OMG that blanka vs ryu match was a nailbiter
I guess Chamu stopped by to say hello. Random.
Oh btw Foosuke is the man. Funny, knowledgeable, gracious. No shit that guy rules.
Shit, i thought it was 11 pm today and not yesterday…
Nooooo!
4:30am on a sunday here on UK time. had to miss it in the end >_<;
any particular reason why so many players were missing…?
edit: thanks for the posts brian =)
Well, what to write…
I think its not a bad approximation to say that every non-foreigner in that room was better at ST than everyone in the entire United States, except for maybe 4 or 5 players on the west coast who would have been, I think, about average. (sure maybe there were some relatively so-so players here and there, but they were extremely rare, and anyways they were almost never the ones still sitting down when your turn came up at the machine)
I guess no one would be surprised if I said this sort of thing about the big name players… what makes the situation so crazy is the sheer number of non-famous guys who are also just way ahead of anything we have in the US. I mean, if Jodim, for example, had never started playing on ggpo, I guess basically no one in the U.S. would have heard of him. So now imagine a room of full 50-100 Jodim’s who never got on ggpo (on top of the Otochun’s and Kurahashi’s), and you’ll have a general feeling for what X-Mania was like.
Anyway I’ll write more later… gotta go to bed now.
PS today they had 18 ST cabinets.
I had to get some sleep and couldn’t catch the last part of the stream. Has it been recorded somewhere?
So I guess I can comment a bit about what made the competition at X-Mania so fierce. Essentially I didnt see any new tricks that made me go “wow, Ive never seen that before”. It was more an issue of people not making mistakes that Americans make all the time, thereby cutting out many of my sources of dealing damage.
For example, I think the entire day, no one ever jumped at me from a range where I could anti air for free with low forward. People would “bulldog” perfectly, walking into fireball after fireball and blocking at just the last moment. Rarely would someone try to jump straight up over a fireball and land on it. Shoto players and Chun Li players would almost never throw fireballs in situations where they could get their projectile cancelled by a sonic boom --> backfist. If I got swept , they would follow up with ambiguous safejump into mixup, and they would basically never fuck up their safe jump. I dont think Ive ever played an American player who, after beating my low fierce with some jump in, would block fearing a subsequent flashkick. Here everyone knew to take that possibility into account. Remember how in the SBO Umehara vs Muteki footage, in the third round Umehara opened with a walk forward --> hurricane kick? Well, pretty much every shoto here had that in their bag of tricks… its not just Umehara doing clever stuff like that. Oh, and no one ever missed a dragon punch, like ever.
Anyway, some other random comments:
-I personally didnt play great but it was to be expected as I really havent been playing much Street Fighter these days… my crossup timing was off, my anti air timing was off… Not that it would have made much difference, as again the competition was through the roof. I managed to put together some small streaks of like 3 or 4 games here and there in casuals but mostly I was getting stomped. Probably I had a win record for the day of something like 20% or less.
-I was disapointed that Muteki Guile didnt join the tournament. He did show up towards the end for casuals though. Someone said that he had been out of the scene somewhat lately (“gone home to become a family man”… lol), and he did seem kind of rusty, often missing the crazy combos he was going for and such. He did land an interesting crossup, low jab x3, stand jab flash kick combo on Fei. He was probably losing more than half his games though… that should give you an idea of what the comp was like.
-The character selections were much more varied than in the US. In fact, it was very very rare to see people picking Claw Boxer or O. Sagat in casuals. There were a ton of shoto players, a lot of Guile, Chun and DJ, and also alot of Honda, Geif, Cammy and Fei.
-The Japanese Old Sagats (there werent many) were clearly not on the level of say John Choi’s Old Sagat. I guess you could see that in the stream.
-I wanted to ask Kurahashi why he dropped Guile, and I wanted to ask Muteki if he’s Mute Chimu Kuri on xbox live, but I chickened out :(. I didnt want to look like some loser Gaijin fanboy…
Thanks for the write-up, Brian! 
Also wondering this. Does their streaming service archive their stuff the same way that Ustream does?
I caught the stream a few sets from the end. Otochun is too clutch and Inomata is too damn scary. I would second brian’s assessment that these guys just don’t make the same mistakes I see elsewhere. Everything I saw that led to significant openings required one guy simply outplaying the other in some fashion and maxing damage at every opportunity. What Inomata did with walk-up 360s in footsie games was too sick. He punished so many baited whiffed moves like that at what looked like max range for a 360. That was just one example I remember (was kinda tired while watching it so I don’t remember details), but very impressive stuff all around. Shogatsu’s O. Honda is too dumb lol. Every time I see him play, it’s like he mindfucked the other guy on some ridiculous way. I hope there is a DVD this year. :tup:
Awesome write-up Brian! The comment about “50-100 Jodims in a room” basically sums up how strong the Japan ST scene is as well. There are a lot of relatively unknown players who are really, really strong – it’s just that they probably aren’t in vids that much so we foreigners don’t get a chance to see them play.
