I went to a Gameworks last week with a friend of mine. He went off and played whatever and I immediately went for the TvC/SF4 cabs they had set up. The version in particular is SSF4AE. I have had minimal experience with the SF4 series, my last time playing it was when Vanilla came out while I was in college. My skills at 4 are definitely weak to say the least. I played against a Vega player who seemed to know what he was doing. I went with my usual SF go-to guys Bison/Guile/Zangief and I got molly-whopped most of the time. I only won maybe two or three times but this game is nuts. Everything about it seems…off. I’m no stranger to fighting games, and I’ve been playing SF since I was five or six years old, I know what should work with Guile and Bison.
At one point the Vega player was just spamming the same kick over and over again and I couldn’t seem to punish it effectively. Normally I’d be able to flash kick or c.lk/mk and punish or something on block but the pokes just kinda kept coming. Are his pokes super good or something? I tried to punish over and over and over and every single time all my pokes got stuffed. What is going on with this game, what is the right way to play? It seems like all the skills and fundamentals I’ve learned and perfected with other SF games are applied in a completely different or backwards way. It was one of those things where I really didn’t feel salty because I knew something wasn’t right.
Is this how the game always is? I didn’t really enjoy my time with it at the arcade, but maybe there is something I’m missing from this whole experience. The EX series felt a lot more like a real SF game than 4 did. 4 feels like it could have been anything else tbh.
Yeah SFIV changed the way SF normally works too much for my tastes. Soon as other games came out I left it. It’s just not for everyone.
He’s talking mostly about his experience with Vega’s pokes as a Guile/Bison/Gief player though.
Surely that doesn’t rile you a bit as a Ibuki player in 3S when you had to deal with worse things like
Anyways
This line of thinking is where you’re wrong. Never assume that characters will be the same/similar across fighting games. 3S Chun is leagues different from SF4 chun, ST Guile is amazing compared to SF4 Guile. List goes on.
You should just acknowledge that you know nothing about SF4 and because of it, you have no knowledge of the game’s matchups and even your own character’s tools despite them being similar. Getting completely outpoked and not knowing what your options are when you’re new to a fighter is pretty self-explanatory.
All in all, it’s too early for you to judge; You might end up loving the game or hating it for another reason but you can’t just judge the game off that match when you’re clearly mismatched.
Sorry to say, but you’re going to have to go back to the drawing board on this one. Sure, you might have decent fundamentals, but now you have to understand the properties of each character’s attacks and the NEW counters for that specific matchup.
So forget about what you know “should” work, because it’s obviously not. You’ll have to take it back down to basics and re-learn what can and does work. Studying matchup videos on youtube and checking character forums here on SRK will go a long way towards teaching you how to play the game again.
Yeah, the arcades don’t tend to be very fun when you’re getting your ass whooped, but it sure as hell motivates you to get better and step your game up.