I just spent an hour yesterday trying to beat akuma (default difficulty US version) with ken and sim. He just counter all my pokes on reaction and combo me to death whenever he got a clean jump in…
Maybe capcom intentionally program akuma’s AI with one flaw with each character, otherwise everyone would have spent $$$ at arcade and ended up going home pissed.
So yeah, please share your character specific tricks with akuma
Hahaha! No longer ending for you! And definitely no all-rounds-won ending! 
That’s the retarded US (Western actually, its the same thing in Europe and SA) developer and arcade operator thing. Similar retarded difficulty differences happened to Ghosts and Goblins and Battletoads (NES). One of the reasons arcades have mostly died in Europe and the whole American continents is the idea that the players on the machine are evil profiteers who need to me fought. And US/World and Asia difficulty settings is just a result. In my town, I have a hard time waiting for challengers because I don’t like exploiting the AI and it kills me if I screw up or try something that his if-then-else statements punish hard. And there’s this stupid damage penalty for the player and boost for the CPU. Sometimes one kicks its ass and still loses!
Akuma is a bit jump-happy, so if you are on your toes and don’t mess up the anti-air, this should give some free damage. The shotos can dodge a bunch of full screen air hadous with tatsus, and use hadouken in the hope Akuma messes up and lands on one of them. Also, against most the CPU enemies, fierce hadoukens are more vulnerable to the first-frame-jump-in punishments.
Edit: there was some thread about it, or maybe a page from this one. I gotta go right now, if I have the time I will find it when I get back!
I have just checked [media=youtube]wHzsPoE7qSs"[/media]. I actually agree, but with alpha counters. But I could tolerate them if they did less damage, even though I find them to be a get-out-of-jail-free-card that would better not exist. He seems to agree with me that ST would be better if supers did less damage.
Edit: I would add one thing: no easy reversals. And just to make it clear: no (or very few, just for a few characters) links from weak attacks to others. If a character has them, they pay with something else, for balance and to add variety: characters with lots of links, characters with big hits and good damage so they can (and try to) trade, etc. Just don’t make the big damage guy also a RTSD machine coff boxer coff FFS.
this game any good?
Better than 95% of the games out there
One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the tendency to blame claw’s wall dive for his top tier status. However, I’ve mentioned many times in the past that I don’t feel that way. Others say that claw’s fast and long pokes place him amongst the top 4 but I’ve also come to feel that they’re only part of the reason and not the main cause for him being top tier.
If you look at the Ko-hatsu ST ratio tourney (courtesy of nh2: super nohoho fighter ii x: Ko-hatsu Ratio Tourney Halloween), you can see that everything is split into 4 tiers (unordered within the tiers). o.claw is considered part of the 3rd tier level. Now, you might consider this odd but when you think about the positioning, it makes sense.
First, let’s consider what’s the same and different about o.claw compared to ST claw (easy to do with papasi’s tool: Super Street Fighter II Turbo - character Hitbox Diagrams : Compare side by side). For similarities, o.claw has the exact same normals and specials with identical hitboxes, damage, and frames. And as an advantage, he even has slightly better crouching normals since all 6 of them have -1 on recovery. But that by itself wouldn’t change any matchup.
Now, for minor differences, the wall dive motion is faulty but that’s easily learned with time. Non-crossup wall dives pull in, which normally isn’t ideal but can actually be beneficial if you want to get the opponent out of the corner for wall dive mixups.
You have the normal old-to-new differences with no throw softening and no super. Claw’s super is good but not practical to pull off much against top players. Throw softening is great to have but I’m not sure it’s matchup changing by itself either since the most dangerous throws are specials or holds.
So down to the character-specific changes, there are only 2: no flipkick and no way to retrieve the claw. Since nothing else would move a character from tier 1 to tier 3, these 2 changes would seem to significantly affect claw’s game. And it makes sense if you think about it. Without flipkicks, claw doesn’t have reliable anti-airs (he has c.HP, j.HP, and s.HK but none of them are very fast). But even worse, claw doesn’t have an offensive reversal.
If the opponent is on claw, claw is in a bad situation. Dhalsim and dictator don’t have useful/any reversals but their throw ranges are towards the top. Claw has average throw range so anyone with better throws (everyone except shotos, Guile, 3 NCs) can repeatedly tick and throw him to death. And since it’s not as easy to defend against aerials, the opponent has a better chance of getting in. That changes a lot of matches against claw’s favor since it’s even easier to tick than to score a wall dive knockdown.
And since the opponent can get more hits in with less counters (no need to be afraid of a random flipkick to beat anything out), o.claw’s claw will get knocked off slightly faster. And since it can’t be picked up, claw is at a huge disadvantage. At this point, a lot of claw’s pokes, while still long-reaching, lose to other pokes. It’s even harder to get the opponent off with weaker hitboxes.
