So I didn’t found a beter placement for this thread, so if it’s wrongly posted, can a mod move it? Welp the point the thread is to discuss where’s the best place to look at when playing fighting game, you can take street fighter 4 as your game of choice.
I play kof2002 and I always look at my character, for me it’s difficult to look at your opponent, but my anecdotical evidence isn’t theory, but theory doesn’t exist on this topic (some people say you react faster to stimuli that comes from your peripherical vision, dunno (sh), I guess in SF4 you need to look at your opp for whiff punishment i.e.; whiff punishment in kof is limited to sweeps, in my experience.
Aditional commet: I noticed than the blind spot of the left player is somewhere near the right corner and viceversa. I haven’t tested if your opp blunders more often when your/his/ both characters are close to/in that position, do you think it is worth testing? it is a crap idea? Discuss.
You need to look at your opponents character mostly, but also know where you are as well. Try to look at the whole screen as best you can, but looking at meter and health is best done when youre getting hit in a long combo if you wanna see that stuff.
Hehe, whenever I get comboed I just get pissed and swear I won’t make that mistake again, good to know getting hit could become productive. After connecting a combo myself I check opps health, but not mine, neither metter (gauge), guess infromation is power…
Q? it is bad to look at stats in the middle of a fight? People might say its like checking for the cops in between a fight with an assailant or something.
This is a gradual process as a new player to try to get better at this. New players tend to look at 80% their character, 20% their opponent, give or take. The reason being that they’re not comfortable with knowing when their attacks will recover, and need to know when they’re ready to perform anything else including punishes or AAs. The problem is, they don’t know what to do in that situation because they’ve been so focused on that what they’re doing, that anything the opponent does at that point comes as a surprise. So these players can’t take much initiative outside of their first move or two, if that, then it becomes a reactionary game for them, but they can’t react well.
Gradually, as you get more comfortable with a character, you are able to judge when you’re going to recover, and can figure out spacings, and focus more on your opponent. This is why a lot people will say that new players should find a character to learn with and stick with that character, because getting comfortable with a character’s tools doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s easy to get discouraged in the midst of this process. Thus, they tend to switch characters because “it’s just not working,” when they just haven’t grown comfortable with the tools available to make it work.
And knowing the frame data is less important than understanding it. You can memorize frame data by heart, but until you see it and have to use it in a match, it means jack. You ultimately understand when x move recovers and what you can do in x situation after it by feeling, not by counting frames.
One other thing I notice people forget is to take quick looks at their resources.
Not just your lifebar (which, thanks to Street Fighter II, is actually in a pretty well thought out place that allows you to see both yours and your opponents life as well as the remaining time), but your meter options as well since, more often than not, having meter will change the match up.
Yeap, what I’ll take is to try to look at my opp more than I’m already doing, which is basically glancing here and there. I read something somewhere that says you shall be only fixating on your character while rushdowning, which might by the reason I like rushdown characters, let’s say how the advices can improve my overrall game
I look at both more or less. With the more, focus on my opponent’s character.
I also learned to keep track of my meter and my opponent’s health, especially during combos, to quickly decide in the moment, how to finish my combo, how much bar should I spend or need to spend and if it’s enough to kill or I need an extra extension to make sure. At first I used to drop combos when I do that, but I got the hang of it, relatively quickly in UMVC3.
Think of it this way. Ever take driver’s education? You should be moving your eyes actively around the screen like you would when driving. Most of the the attention should be watching the road and other drivers (the opponent) watching your character is like starting at the hood of your car while driving, you don’t get a lot out of it but you have other input to help you feel where you are. By the time you really need to see your character, you are pretty much in the range where watching your opponent will also let you see your character. Checking meters should be like checking mirrors. Lifebars and clock are your rear view, super meters are your side mirrors quick glances at opportune times.
With games with like marvel and anime games this may get a bit more complicated because of filling the screen with a lot more stuff, so your mileage may vary.
You should look at your character as little as possible. After all, it’s doing exactly what you command, so you shouldn’t really need to look at it to know its state; if you command it to jump, it’s a safe bet that it’s jumping. The opponent is what you need to know, and of course try to keep meters checked, too.
Something that helps me when I’m playing online with lag is to keep my eyes in a random place like around the timer area for example, because this forces me to rely on muscle memory and prediction rather than react to laggy visual clues.
Another important thing has to do not with “where” you are looking, but rather “how”. The human brain has the amazing ability to categorize and group things together, even things it sees. So instead of looking at both characters (yours and your opponents) as separate objects, it helps to mentally “chunk” them together. This way, you’re aware of the movements of each character in relation to the other. Heck, your brain is probably doing this automatically already. The trick then is to both master this while at the same time, knowing when to stop doing it to focus on your opponent, or your own character depending on the situation.
i had this question last night as i went on a 10 win streak and realized i wasnt looking at my character or the oppenent and was actually just watching the space between us. sometimes i watch right in front of my opponent at what i think is their prefered range. and then sometimea i catch myself staring at my own character, and then wondering why i cant anti air anything…
