Was damdai’s account hacked?
that’s funny… zangief broken.
Zangief is fucking beatable. Snake Eyez is fucking beatable. I have beat him online and I’m sure that I can beat him in person. I’m not trying to brag or boast, he is a tough and skilled player, I’m just saying it can be done, and I have done it with Ken, a so-called disadvantageous matchup for me (I think it’s even). Zangief is not overpowered or broken IMO.
I’d much, much rather play R.Zangief than O.Sagat or ST Vega. So what if Zangief has a faster Running Grab or better Lariats or better BFs? He needed those improvements cuz he was low tier. And he’s still low tier IMO. So what if SPDs have easier motions? When that change was first announced, pro-ST players were claiming that Zangief doesn’t need that, as ST Zangief players could already do walk up 360s. So…what’s the problem? The 270 SPD motion is not that difficult to execute in ST. Even I could do walk up 360s in ST on pad. Granted, I would miss it 4 out of 5 times, but that’s cuz I’m not a Zangief main. If I really focused on maining ST Zangief, I’m sure I could do walk up 360s all day. The new motion doesn’t change anything.
If it had been Kuni who won EVO instead of Snake Eyez, nobody would say a peep. And that’s the fucking truth.
Just because an “unknown player” won EVO, some people are taking that as an excuse to blast HDR. Even some who previously preferred HDR to ST are hating just cuz they’re losing to “online pad warriors”. So when you start losing, you start hating on HDR? 
That’s just pathetic. Some so-called “top players” have been getting by on luck in previous tournies IMO.
yep, guess who i found online practicing everyday even up to the day before evo began. guess who was practicing every night during evo. go figure someone that dedicated won.
It’s too fast and convenient, it doesn’t require a single up motion so you can easily buffer the whole thing anytime since you won’t jump.
I would be interested in seeing an updated matchup chart of yours; a lot seems to have changed since last year, when you claimed HDR Zangief lost most matches 3-7.
og sagat doesnt win for free on one knockdown or if he just gets close to you for that matter
Gief is too good in HDR? This is a discussion I never thought would take place in a million years. What’s next, Honda owns shotos?
I’m looking forward to Gief winning most tournaments from now on and 6 out of the final 8 with Gief at EVO next year…
We’ll see I guess.
I don’t think it’ll happen but it would be good for Cammy and DeeJay players to have that huge a metagame shake-up though!
I’m not sure why folks would discount damdai’s opinion on Zangief so quickly. If you recall, he was one of the first to call for Gouki being overpowered in HDR (back when some folks here actually thought he was only mid tier). Also, he initially announced this belief on the podcast interview ahead of Evo so it isn’t simply a reactionary response to Evo results. I respect that he’s made accurate, prophetic results about HDR.
The biggest part I don’t like about HDR Zangief is that his changes to startup and recovery really segregate those who have fast reaction times and those who don’t. For example, the few who can still respond to the new running bear grab on reaction are rewarded whereas others who find it very difficult are now forced to stay back (until they reach the corner) or guess pokes. There are basically a lot more “have not” players that are adversely affected because of the limits of their reaction times and I don’t agree with that sort of character buffing mentality.
Anyway, I’m not sure what to say about Snake Eyez other than I didn’t see anyone win a majority of matches over him in competition or casuals. His Zangief is certainly the player/character to beat right now in HDR. I applaud his efforts and hope that his mentality has been calmed by success. Maybe if he plays classic mode ST sometime (although I’m not sure if he cares about that version or not), we can see whether those skills are transferable to ST and, consequently, whether damdai’s assessment is accurate. I personally doubt that the results would be very similar between HDR and ST but would like nothing more than to be proven otherwise (since opinions mean nothing when it comes to game performance); it would be pretty cool to have an ST Zangief dominant in the US.
I think Zangief is low tier because he technically loses many matches if you play theory fighter. Let’s say a Honda player is able to react perfectly to a 'Gief - he will then win. Street Fighter is a game of dexterity and one mistake is all it takes for Zangief to win. You can spend 90% of the match zoning 'Gief, but then you make one mistake or one bad trade and suddenly you’re eating SPD’s. I still think he’s low tier but has the most potential to win just because of his raw power and SPD range. I also think he’s a rare case where a low-tier character can actually succeed, I doubt you’ll see any other bad low character do that. He also has some favorable matchups against higher characters like Ryu, and once he gets in on his bad matchups he can win. For example:
vs. Vega - one good knockdown leads to a cross-up, Vega gets raped by those.
vs. Dhalsim - has no true reversal to counter ticks and cross-ups.
when hdr came out people made assumptions about the tiers and have lazily based them off st. Hdr is more different than originally realized, you did not see this in tournament results for the most part because people haven’t put the work into finding the full potential of this game like snake did with gief.
I respect snakeeyez for winning but its not the same as winning in st with gief, anyone that says otherwise is punching st gief players in the dick. I also agree with damdai and would rather play against og sagat anyday than gief in remix
I don’t recall seeing 6 of the top 8 using old gat. I guess he didn’t qualify as top tier to you either
ITT: ST players derail a congratulatory thread to the EVO HDR champion
You have excellent skill and dedication, SnakeEyez. Your ability to adapt to your environment is amazing, especially considering some of the legendary names you had to go through. Looking forward to running into you online man, and again…congrats.
meh…
You guys are funny. When K and Toutanki did so well in ST a few years ago with Hawk, he shot up the tier lists for awhile, but everybody gave them mad props. Snake Eyez wins with Gief and we get people calling Gief overpowered and saying “bet he couldn’t do that in ST” and such. I’ve got three things to say about this:
A) That’s kinda the point of HDR. It’s a different game and the idea was to make characters that sucked in ST able to compete. If someone won a tourney with Sagat or Claw in ST would you guys go “Well sure, but I bet you couldn’t win in HDR. That’d test your true skill.” GTFO with that crap.
