Some 3s noob questions

Classic Fighting Games Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike
1

So yea, I’ve been playing 3s for a little while now (GGPO is the only platform I play it on =/). Used to play only against a couple of friends at first, but a couple of months ago I suddenly realized how much I enjoy learning and improving at the game, as well as playing against better players since I learn something new every time, despite getting massacred.

I’m a pretty average player now, but I have a few noob questions. I’ve searched around the forums but can’t find much and since I’m a latecomer to 3s, every forum is pretty much dead, except for General Strategy.

Here they are:

  1. This may be a pretty dumb question, but what is the best option after getting hit by a UOH? Immediately throw? Continue blocking? I’ve been under several situations where I get hit by several UOHs in a row because I’m not sure how to react to them. At first immediately grabbing worked with some characters, but other times the grab would whiff and I’d get UOH’d again… lol

  2. I’ve played against quite a number of good players who like to tick-parry (I’m not sure if this is the right term), but basically they like to down parry a lot, usually after their move is blocked but not punishable, and I immediately attack with a low forward/roundhouse/strong, only to be parried and punished. I know it’s my fault for being predictable, but I feel like there’s more to it. It gets pretty frustrating to the point where I feel like my opponent is always on the offense, and there is no gap for me to attack. The only time it looks like my opponent has stopped going on the offensive, I get parried and am immediately under pressure again. My questions are: How do I counter tick-parrying, and how can I get good at tick-parrying?

  3. This is another pretty dumb question, but when I’m under constant block-string pressure (i.e. Ibuki’s standing jab over and over, which may lead to a throw), what’s the best way for me to get out of it?

  4. I’ve seen Japanese players in videos do a parry the instant they jump (instant air parry?). How is this performed? I’m guessing you move the stick up then almost instantly forward? If this is the way it’s done, it seems pretty unnatural and difficult to do, but I just want to know for confirmation.

Thanks for your time, and I appreciate any kind of advice, even if it’s not directly related to my questions.

2

First off, it warms my heart to see a post from a new 3s player :lovin:

In 3s there isn’t really any all inclusive best option for a particular situation because of parry. Your tendency to throw after a UOH is a typical one. UOH doesn’t give very good frame advantage, so most of the time people mash on grab afterward, both defender and attacker. So one thing you have to watch out for is your opponent doing a spaced out UOH. If he does this, your tech will whiff, and he can punish that. You can turn that around though if he is mashing grab by back dashing and trying to punish, depending on what character you use.

Your best options are either do nothing (safest), attack them high (which is understandably not your gut reaction because for many characters they get more damage off of low normals), or throw them. It’s hard to fight the urge to hit them low in between block strings, but you have to fight it and eventually when they realize the low parries aren’t working, they will stop (unless they are stupid).

Parry her jab. Or if you have a character with an uppercut, uppercut through it. I know it seems scrubby to uppercut through it, but you have to make them respect that option otherwise they’ll continually do that stupid shit over and over.

Yeah thats how you do it. So yeah, its a quick movement that will probably take some practice, but its very useful.

Hope that helps. If you have any other questions feel free to post em up

3

[media=youtube]cGZjK-yGG-o[/media]

welcome to 3s, I will be glad to beat you up on ggpo and help you at the same time

4

First off, i wanted to start with exactly what Pherai said but he beat me to it :tup: lol and yea pretty much everything he said is what you can do, but it’ll help to know what character you use, so we can get into specifics on how to punish and what to do vs certain situations…giving specific examples of a situation like the way you did with the “tick parrying” thing as you said will help, btw its not necessarily “tick parrying” but rather them baiting you into throwing out a low poke

but yea, what character do you use and what are specific situations that you have trouble with?

P.S- with the jump parry, think of the parry as another motion to the jump, so for example when you super jump you press down then immediately to up forward or up back or whatever, but right after that press forward and you should be able to get it consistently, the main time you want to use this is when you’re in a situation where you are “boxed in” so to speak

Example: you’re in the corner and your opponent is ken and does 2 low lk’s then does standing mk to stuff your jump, you block the 2 low lk’s then jump (push forward right after) and you should be able to parry the st mk in the air (you can go to training mode or ask someone online to help you practice this, you’ll know you’re getting it right when you parry right after you jump)

5

Regarding your ‘tick parry’ situation, you can create your own reverse traps with command grabs.

Example: You are Hugo in the corner vs Ken, and he does a cr.mk which you block. You throw out a lk/cr.lp which he catches with a parry, but you instantly cancel your normal to a 360 or 720. The beauty of using a normal which can be parried high or low (like those 2 of Hugo’s pokes I mentioned) is that it increases your chances of getting parried, which creates a far bigger payoff for you if you react faster than your opponent. Your opponent will often still technically be able to Shoryu or super through your grab, but they need to know that you’re capable of doing that to react fast enough to escape.

