Actually for the US scene, the regulation ST court was CPS2 board on a US arcade cabinet, US sticks, and US speed settings.
A player can learn CPS2 ST now, win all the US tournaments, go to Japan and even win SBO… and it’ll be great for them, but history will record them as just a good player, never one of the greatest. To be the greatest you have to win when it counts most, when everyone cares the most. If you didn’t box when Ali boxed, if you didn’t ball when Jordan balled, and if you didn’t put your quarters on the cab when the OG US players did… you missed the boat. The ST court is pretty bare today, but it’s a historical landmark. The court will never be demolished, and the kings of that court will never be replaced. Playing another ST today and calling it regulation is just an attempt to imitate greatness, playing on the HDR court in console park is an attempt to create the next generation of greatness.
Most of the efforts to support Console ST are a scam to increase the ST side of the ST/HDR polls. Regardless of the era, arcade players never consider console ST to be good enough. This is echoed over and over again but players still let themselves believe that console ST will be accepted. The instant a scene adopts Console ST the battle will start to replace it with Arcade ST, and you will hear the same insults and belittling that goes on in this forum.
Instead of stringing you along, i’m just telling you the truth up front. If you want to play ST, you should probably start planning to get Japanese equipment and play on those settings, and if you want to play a game that will ever matter on console, you should play HDR.
EDIT: Of course you can have both an arcade setup and a console one if you want to.
Or you can play and love both! It’s possible, I promise.
FMJ, it will be interesting to see how the form of your argument plays out with 3rd Strike Online once it’s released as well. Don’t care immensely either way though…for the amount of enjoyment I get out of the various Street Fighter games, I’ll gladly keep bankrolling Capcom every time they release another generation of them :lol:
^ This x 1,000. Seriously, there is ZERO point in arguing about what changes are good/bad in HDR. There is zero point in arguing whether O.Sagat/Vega/loops are good bad. Nobody will be impressed by your take on the importance of execution vs. mind games. PLEASE…stop all that crap. Some people prefer ST, some prefer HDR. Nobody is going to convince each other to go wow, you’re right! that other game is better. Let’s give it a rest…
There’s a lot of good discussion we could be having about how to handle the US/World tournament scene and how to level up for SBO, but the past few pages are not the way to do it. Let’s get back into the constructive, cooperative, civil mindset…for all our sakes.
Actually, HDR easier execution makes the game more fair for everyone, complicated inputs just let a very few players master it, probably the only mistake in HDR is its balancings weren’t tested properly, some of them work nice, others simply don’t fit, but overall is ok.
SF2 is a game which punishes mistakes really hard, so in HDR u have better chances of doing the right moves when needed, and focus more in mindgames, etc.
Giving Hawk a whiff animation was a huge nerf, for example.
I think it’s ridiculous that people are bitterly arguing about a 15% difference in execution requirements between two games that probably wouldn’t make a list titled: “The Ten Most Technically Demanding Fighting Games Ever Made”
Well according to a top level player who sent me a pm compares it to a 1 button macro now. According to him, since im not his level of play i cant understand why babyzoning has changed the game completely…Can some elite players chime in on this. dust sand off
OK, I’m going to ignore all the nonsense the past couple of pages and all the HDR vs. ST stuff because I’ve grown tired of it and ask a question about what I’ve found disturbing in this thread:
Why are none of the EC guys coming out? From what Ganelon and Rambo have been saying it sounds like the only SF2 players who show up are the few who used to show up for ST before HDR even came out. Did they all move on to SF4 only (it seems DeMaverick has)? Why are the online players not coming to play offline?
That’s the big question right there, if we could get all the regular online players to start coming out to offline events then we could get pretty good numbers. I’d like to know why the ones who don’t come out choose to not play offline. SF4 had no real arcade scene in the US, it’s pretty much a 100% online scene, and they get over 100 people to every event, big or small. Why is it so much harder to get HDR/ST online players to come out? That’s where we can really boost the numbers. I think all our efforts would be better served solving that problem over the silly in-fighting over different versions.
P.S. Great post Vintage, agree with all of that.
P.P.S. Immortal comes out to Ohio and plays in our tournies, that’s where all the good midwest players are, LOL.
Vintage: yeah I guess I should be thankful there exist saints like you, but you are a rare breed.
I pretty much agreed in general (the part where people care most), but there are boxers greater than Ali playing right now! They live in another continent though.
I think it still goes down to the problem of the availability of a platform.
CPS2 is hard to source & setup and just not feasible to everyone.
(like you need to rent a NBA regulation court to practice bball).
The best of the best OG in US, they don’t really play ST back in the days. They retire/semi-retire after HF/Super as the arcade died.
Even if they play ST, they didn’t put as much time as they did towards to previous versions. Almost all the crazy stuffs are found by the folks from the other continent.
So there isn’t really a king in the US for ST CPS2. Also consider that no one has reached the peak at ST yet (including the japanese), in the past year or so, N Hawk has already gone up a rank or two.
