While it’s true that the complexity of MvC style games can be very daunting to a lot of players and cause them to bleed an audience quicker than other styles of games, Marvel 3 retained it’s popularity for quite a few years, even through complaints of TOD combos taking over or a few specific teams dominating for a long time.
But to be completely honest, I feel like Mr. Wizard’s recent tweet about DBFZ’s entrance numbers surpassing 1,000 completely re-contextualizes the discussion from the ambiguous ranking order we were working off before. I think this means that DBFZ is doing fine and instead goes to show just how strong is not only everything above it in the rankings but the fighting game tournament scene overall. 1,000 people is an absolute ton! While it’s still a precipitous drops from the 2,500 entrants last year, I think a lot of that came from the release high of a solid Dragon Ball IP fighting game coming out a few months before EVO (SamSho will probably drop off a lot after EVO for similar reasons).
Is anyone else playing Samurai Shodown by the way? I was considering making a thread on it because I feel like I’ve been thinking about it non-stop since release despite not getting enough time in with it. There just isn’t much else like it right now and I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops.
Just putting this here so it’s easier for me to find someday in the future
Also hi Pat, I remember watching your mystery tournament prep stream before Frosty Faustings and you mentioned David Sirlin had written a guide for playing an okay Pai in VF4 with very few moves. Did you ever find that and if so, can you link it here? I’ve been googling and came up short
I think Samsho will be an interesting test for the modern FGC.
Although it has a couple of modern tweaks, its very old school. And its much slower than most of the games out there. Even slower than NAMCO’s fighters, Tekken and Soul Caliber.
I’ve seen pretty large contrasts in interest. Some people whom are really into the old school idea, pushing hard for Samsho. But other people who don’t necessarily care, saying its an interesting distraction. Decent for a side game. Of course, personal tastes like that are a factor with any game. However, some of these youtube/twitch/etc people have a lot of influence on the FGC. Their impressions, positive or negative, could make or break games.
Also hi Pat, I remember watching your mystery tournament prep stream before Frosty Faustings and you mentioned David Sirlin had written a guide for playing an okay Pai in VF4 with very few moves. Did you ever find that and if so, can you link it here? I’ve been googling and came up short
I don’t know if he ever wrote it down except maybe in an old email somewhere that is long since lost, and I’d imagine you could do better with like 20 minutes in YouTube (which didn’t exist when we were having this conversation).
I did end up beating ESAM in VF5:FS at Combo Breaker’s mystery game tournament with…random select Kage and El Blaze, I think?
SamSho is fun. Feels very old-school, think a lot of SFV players will have to relearn what they know of neutral to really get into it.
There was a write-up someone did at VirtuaFighter .com that felt like it did for me whatever that Sirlin article did for others. It was explaining some of the universal moves that are shared across the cast (2P/crouching punch, 6P/elbow, 3K/knee, etc) and talked about what their usages were. By the end of it I had a pretty solid understanding of how to play the game using only three or four of those universal moves because they made up the core foundation of the game’s RPS. Everything else in your movelist is about working around and manipulating the rhythm of those universal moves.
That article also helped me think about how much intention there is behind each move in a character’s moveset, and to think about why the developers gave a character a particular technique. What did they want that move to be used for? Why does this character have that in the first place? It helped me focus my attention when learning fighting games in general for about a month before I forgot about it and started playing by instinct again, as a casual is wont to do.
I saw mauve make a tweet about Samurai Shodown a while back that said:
And I think this general gist is something I’ve seen a lot of FG heads echo after trying out the game. The thing a lot of people are finding appealing about it is how much of the game is built around thinking about your defensive options that it’s quite refreshing in the current landscape of the genre. You’re more often thinking about what you can do to make your opponent whiff than you are thinking about how to pressure them. I’ve found it to be a particularly intense game even in neutral situations and it gets me mentally fatigued much quicker than other games have recently.
But I think the emphasis on well times single strikes and big damage gives the game some approachability for casual play because you can easily play a new character and it always feels satisfying to get a hit in.
Here’s hoping Evo top 8 is all old people, because I hear a lot of older FG players have been getting into it.
I bought this back in like 2010. Surprisingly, this works fine on my PC with Soul Caliber 6. No special drivers needed. Although the main 4 buttons were all shifted one position, counter clockwise. A quick tweak in the controller options fixed that.
The D-pad is absolutely perfect for Soul Caliber. Its soooo easy to do diagonals. and the main face buttons are big and fat. Very easy to hit multiple buttons at once. 3 buttons is no problem with just your thumb.
Unfortunately, its wireless and the wireless is not very good at much distance. Fine for PC. But I won’t be able to take this controller with me to a console. Unfortunately, they didn’t make this style of controller wired, for playstation, until Tekken Vs. Street Fighter. And those controllers are like $100 now.
The wired 360 ones for wresting games can still be got for about $20. But I doubt they work on a PS4.
The Mad Catz fight pads were pretty popular but I think also had notoriously probe to faliure. There was a guy in my local scene who used one and every month would be replacing the PCB at meetups mid-tournament.
Yeah, I’m aware. The D-pads usually don’t last long.
I didn’t use this much when I got it. Because the wireless sucks at living room distance or if anything at all gets in the way.
I love the feel of the D-pad, though. Its too bad there aren’t more pads trying to make diagonals easier. I’m sure the Hori pads are top quality. But the D-pad looks only a minor improvement over a Playstation controller.
I guess the asymmetry was to allow for claw style grips or something but I did not like it very much. It didn’t work well for holding the right side like a regular controller because there is little to grip with your palm. It also had this wheel on the bottom left for rotating the orientation of the dpad but the build quality was such that the dpad kind of wiggled in place.
Also word is that the patch yesterday for Samurai Shodown has improved the netcode for a lot of people. It mentioned it was fixing some glitches in online play that were causing lag but a lot of people are saying that the connections really do feel much better. All of my matches last night felt great at 3-4 bars but I don’t know if that’s just a one night fluke or not. Hopefully it’s consistent.
Charlotte’s the bomb. She’s the one I’ve kind of played the most even through I’m trying to get a basic competency with everyone. She’s very comfortable just standing back and poking from mid-range but at close range her kicks and jumping C are good too. I wish her C power gradation (DP) was a bit faster though! It’s hard to use reliably against characters with faster jump speeds.