6

what character are you and what character are they during these scenarios?

7

letting you know since you said you only play on ggpo that ggpo 3rd strike due to lag and what not isnt the best form of 3rd strike.

for example ibukis doing st jab over and over and reacting to the throw or move afterwards is 10folds more difficult on ggpo.

8

Thanks for the replies, guys. I apologize for the delayed reply but assignments were keeping me busy.

First of all, just for clarification, I’m not exactly “new” to 3s. I’ve been a fan of it since 2006 or 2007, which was when I first came across the EVO Moment 37 video (and found out about the game). I know Daigo wasn’t the best 3s player in the world, but what he managed to do definitely got me hype and interested in finding out more about the game. Of course, I don’t have a console that has 3s, and back where I live, there are barely any arcades (and the ones that exist don’t have 3s), nor does it have a 3s community. So, I had no means of playing it until GGPO came out. From then onwards, I played off and on casually with a friend or two, but never against other players. There were some long breaks in between, but even though I wasn’t really playing 3s much at all and didn’t really know much about the game, I still watched a ton of 3s vids regularly… Mainly because they’re so enjoyable. Also, back where I live (in SEA… Yes, I’m not American), almost nobody knows about the game, so even on GGPO there isn’t much of a community to play in. I’ve recently come to Australia for a higher education, and the GGPO 3s community, and 3s community as a whole is definitely bigger here, so it’s a great opportunity for me to get in the game, even though as yuuki said, GGPO 3s isn’t the greatest form of 3s there is.

@pherai:
Thanks for the warm welcome, and thanks for the useful tips; Especially the one about the spaced out UOH.

@bodler:
lol, I’ve actually watched that video before. It’s funny because I thought the guy was just some random drunk who was told to say what he said, but when I was watching the SoCal Regionals stream yesterday, he was actually playing 3s, to my surprise! He had a really good Yang and did some really nice moves against Tokido, who beat him and got first place. But congrats to him for getting 2nd!

@nica ko
I mainly use Alex and Ibuki, but I’m still exploring the other characters so I’ve also been using a lot of Ryu and Akuma lately, especially Ryu. I was using Ryu when I was in the situations I described before, where I do a low attack after blocking a seemingly punishable move, only to get parried and punished. I guess it makes sense I’m getting parried a lot since it’s so tempting to throw a cr. forward or sweep with him, making my moves a lot more predictable. It’s a bad habit I got from my earlier 3s days of playing shotos-only. And thanks for the advice, the jump parry tip will help me a lot.

@circle masher
Ahhh. Yes, that makes sense. I’m probably going to need better execution and reaction to be able to do stuff like that, but I’ll definitely keep in mind that I can use the opponent’s parries to my advantage as well.

@Lostintheflurry
When I posted this, I was using Ryu, and my opponents were using just about any character. It didn’t matter, they just knew how to bait out a low attack for them to parry, regardless of what character they were using.

@yuuki
Yes, this is something I have come to realize, but something that I have to accept as well, since I have no other means of playing it. Heck, I’m lucky that I’m studying in Australia right now to be able to play with other better players on GGPO. Back where I live, I wouldn’t be able to play 3s at all since no one plays it!

While on the topic of 3s noob questions, I have a couple more… Mainly to do with hit-confirming. I’m practicing hit-confirming right now, but I’m not completely sure about the stick motions (I’m not exactly a veteran with using arcade sticks, but I’m getting a lot better). With moves like Akuma’s st MK and Ken’s st MP, I’m able to press the button, then quickly execute a double qcf afterwards and press P/K if it hits… Well, at least 60% of the time… In training mode. Is this how most people do it? I know you can do a qcf together with the attack, then another qcf + P/K if it hits, but that only works with stuff like chun’s cr mk into SA2 afaik. If i do it with Akuma’s MK, since he’s standing, the first qcf will make him stop to crouch for a split second before he actually does the MK, at least for me. So it might not be as instant as I want it to be. And as for stuff like ken’s st MP, it’ll probably make him throw a hadouken.

Lastly, the hit-confirm motion I’m having the most trouble with is cr LK x2 or cr LK, cr MP, cr LK, into super… Mainly with the shotos. It’s hard enough that my reaction time is really bad that I can’t really hit confirm right now… But I’m clueless on how to buffer the qcfs for hit-confirms like cr LK x2 into super… Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks guys!

9

I could try to answer a few of your questions, though they might have been answered all ready in more succinct ways. My story is very similar to yours though, I got into it when CPS 3 was finally emulated and saw the Daigo vid.

