Quick intro (scroll down to ‘Help’ to avoid wall of text): I grew up playing fighting games with my best friend C. We grew up in the arcades after school playing Mortal Kombat and at home after dark playing everything SFII all the way up to Capcom Vs SNK MF2000 across over a decade. I was always Ryu, and he was always Ken. We then grew up, dicovered beer and work and girls and all that grown up stuff, grew apart and stopped fighting. It’s now 10 years later and C has sadly passed away.
I’ve spent the past few months reliving our childhood by playing through the classics, and have decided there’d be no better gesture to him, from me than to compete at a tournament level, hopefully as Ken in his honour. Better still, I’d like to WIN and donate some prize money to a charity of C’s sisters choice (she doesn’t know anything about this yet) but that’s a pie-in-the-sky goal at the moment. Just getting into tourneys and representing for him is what I want to do right now.
I’ve been playing through SFIII and SFIV lately and getting better and better. Currently winning 40-50% of my online player match-ups (my W/L is still at around 25%, due to the mountain of defeats I had to climb to learn the game haha). I plan on entering a local Third Strike tournament this summer, plus whatever casual SF tournaments are at Eurogamer this year and any other tourneys I can get to. Time and money aren’t an issue; I’m currently banging in 3-4 hours a day across the 2 games and willing to travel and join clubs to improve.
I’m hoping to use this thread to track my progress, open myself up to advice, criticism, improvement, and if successful, provide a diary for others on the road to tournament gaming.
I don’t know the community at all, so I don’t know what to expect; I don’t know if this is over-ambitious, I don’t know how hard it is to get into the scene, I don’t know if I’m wasting my time, but I’m going to put in as much time and effort as possible to see how far I can take it.
Where I am now: I’m doing ok at the game, winning nearly half of my player matchups and starting to explore ranked matches. My inputting isn’t consistent, but I’m slowly ticking through the trials to get used to combos etc. Most of my wins come from exploiting opponents bad habits, which is keeping me from winning against the GOOD fighters out there, since I have no set tactics against solid fighters.
HELP:
Firstly what game should I be playing to get most of the benefit out of tournament gaming? Is SFIII too old? Is SFIV too saturated? Do I need to get something more recent/popular like SFxT?
Should I main a single character? Or is it important to get the feel of all the characters to compete against them?
The big change to SFIV is the focus mechanic replacing the parry. Should I be using it as a parry? Or just get over it and forget parrys altogether in SFIV?
Is there anything I need to know about getting started in tourneys? Or do I just rock up with my controller and start playing?
I have a tonne more questions, after 10 years out, I basically feel new haha
Feel free to add me on Xboxlive, tag: TooFarSouth
Would really appreciate the help