I agree with this. I was “good” at SF2 growing up, which really just meant I had no execution problems and I could do some re-dizzies with Guile or what the hell ever it was that would impress people at the local arcades.After playing my first genuinely good player I was mystified as to how I lost. I couldn’t even touch him. It wasn’t until learning about footsies and safe jumps and frame traps that I understood what the hell was going on.
I’m not a good player by any stretch but I try to help out with a quick PM after facing someone that really needs the help.
Play Yipes’ Magneto on day one of learning MvC2… You wont realize that you lost until somebody’s pushing you out of the way to put their coin in the cabinet.
right now im really trying to break out of “auto-pilot” mode. I have a tendency to jus do things w/o thinking and i really am trying to stop this bad habit. Its hella hard tho.
Yup sure is. I have a friend who can’t get out of auto-pilot, he knows what he should be doing, but before meeting me he played that way so long its hard. Just gotta keep at it.
Yup sure is. I have a friend who can’t get out of auto-pilot, he knows what he should be doing, but before meeting me he played that way so long its hard. Just gotta keep at it.
The difference with Marvel is that that Yipes match would look like a slaughter though. Like there would be absolutely no question in your mind that he was better than you when the match is done.
In more traditional SF it doesn’t look like that at all. The first time someone wrecks you with just 1 or 2 different normals you usually don’t have a clue whats going on. You’re probably more likely to think they got lucky than to realize they are waaaay out of your league at this time. Your mind doesn’t fully compute getting trashed by someone who is not even using specials at beginner levels.
So you’re saying that in traditional SF, they don’t do as much to win?
So in Marvel…
Magneto - 5 fierce and rom + resets
Sentinel - Fly back fierces and ffly combos
Storm - fierces and hailstorms… throw in some assists and bam… looks flashy, but there’s not a whole lot to it.
Compared to in 3S…
Ken - c.mk, c.mp, and dps
Akuma - spin kicks, c.mp, and demon flips
makoto - karakusa and hayate
yun - GJ…
Chun - c.mk, c.mp, and b+hp…
In either scenario, a logical person should realize, “This person is better than me”. If you don’t, then you’re looking at the game the wrong way. Essentially, every fighting game is teh same. It just so happens that in MvC2, it looks flashy.
However, in GG… you’d be like, wait wtf… because unlike other games, a good player will make you feel like you’re not even inputting anything into the game. You’d think your controller is broken. MvC2, you’ll just die fast… Somebody who’s never played ST before loses to a good Boxer just as quickly…
Oh yeah, that’s another thing… When you lose like that in mvc2, you feel pretty much teh same way as when you lose to a good boxer in ST… you have no idea what happened.
No, i’m just saying sometimes in SF the skills are alot easier to miss than in Marvel.
Example: Years ago before we left out for ECC one year we were all at the arcade practicing and Julian ran like a 20-30 something game win streak using Gief someone else and Eagle who he had just started playing. As far as Easily visible play he wasn’t doing anything special, he was literally using 3 like 4 normals and grabs and he was TRASHING people. A-groove players, K, C, Sagats, Blankas, Bisons. The average person was losing two characters to his R1 Eagle and we had all been practicing for ECC for a while before this day. It wasn’t quick noticable beatings, it was like minute long perfects. with practically no supers and damage coming mostly one hit at a time. If anyone who just started played SF was watching they would have thought we were all trash, and probably been bored to death, but in reality Julian’s poking and spacing was just that good.
Marvel requires that you put some damage into each opportunity so you can’t really win on pokes like you can in SF.
Thanks for the article. Really woke me up.
I think a lot of new people (or at least this is how it is for me) “know” how to play smart, but don’t realy understand how to apply it to there game… if that makes any sense :wonder:.
The only thought that I’d like to add is that I don’t think that noobs (like myself) should emphasize playing opponents SIGNIFICANTLY better than themselves. Every once in a while, sure, it can be beneficial, but if I go onto GGPO, I typically get wrecked. When I walk away from the session, I typically don’t leave feeling like I learned anything besides little tricks, like shenanigans or little setups that I hadn’t seen before; nothing really game changing like “Oh man, since I just got my ass handed to me for the last hour, my footsies are 10 times better!” I could have easily learned something new by playing someone that was just a little better than me. Stuff like footsies just takes time and experience. Just imagine sitting down against Daigo or Valle… their skill set is so much higher that it’d be difficult for a lower skilled person to even interpret what they’re doing.
I also think that people just starting out (myself included) get too carried away and try to raise the bar too high and then suffer from ego crush. I feel like I was too busy trying to master engine mechanics when I should’ve just been focused on learning the gameplay fundamentals. When I look back on this past year I know that I’ve gotten better but I realize that I could’ve been much better by this point had I taken baby steps and not overwhelmed myself by trying to do all the sick shit when I should’ve just been taking it slow. “Trying to run before you can walk”… Of course, every one is guilty of this in one way or another because its exciting to play all these new games (especially since 09’ was huge for fighting games). But I do look back with a little regret thinking about how much better I could’ve been had I just played HDremix this whole time.
Although I dont use gief, i whooped a ryu scrub with this in mind.
I got destroyed on the first round because he would do tatsu’s when I didn’t expect them and throw out wake up SRKs. The lag wasn’t that helpful either. Although he was able to do some attack > c FP > super, his baitings weren’t THAT effective, and his hadokens were pretty obvious i punished him back for that. After a knockdown, if i’m near he’ll srk on wake up. So getting srk’d like that for like 4 times, I move in when he was down, but I would c. block and SRK his whiffed SRK. I won in the end.
Another good time this reading the opponent came to use was a match i had with my cousin’s friend, he usually predicted whenever i threw out hadokens. So in that “bad range to hadoken”, i didn’t hadoken, he jumped in and I shinkryuken’d him, ULTRA COMBO FINISH! I caught him twice with this in the same match, which made me laugh out loud
One thing that always kept me back when I was first starting out, even before I got competitive with it is an obsession with the special moves. When I just started playing fg’s I saw all the commands and thought, those are what I’m supposed to do. Even before learning anything about the game I think there’s an appreciation of normals that has to be made. Everyone new wants to make shit happen on screen and that gets people not very far.
It also helps alot to a have someone on the same lvl as you or slightly better who also strives to learn and get better. I have had people like that for years and its another reason I started getting better.