It depends on the character and it’s just part of the mind game of 3S. It’s just like ‘okay, I knocked him down, should I do Meatie to interrupt his wakeup attack? Should I grab? Should I parry? Should I jump? Should I just block? Etc.’ Just part of the mind game. For example it’s very easy for Ken to link off of UOH into SRK then super cancel. But other characters like Alex have a really hard time linking into UOH unless your spacing is perfect, so what I tend to do as Alex after doing an UOH is: Powerbomb, a lot of people fall for that. Or do an immediate jump, in that case your grab will whiff giving me time to punish you bad. Or still do SA2 even if it doesn’t link. Because 9 times out of 10 the other player will grab after you do an UOH. I don’t know why. Force of habit maybe? But they do it, and my SA2 should beat their grab.

That Ibuki thing is pretty much a GGPO-exclusive. I’ve watched shit loads of tournaments and I’ve only that seen that done once. The problem is it’s really hard to react to that online. Offline is a different story, you could grab her, parry, like others said do an SRK, etc.

Parrying in the air is relatively easy. Parrying on the ground is much harder. If you see them doing that, it just means they’re awesome at reading the other guy. For example: You jump in and do your block string, then you jump and 9 times out of 10 the Urien player will do either a Shoulder, a Headbutt, or a Projectile.

Just want to say since you mentioned that you use Alex, really explore his normals. For example: Alex’s sMK beats the Shoto’s crMK, it also applies to Chun’s crMK. That’s just one thing that not a lot of people just starting to use him will know. The SRK Wiki article needs a lot more shit. Also, EX Air Knee Smash is pretty good and it beats a lot of things. It even beats the Shoto’s EX Jumping Hurricane Kicks.

10

Sometimes you see people who just parry you a lot because they do option selects.

11

its really hard to hit confirm short short super online.
offline is like 10x easier.

12

I asked a few Japanese players on GGPO how they were able to do short-short-Super, and they said they just guess. shortx3->Super is possible to confirm, but even then it varies.

13

Doing the super motion after the stand mk or stand mp with akuma and ken respectively is how I do it. Since they are links, it should be enough time to do the whole super motion for anyone. It’s how I do it anyway, but then again I do the whole super motion after a short short, and some people will buffer one of the qcf motions during short short, so its probably worth experimenting with different techniques and seeing what works for you. I’m not really sure how people buffer during short short though so I can’t help you there.

14

They guess? Lol, it’s not that hard, come on…
I can’t even imagine how they feel with PS2 version…
On a side note, I always wonder how many frames we got to hit confirm between the first cr.lk and the last cancellable frame of the second one. Seems to me like near 16/18 frames…

To me, it’s emulation (played online or offline) which is faster than regular arcade cab, not ggpo increasing speed (beside fast forward effect).

To answer the initial question, for short short super, i do both qcf after the second cr.lk.
For st mk with Gouki, i do like Pherai said. Anyway, i can’t super at all if i begin motion during st.mk for some odd reason (i mean to still have a link and not a cancel)…

15

Isn’t there a way to make offline emulation be slower (I mean, play the same speed as arcade) with some emulator settings tweaks? that would be fine, waiting for OE (which I fear is going to be faster than the arcade if they emulate it the same way they did with previous ports :shake: )

16

Yeah you can lock it in usually with emulators. So I’m not sure how it’s setup with the ggpo emulator but it is possible.

I just hope they don’t take the xbox version/ps2 version straight up and use that. Hopefully they can do a better job making it work on the current consoles.

17

Mind telling us how (at least with the emus you know?) thanks

18

Well usually you can set the emulation speed. I know in just straight up MAME you can do that. If you’re on osx i believe in sdlmame there’s an option to do the same. I don’t have osx open at the moment so i’m not sure how it’s phrased there.

If it’s running faster regardless and it’s possible to find out by how much you could always tune the emulation speed down accordingly. There are no 3s machines anywhere I’ve been/near me so I don’t know how the game looks that way. I’ve only ever seen it emulated and on xbox/ps2/dreamcast. I can tell the emulation in mame is a bit different from the xbox version and I know the xbox version is slightly faster so I assume the emulation is running correctly. Otherwise well, don’t know what to do really unless someone wants to run some tests figure out the math and report the proper emulation speed.

Specifically you right click the rom -> properties -> advanced tab. Should be under there.

19

There is an option in FBA and/or fbashuffle, emulator speed or something like that, but it never worked for me.
Some emul features seems to be disabled or just out of order for CPS3 games, like the sprites explorer…

20

cps3emulator is I think the best route really if you want it as close as possible. I think with some tweaking it is possible to get it very close in mame but I could be wrong.

For those that have a bunch of arcade experience: have you tried cps3emulator and if so is it very close to the real thing? I’ve heard it has basically no input lag where as depending on the configuration in mame/fba you’ll have some amount of input lag.

I guess this is the wrong thread but whatever.