When ST claw gained his much-needed flipkick, he was able to effectively do huge damage for AA, stop block strings, discourage meaties, and have a way out of traps. That defensive enhancement, in addition to his already capable offensive capabilities, is currently my theory on what primarily brought n.claw into contention and elevated him into the top tier.
HDR removing wall dive knockdowns on the ground isn’t a bad way to neutralize claw’s offense (perhaps enough to lower him a tier) but removing ST’s straight-back flipkick motion only reignites the issue of claw having a difficult time with ticks on knockdown. The issue is that this defensive weakness only becomes evident when playing against good players who can consistently perform safe jumps. Claw gets up fast but flipkick is only above average in startup time. In ST, it’s a 50/50 guessing game but in HDR, it’s a guaranteed loss against the same characters o.claw had trouble with. Now, flipkick is still useful for AAs and to beat out pokes but it’s no longer an effective wakeup reversal and now loses to more traps.
Basically, it’s not clear what the verdict is for claw in HDR (since he’s now halfway back on his defensive capabilities, which is what made him move up from 3rd tier to 1st from o.claw to n.claw in ST, in addition to the wall dive). But in ST, it’s pretty clear why claw became better and why the common misconception that he’s good solely from offense is inaccurate. If anybody wants to see what I mean, I don’t mind giving a demonstration sometime on GGPO to show how silly it is to win against o.claw using some characters.
The only games that i really like more than ST is Metal Gear Solid saga, yeah i know MGS games are not fighting games, but MGS is my priority when i talk about games in general.
Anyway, ST has to be my favorite fighting game of all times!
Newb thoughts on Claw
An anti-air was not much of a big deal for Claw in S2 because he could just hit cr.fr for front jumps and st.rh/j.fr for closer ones. St.rh would either beat everything, trade, or get stuffed before becoming active, which was a very bad idea for the enemy as it was certain sac-throw as they landed. As in that game he could eat 4 aerial attacks, land 4 throws and win, it was a good trade-of. In ST, the enemies can soften the throws, which effectively forces Claw to sacrifice more damage or probably lose. Also, ST is much faster, and while this enhances his rush-down, it does hurt his Dhalsim-like normal defensive options and punish-on-reaction game. Say, Ryu trying to feint then throw sparse projectiles was absolutely useless: every single hadouken from close range was a free 3-hit combo. So I would not say he needed the anti-air in S2.
Not to whine,* but sort of, but I still do not like the idea of Claw’s and Boxer’s anti-airs beating SRKs, TUs and flash kicks.
PS: ARG’s performance in Thunder Beast Cup 2 reinforced my belief that he is the best Claw player and Claw’s footsie game is very strong. MAO and others may sometimes end matches very fast, like that MAO vs D match, but they also get beat in ways ARG does not. I would say ARG is the primary example of why Claw is top tier.
*OK, I’m blatantly whining, lol!
Yeah, the speed difference may be part of the issue. s.HK’s hatbox makes for a great AA but the main problem is that it comes out in 9 frames. It’s easy to react to jump-ins in NC speed with s.HK but ST tourney speed is fast enough that it’s pretty difficult (hence ARG fishing s.HK to stuff jumps), which is why that AA isn’t as universal as it could be. ju.HP is a fantastic anti-air for closer jump-ins but the fact that its takes about the same time to come out as s.HK at the very minimum puts it in the same category.
c.HP is also 9 frames (but starts with a shorter hitbox) and trades with many moves but that’s fair. claw never needed more long-range AAs (most of his punches can trade with them) and they don’t really threaten him either (although blocking too many aerials will lead to the claw falling off). It’s close moves period that he tends to struggle against and both NC claw and ST o.claw are critically weak to that against half the cast. If you miss a clean AA, chances are you could be looped to death. And on NC’s slower speed, there’s likely no chance of escaping with a surprise backflip once you get caught.
Anyway, I suppose it’s fair to say flipkick is necessary more for its reversal properties than as anti-air. Flipkick having longer invincibility than some of the other specials makes sense because it’s not possible for claw to charge up for a flipkick while jumping whereas the other characters can immediately go into their specials from a jump. So if n.Ken safe jumps on wakeup and mixes between throw/dp/nothing, LP dp would always result in a completely safe option that does either chip damage or creates another knockdown situation. But against n.claw, he has to be wary of flipkick so the odds on the guessing game situation are more reasonable
Speed also helps the wall dive.