B) It’s funny how only Snake Eyez and Jodim(Haru Tejyo) can rape like that with him. If Gief is so good, maybe you guys should pick him up and start beasting with him.
C) If this forum had the numbers that SF4 does, I’d see 126 people viewing the Zangief forum right now and that’d make me ROFL.
i just don’t see it. there are plenty of people who use zangief as their main since ST days and none of them “dominate” like snake eyez.
if i play for more than an hour online against decent to good competition, the guy shows up. it’s rare that i go a few hours of any part of the day where the guy doesn’t show up to play. most of everyone else, even those that finished top eight played other games for most of last year up to evo. dgv is probably the exception, and guess what, he was the other finalist. i could be wrong about the others.
look at dgv’s and damdai’s match vids. both of them threw out high risk, low reward srks against snake. i’m still scratching my head on it. i understand that mp and hp srks have better arcs (and ken’s mp srk has the invincible frames) and that you can buy a little bit of time if you knock gief down, but if you miss he has way too many options to punish.
and if you do get the knockdown, then what? you’re not that much better off to begin with other than you got him off. you did little damage because they weren’t deep srks and knocking down zangief with ken and ryu isn’t that advantageous anyway. the only reasoning i can see behind using the stronger srks is that snake eyez will punish any whiffed srk anyway so you may as well at least have a larger arc on it. just seeing the higher risk srks looked like uncertainty in the matchup.
i also believe that ken’s standing hk reaches further than his low hk but i never saw damdai use it, not once. i’m probably missing something here, but mixing it up with both would help in the match. again, i could be missing something, but this seems like someone was caught off guard because they didn’t put in the time moreso than zangief being overpowered.
now i’m not knocking damdai’s skills in any way. he was definitely right about akuma, but he was not the only person who was dominating with akuma at the time he made his argument. many people were abusing all sorts of garbage that akuma was capable of then. as for zangief, there is only one player who is playing at that level with him on hdr. no scrub can just pick zangief and then start giving elite players fits like they did with akuma.
now about snake eyez being on the level of like pony or gunze, it’s hard to say because you’re talking about two different games. this will only bring in which is a better game argument which isn’t what we’re talking about. what we’re talking about is how much credit should be given to what snake eyez accomplished.
nobody else currently playing hdr could have pulled off what snake eyez did. why? because nobody else put in the time. if zangief is overpowered, then there would have been more zangief players in top eight. if damdai truly believed zangief was that good, he would have used him to prove his point like he did with akuma. if damdai can beat dgv with zangief, then maybe i’ll give more to his argument.
lastly, dgv versus snake eyez ended up 7-5 in snake eyez’s favor. dgv 2-1 to send snake to loser’s. snake 3-1 to send dgv to loser’s. snake 3-2 ftw. 7-5 overall, that is hardly overpowered.
Lets put an * on Snake Eyes win HDR…Somebody get the Morton Umbrella bitch over here cuz there is salt all over the place…Its not like DGV vs Snake was a dominate win.
man, some of the people posting on this thread sound mad bitter. old school st players, you gotta stop looking thru that ST lense, like it’s still the standard. this is hdr. you guys still think you run things, or should be running things then get mad when someone pops outta the blue. give credit where credit is due
i’m assuming this is the sirlin article ya? well he’s comparing snake eyez’ hdr performance vs legendary st players while they were playing hdr, repeat HDR.
it ain’t just about being good, i’m sure there are alot of good gief players out there i’m sure, but what’s amazing is WINNING evo with gief. can we agree that kuni was good in st? what did he place at this year’s evo? not top 8, while this dude snake eyez place top 8 AND WON. and it isn’t like, all of a sudden there’s gonna be gief all over the place in top 8 for the coming evos. nobody prior to evo, and i mean NOBODY thought a zangief player would win hdr at evo.
what’s your point? sirlin and company made things easier to get casual players interested. that was no secret. and you know what, this comment almost sounds so similar to watson and tomo’s friend (i forgot his name but youtube it, he talks about it somewhere). i can’t think of it at the moment but in a nutshell it was talking about champion edition and hyper fighting players. about how when ssf2 and st came out, with all the half damage supers etc, they were like “WTF”. characters able to come back with half life etc. they thought hyper was the peak/perfect, and the additions and whatnot in st ruined the game. whatever, i guess st wasn’t their game, so they stuck with hyper. you guys keep hoping, thinking, wanting things to be as they were in st. wake up - cuzz it ain’t. i’m sure hyper players were thinking, hoping, praying just as hard when st came out. but we didn’t go back did we? keep it moving. this is how it is:
people who were good at WW, think they were better and more skilled than CE players, and those players think they were better and more skilled than HYPER players, and those players thought they were better and more skilled than ssf2/st players, and those players think they are better than HDR peeps. let’s not even throw in what old skoolers think of 3S and sf4.
snake eyez was dope in this tourney. seriously, he went thru alot of top players that i personally thought he was gonna lose to (let’s count them off, tokido-former evo st champion, john choi-former evo st champion, afrolegends-last year’s evo hdr champion, dgv-possibly best usa ryu player/hdr/ggpo online rapist)… seriously, this guy won legit imo. and what… is gief all of a sudden on everyone’s top tier list? no. is gief gonna flood top 8 in every evo now? no. is this st? NO. but is this win impressive regardless? hell YES
My boy snake eyez is not to be taken lightly he could have won with another character if he wanted, also just because its his second tournament and we (myself, snake eyez and my other friends) don’t play tournies for the most part doesn’t mean we can win em’. BTW he can play ST on the same level as HDR new motions or not.Btw he can play ST on the same level.
^ perfect post.