Shiro retiring? Muteki semi-retired? Say it ain’t so …
Anyone ever seen one of these in action?
http://www.arcade-game-sales.com/screenshots2/street-fighter-anniversary/29771-9994-1.html
I think John Choi, playing O. Sagat, would probably do very well in Japan. I would certainly agree this would be the biggest exception to what I was saying… The situation with O. Sagat in Japan is weird though, so I’m not sure how much to make of this…
The problem is, there just isn’t enough data to use an empirical approach to this question…
The results we have are simply not statistically significant… aka, they don’t mean anything. So while I absolutely agree that real numbers would be the best way to settle this issue, at the moment, I think overall impressions are about all we’ve got.
One thing to keep in mind is that when making the strong claims that I made, I was trying to consider things on a character by character basis. Presumably no one would object to me saying that Japanese Fei Longs, Cammys, Zangiefs, T. Hawks, Kens, Hondas, Dictators, Chun Lis, Blankas (though nohoho is great I dont think he’d disagree with this…), were clearly on a higher level than the best in the U.S. Though the best Guile’s in Japan seem to have gotten kind of rusty or changed characters, I’m sure the same is true for Guile.
So, what characters are left to think about?
Claw: I think the only claw players at X-Mania were ARG and Noguchi. Is Graham better than them? I doubt it. If he is around their level, then Graham would have been an average claw player at X-Mania. (remember I said maybe 5 players in the U.S. would have been about average).
(O.) Sagat: As above, I think this is the exception.
Boxer: Not many people were playing boxer. I think it was just Tamashima, and… I forget… maybe one other person or something? So if afro legends is worse than Tamashima, but better than the other boxer or two I can’t remember, then he would have been about an average Boxer player at X-Mania.
DJ: I have a hard time judging this one, so I’m not sure I can say much. Afro is great, and I played some DJ’s at X-Mania that felt like playing Afro. So… shrug.
Dhalsim: Again, the typical Dhalsims at X-Mania felt like playing Alex Wolfe. Say Gian is better than Alex, and just suppose KKY and another guy here or there are at the same level as him. Well, Alex Wolfe is now an average Dhalsim player at X-Mania.
Ryu: There were a ton of fantastic Ryu’s at X-Mania. I think the only Ryu in the U.S. who might have been at their level would be John Choi. Personally, I felt like many of the shotos there were on a similar level to Choi, but its hard to make a precise argument about this… anyway that was my impression. Presumably the best Ryu’s are a bit better than Choi’s, but its hard to judge.
Moved from VF topic (replied to Brian’s X-Mania observations and the subject of his above response):
I’m just saying that regardless of how much weaker US ST players are perceived to be, tourney results don’t show any difference. We’ve seen Daigo, Gian, Kusumondo, and KKY at Evo recently and while they’ve showed their skills, it’s not like they seemed unstoppable.
Brian is a great Guile player and has had some great results at AE in the past (although he hasn’t played in any recent tourneys). He makes a convincing argument when he says the typical “good” JP ST player is way better than the “good” US player (since the US player doesn’t practice as much and against as good competition) but if you look back at his post about X-Mania 10, there are a couple of nagging points (which I originally didn’t want to point out but…):
(the original posts are http://forums.shoryuken.com/showpost.php?p=7350286&postcount=3602 and http://forums.shoryuken.com/showpost.php?p=7354075&postcount=3604)
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While I’m certain there are plenty of real good JP players that we don’t know, Jodim has beaten some of the top JP ST players before (check out Nogyo’s vids). He doesn’t really play in tourneys (“for fun” is what he’s always claiming to play for) yet he already beats most JP GGPO players as well. We do know how some JP tourney players (not the best for any character but rather known good JP players under pseudonyms) fare when they show up on GGPO (names omitted out of respect, and because it’s just online play) and, surprisingly, top US players seem to have far more trouble with Jodim. He may not be quite Pony or Gunze but he’s definitely up there.
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If Muteki is rusty, attempting crazy combos, and missing, does that sound like he’s really playing to win? That’s less a sign of great comp than it is of a great player that’s become rusty with too much offtime and is just trying to snazz things up with some flashy play during casuals.
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If JP o.Sagat players aren’t on the level of John Choi and one of them still led their team to their block finals 1 win away from reaching the finals, losing to Otochun’s team (who eventually won) yet still giving them more trouble than any other team (including both of the other teams in the finals), what does that say about John Choi’s o.Sagat?
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He credits the JP players not making any mistakes as the primary reason for their better play. Well, if you watch Graham Wolfe’s match against Otochun at SBO07, you notice he makes 2-3 combo mistakes whereas Otochun makes none. So what? Despite making mistakes, Graham still outplayed his opponent and took the match. And this was just 2 years ago, where Otochun made it towards the end of pretty much every major tournament.
Anyway, I just like to base my opinions on empirical results. I think it proves way more than any impression or words can. And in this situation, the results so far show no significant difference between the cream of the crop in the US and in Japan.
I agree with everything Brian said. US top players are good, and even on the same level as some JP tops, but the JP scene is so much bigger that a much larger field leads to better comp and more well-rounded players.
Over the years I’ve seen countless posts on SRK about USA vs Japan – this whole debate about relative strength has been done to death. Pride is a powerful emotion, and an “us vs them” mentality can be harmful at times. Just appreciate high level play no matter where it originates.
Is this game officially dead now?
Not the game, just the forums.
The game will never die. The way I see it, the less people talk about it, the better.
Less talk more action. :tup:
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