Yeah, as well as sky high claw and his own jump. I don’t think anybody doubts that claw has good offense, which is even more advantageous when speed increases. It’s just that o.claw’s lackluster defense is reduced further when speed increases as well. If you combine them, what happens? Probably 2 extremes: o.claw wins fine against the characters who can’t stop his offense and can’t outrange his throw and gets decimated by the majority of characters who can win off a single tick. And hence o.claw’s 3rd quarter placement at any speed.
I think Claw is an extremely complete character. I feel like my one issue with the reversal is the properties of its invincibility. But Biran is right. Nerfing Claws ability to use it meant that I could basically safe jump at him all day and it was extremely retarded, I won like 10-20 matches in a row because he was free on wake up (doesn’t work online). I think my number one scrub request is that I’d have liked it to be more punishable on block or whiff, but w/e. I’ve really been thinking about why I like ST vs HDR for instance and it really is this: I think if you want a fundamentally rewarding game you’d play Hyper Fighting. Super Turbo is not a perfect game, it has plenty of shit I think is scrubby or fundamentally absent. Low Rushes xx Headbutt/Throw OS, Stored Command Throw/Super bullshit, I guess you could say O Sagat.
If you were to ask me which one of those things I thought would take a more complete type of player to utilize, which one I thought was the lesser of those evils, I’d have actually said O Sagat. And look at what stayed in the game and what left? It’s a wasted effort, even trying to make piddling concessions like “Well, it’s more balanced so it’s better.” I’m sorry, but you’re like on a razor’s edge of a competitive and enjoyable masterpiece and a watered down fighting game and you basically decide to stomp on the “scrub” side of those scales when you make concessions like HDR does. HDR is everything ST is, except for the technical flavor. Which I think is its biggest weakness. Instead of being a celebration of the game, it’s a self-loathing/backhanded statement about how people feel about the game and how they feel fighting games should be. A scrub’s validation pipe dream. And if you really wanted to make a statement, just look at who’s playing ST vs who’s playing HDR. I’m not trying to play ******* in an online discussion, their game sucks. Oh, and by the way, shit’s too hard so let’s just take out what wasn’t scrubby and leave in stupid gimmicks.
I really love ST, I think it’s great. There’s plenty of shit to overcome and whatever is fucked up is there and nothing is going to change it. Having the opportunity to create change and then just half-assing it and then removing things that were interesting like Chicken Wing links with backhanded compromises like “Well, execution r bad and not about mind game but durr if this move were easy then it’d be too good so I guess execution is important but it isn’t” makes me realize how pointless the argument of ST vs HDR is. If you really wanted to be real about things, ST isn’t that great in the scheme of “winning like Jeff Shaeffer says guys” but HD Remix is somehow even worse lol.
I tried searching for the awesome hitbox images site (it even let you compare several attacks) that was posted a while back, but no luck so far. Can someone link me to it? It was made shortly after that one guy made hitboxes viewable on arcade emulators.
Thanks in advance!
Thanks Cauldrath. They really should have this for like every fighting game ever. Now I know why i kept getting owned by psycho crushers as DJ. Cr. MP whiffs :sad:.
Big O,
Yeah this forum is misconfigured. (hopefully a new mod next year can fix this)
You have to manually change the dropdown box at the button left
“Show threads from the…” -> “beginning” then click on the “Show threads” at the right to see everything.
Or you can bookmark this
http://shoryuken.com/f223/?daysprune=-1
I put the hitbox URL in my signature now. I’m glad you find it useful.
BTW, I added a color guide too, since I’ll use those images in the danisen battle website anyway…
Looking at these sprites again make me hate those HD graphics even more… UDON really have no clues / experience making animation sprites
Thanks for the tip papasi. The only thing keeping the hitbox graphics site from being perfect is that not all of the pictures are level with each other (indicated by the relative heights of the super meters). That made me think DJ’s Cr. LP was high enough to beat/trade with psycho crusher for example.
guys i love O. Gief as a character, moreso then regular gief…
but what supposedly makes gief better then O gief??
just wanna add that o gief has a godly counter poke with fierce and cr fierce 
it’s slow, but it does the job.
O.Gief has shit for priority in his aerial attacks, no super, no green hand, no hop and cannot soften throws.
n.Zangief also has better hitboxes in all of the few instances the 2 versions differ (I just checked and the HPs are identical).
The only reason to choose o.Zangief is if you find ground hop or banishing fist adversely impacting your ground game (in which case it’s better for you as a player to adjust since the green hand is useful against Sagat) or you’re playing the world version where 360-HK is a free reversal teleport grab on a grounded opponent in a non-invincible state. On the world version (default MAME version, used on GGPO, not used in US or JP tourneys), o.Zangief can certainly wreck house trying to punish any heavy poke with reversal 360 attempts and is probably the superior Zangief overall solely because of that.