And if someone claims that DGV / Damdai / Ganelon is as good as or better than the US OG (back in their days) at ST, it wouldn’t be as ridiculous as someone to claim that a particular current boxer is greater than Ali.
because we’re old and/or lazy. st/hdr players are probably on average, 7 to 8 years older than what you would get with ssf4. if you took out the number of entrants in most tournaments who were there for another game, st/hdr probably wouldn’t survive the next couple of years (stateside anyway). most new players between the ages of say 9 and 13 would more likely be attracted to the extras involved with the new games because they cater to learning the engine with better training modes, recording matches, and challenge mode. as you lose new blood to new games and old blood to old age, your numbers dwindle.
as for which version is better, toss-up for me. like i said, being able to power up and play is the biggest draw for hdr. it’s just so convenient. on the other hand, i agree about execution. tapping d/f twice and hitting punch for an srk is ridiculous. i feel that execution should be just as important to the game as setting up for and avoiding the big damage that demands execution. although i take advantage of easier inputs (zang’s running bear, rog’s TAP, fei’s CW) it isn’t like i couldn’t live without them. the old inputs i already knew (and sometimes still use) because of birdie and adon. for anyone to think that we should go to easier inputs for fighting games to survive should look at tekken as a model. wavedashing and throwbreaking hasn’t been made easier and yet it is the longest running franchise without breaks or loss of popularity.
some of the easier inputs were placed largely for pad players. being a pad player, being able to teleport on a pad was a bitch. if you set one of your buttons to ppp or kkk, then your supers would be messed up. if you set without them, you lose teleport. i still have this problem on my psp and wish they would make a psp with fighter’s 6 button setup. some input changes also are kind of justified because they were implemented properly in later games. zang’s banishing hand motion and sim’s flame motions not overlapping his fb come to mind because they were still works in progress at the time ST was released.
anyway, this brings us to the unnecessary changes, things like being able to do standing FAB’s and changing guile’s super (which for some reason i can’t do with his old motion). some changes were warranted because the execution of the original idea was not realized such as not being able to reveral super but then things probably got out of hand. ryu’s fake is prime example (i forgot who originally brought this up and in what thread). as much as i love the move, it was implemented with only sim’s drill in mind but gives an edge in any matchup and outright murders many of the cast.
a solution, but a very improbable one, is to try and get capcom (both us and japan) to redo ST with the resources they have. as much as i love remix and what sirlin and company has done with sf2, hdr hasn’t completely lived up to everyone’s expectations. i’m not faulting sirlin in any way. he pushed for changes and was likely given very little for his efforts. for what he had to work with, i give him mad props for the finished product. i’m sure he is a large reason why there is a psn/xbl version of mvc2 and why mvc3 is being made. the slight possibility for a remix of remix is there. 3S is being remade, and i bet with the time and resources that sirlin could only dream of. so why not? a lot of the work has already been done with sprites and animation. an arcade release of hdr with a coinciding console patch would make the majority of both parties happy.
That’s a great way to begin playing ST but the best ST players in Japan can perform those great combos given an opening. Up to a good level, mindgames and zoning are enough to win. But as you approach the highest levels, the level of thinking is closer and one of the few ways to have an edge on an opponent is to perform execution-heavy techniques more and consistently.
As for randomness, while HDR does fix some input windows, the random damage and dizziness are probably much more important. I’m not sure anybody prefers it that way but every version of the SF2 series has them randomized.
Yeah, that’s been my golden question and what a lot of HDR proponents should be focusing on more. Like I’ve implied, if even 1/4 of EC’s SF2 tourney players preferred HDR, we’ve probably be giving it a lot more consideration here.
Or if even half the folks who consistently play HDR online (I see people playing every time I log onto PSN and XBL) or post on SRK came out to EC events, I’m pretty sure we’d be happy to have an HDR scene going. Now then, the ratio of offline vs. online may be the norm compared to other fighting games but that doesn’t work for SF2’s scale.
I can’t completely speak for CT’s scene but what I can say is that we’ll be giving CPS2 ST a try for a few months and see what happens to the turnout (whether it grows, maintains, or shrinks). There are many months before Evo and perhaps Tougeki will start again so hopefully, that will give more perspective to this effort. Maybe Rambo can give some thoughts as to how players will be practicing besides regular gatherings. I know many of MD/VA’s players don’t regularly practice online (much less post here). I’ll probably be on GGPO occasionally. I think the main hope is that gatherings will be regular enough that it’ll be like Japan where you may play at home for some minor practicing but go to your arcade to play the top regional comp on the proper format.
Regarding Evo, from when I spoke to damdai and Rambo, we’d prefer HDR classic as an Evo tourney game. But I’d imagine we’d still be happier to see HDR remix there as opposed to no game at all (and chances are good we’d go play anyway to support the scene as we’ve always done). And since WC may strongly prefer HDR (maybe not the game itself but for logistics), that’ll probably be the format used if SF2 is there. Cab ST is always great but I’m not sure we’d attend only for an SF2 side tourney.
