf, that game annoys me when I don’t know my moves because I can’t do any of the advanced stuff i used to know with Shun. Oh well. Also i still think throws clashing with normals in vf 5 is dumb, and K+G cancel with kage from the few matches I’ve seen with it, also kinda dumb, I’m betting thats gonna get get revised in ver.C though.

Hey KabukiMono,

At first, throw clashing really bugged me because it kills some of the Nitaku game.

But I don’t mind it anymore. Call it rationalizing… but I’m fine dealing with near neutral situations and I feel that the new system has been encouraging a little bit more “risky” play.

That said, not asking you to like throw clashing. I don’t know if anyone really “loves” that system, because it’s intent seems to be a direct form of intereference with how the game is played.

But I don’t get into clash situations all that much except if both players are spamming safe pokes and throws.

I haven’t paid enough attention to Kage in VF5. I was wondering what you were referring to in the K+G cancels. K+G is now the command for a high spin kick, I think.

Understand what you’re saying about going back to an older game and not having played it in awhile, trying to do old stuff and not remember it all. Don’t worry, I understood your frustration and didn’t hold any of that against you hehe.

Especially going back to Evo when Shun is a beast in VF5. Assuming you’ve been playing VF5 (was under impression you have been playing that).

I really hope we get to play each other in VF5 sometime soon.

-Chanchai

Yeah, good times Nick!
Glad you had fun at the weekly, it’ll be cool to play you some at Art’s or possibly some other times if you do get something going.
Hit me up anytime if you wanna learn some Guilty Gear. Next month, baby.

Later.

Hey, this is Mackinzie’s friend Grant I actually only met you toward the end, but I saw you play VF for awhile and I don’t even know how you got so crazy good. lol Anyhow I also went to the PSU event last night and met some new people and I just wanted to say hi and thanks to all the people who gave me some pointers on third strike. (Sam, Anthony, Ross, Jetay? don’t hold me on that spelling.) So anyhow I hope to see more of you guys and sorry if I seemed a little to quiet. I didn’t want to run my mouth and get on some peoples nerves like some of Mackinzie’s friends. :stuck_out_tongue:

Yeah, I remember you Grant! It was a nice chat we had at the end of the evening.

At least while I was there, everything you said was alright by me lol. But I guess both of us were new to the PSU Wednesday group :stuck_out_tongue: That makes me this week’s official “guy who runs his mouth off (about VF).”

Warning: Rest of post is my rant on my “VF journey” (<-- VF Dork), you might be interested, you might not.

About the VF experience. I was always a VF fanatic since VF2 (played lots of VF1 though when it came out). Locally I did fine in VF2, but I didn’t play the hardcore VF players during the VF2 and early VF3 days.

When I got the Dreamcast and VF3tb, I got hooked on the game (heck, I was still playing VF2 when I could up to that time). And decided I’d go serious about it. Read up on it, but the big thing was…

I actually travelled all over the country to play VF. First gathering was summer of 2000, I went to New York City and met up with a ton of VF players who were all meeting there for like 4-5 days of almost non-stop VF. Learned so much there and NYC has always had a great scene for Virtua Fighter. They left me with lots of good experience and I came back with tons of videos (like 30 8-hour videos of VF3tb play), notes (I filled a whole notebook), and a decent understanding of what I needed to work on. And when I got back, I took a few days away from the game, then just constantly practiced.

On top of that, I contacted people through the network and formally met Ray because I was looking for someone to play VF3tb with. We hooked up and played lots of VF3tb and the first day we played was pretty cool. I had some friends over and though Ray and I hadn’t played each other (aside from many years before that during the pre-Tilt, old Beaverton Wunderland days of MK2, Tekken 2, and VF2), we had a compelling match and my friends were shocked that VF3tb could be played the way we played it.

Anyhow, since those early days in 2000, I travelled a lot for VF. Chicago, New York again, Vancouver BC, Los Angeles, Sunnyvale. In those travels I played against people from all over the world. Played some people learning VF up in Seattle (Seattle does actually have some history with VF, but it’s always been scattered about, I loved Seattle most for its amazing Virtual On scene though).

One of the best things about the VF community are the gatherings. We do have our tournaments, but biggest priorities are gatherings. Gatherings are like our own amateur conventions for VF. Usually we get some hotel or someone has a big house, but the gatherings are just amazing. It’s competitive, but more social and more like a society. Everyone works to improve everyone’s game, to discover new things, show off what we’ve learned, etc… It’s super productive.

Ray and I also built up a VF4 community for awhile when that game came out. Ray introduced me to a couple of people who played VF3 at PSU and one of them actually had been to Japan (and I think is there now) and played VF so he understood how to play the game. Those guys we met up with during the VF3tb Dreamcast days. Junior asked me if Tilt should get VF4, and my answer was obvious. I think him watching me and Ray play VF3tb was what encouraged him to do that and I hope I helped Tilt make some decent money on VF4. I know I donated a lot of my funds into that machine (and I got a happy Win Streak on it too).

In any case, through SRK and Tilt, we built up a decent base of VF4 players and it was actually a good population of players for awhile. Unfortunately, academic pressure became heavy in the later years of college and I also needed a break from the fighting game scenes so that’s kind of where I disappeared to.

Even though I stopped keeping up with everything for awhile, there were times when I still met up with out of Oregon players. On some trips to San Diego and LA, I met up with the local crews there though I was there on vacation. When I went to Thailand, I hooked up with the VF players there (the main guy being T^5 who was a good Tekken player in North America, I still talk to him). The way I play VF4:Evo is a lot like how I played when Evo just came out, I don’t use enough of the advanced stuff that has developed in the community since then, actually–though I’m starting to because of VF5.

At the end of March, I went to Southern California for a gathering we had. Gathering was awesome, food was awesome, and we had 3 tournaments that were all very fun. I even placed 5th at the Buy.Com tournament at the end of the gathering. Trust me, that was over-performing (and the draw playing out in my favor, if I didn’t lose to Ken_I aka Sextaro in the main draw, I would have probably gotten 7th or worse). But I did play well in that tournament, was very focused. And the VF5 tournament at Buy.Com’s LAN2007 event was probably the only fighting game tournament that ran smoothly from what I heard. Lots of technical issues with the others (HD lag on 3s, controller issues with T5DR because they were using PS3, the “pad only” rule on DoA5–yeah, I was lucky VF5 tourney ran well).

I will say though that the national level is a good leap over my level. A good, good leap, but I’m working on it and I’v been getting more competitive. The Japan level is freaking out of this world though… and if I get Yosuke down to Portland (which he and I are planning to happen in a few weeks–he’s studying in Seattle), you’ll see how insanely scary the Japanese level is. He’s also an awesome guy :slight_smile: It’s just an amazing honor to play someone of that level and have someone like that in North America. I mean, the guy did really well in Japanese tournaments. Won some even.

Anyways, that’s my “hardcore VF experience” in a post. Strayed from topic, but felt like sharing because I’m talkative like that.

-Chanchai