As for Tougeki, it may or may not have ST next year (or perhaps no arcade here can pay up, resulting in no US qualifying spot) so we can’t count on that. But really, we have to see from the upcoming months (esp. tough in winter when players don’t normally show up as much) how CPS2 ST will be received. Like I said before, only time (or some major action from online players) will change the current circumstances at this point.
Anyway, I’m with SweetJV. Let’s all just calm down here, stop demonizing, and keep a healthy discussion. It’s funny because if this was all happening offline, I doubt we’d be seeing so many personal attacks.
IMO the UK is exactly the same btw. This is the only debate worth having (and the stuff at Capcom to Remix Remix and/or release in Japan etc of course, but I think that’s a waste of time wishing Capcom would properly support SF2).
Increased input windows are mostly a non issue. Most decent players can execute the same on ST as on HDR. I play ST on GGPO occasionally and I have no problem executing with an Xbox 360 pad (I do occasionally miss a DP once in a while where I’ve become lazy thanks to the input window, but it’s not like I can’t execute with that kind of speed).
Besides, if the input windows were an issue, then it would be even easier for the ST players to beat HDR players, right?
Also, someone help me with this one. ST has some bugs (such as no reversal super), and one of the good things about HDR was those were fixed. IIRC these were also fixed in the DC version of ST and HSF2, so why does no one play those?
Not sure (but really really not sure) Sim with a reversal super is a good thing: finally getting in just to eat a super that is really hard to bait and escape is a problem for many characters. As for Ken and Sagat, I would say it does help balance the characters.
All of the arcade bugs are in the DC version with the correct dipswitch settings. Capkore AE also has all of the bugs but N.Characters cannot soften O.Character throws. The DC version of ST with the proper dipswitches was the standard at EVO for two years (2004, 2008) and would have been for EVO 2005-2007 had anyone bothered to actually test the DC version or had anyone listened to NKI when he said the standard should have been the DC version. PS1 ST was used at EVO2005, AE for 2006, CCC2 for 2007, all because the ST community was beyond dumb when evaluating which console version was best year after year. After EVO2004 everyone was screaming that the DC version was horrible and not even close to the arcade version…of course no one had a clue what they were talking about. It wasn’t until NKI owned everyone with his ST science that the DC version was seen as the best but by then HDR was right around the corner. And no one uses AE or Capkore AE as an ST substitute because AE is not ST. If AE was a worthy substitute for ST then it would have been used probably to this very day as the standard for SFII. And no one uses the DC version of ST anymore because getting a DC, DC sticks, and legit copies of SIIX for matchmaking is not feasible and for large tournaments impossible. It’s more efficient to use HD Classic Mode or even CPSII hardware than use the DC in my opinion.
because we’re old and/or lazy. st/hdr players are probably on average, 7 to 8 years older than what you would get with ssf4. if you took out the number of entrants in most tournaments who were there for another game, st/hdr probably wouldn’t survive the next couple of years (stateside anyway). most new players between the ages of say 9 and 13 would more likely be attracted to the extras involved with the new games because they cater to learning the engine with better training modes, recording matches, and challenge mode. as you lose new blood to new games and old blood to old age, your numbers dwindle.
QUOTE]
Believe me, I know about the age difference (I’m always the oldest person at every tournement, LOL). I also know the challenges about attending tournies once your older with jobs, wives, kids, etc.
While SF2 doesn’t seem to be attractive to most younger players (both my sons prefer SF4) there have been a number of good players that have come about since SF2 games starting been online on consoles (starting with HF on XBL). If we can find a way to get more of them to come out it would really help. Ganelon is right, I think the percentages of online players who play offline for HDR is about the same as the newer games, but with games like SSF4 having so many more players, HDR needs to have a higher percentage of players to also play offline to survive.
My concern is that we need to get more players involved now, because once MvC3, SFvT, and maybe even 3S HD come out the situation will only get worse and there will be less room for HDR at most tournies. I could easily see it getting squeezed out.
That’s why I think we need to continue to have a positive and helpfull attitude in the community. I know most of us old timers have the old arcade mentallity of not sharing information, smack talking, and ignoring the scrubs, but we need to try to help anyone who shows in interest in learning our game as much help as we can. Especially since, like KrKnight said, there is no kind of training mode like there is in newer FG’s to help them learn. When St players call HDR “garbage” and “babyzone” (and vice versa for HDR players and ST) it just turns off potential new players. I’d hate to see us all end up shooting ourselves in the foot and ending up having no SF2 to play offline because of insignificant squabbles.
So the question is, what can we do to encourage more people already playing HDR and /or St online to come out to play offline? What can we do to encourage new FG players to give SF2 a try (and really give it a try, no SF2 game is really pick-up-and play, which is what is making it hard to get new players, I think)?
Anyone that sucks at ST is equally as horrible at HDR:rofl: