Essay

Naw, I couldn't reach him (but he's got wheels if he gets hyped up about it and decides to come last minute).

Ah yes, I saw that. The Foonzo stream url is www.twitch.tv/bibiquadium so tune on in tonight. GG's after BB, which starts at 6.

Looks like we'll have a 5th Ottawa player today for GG, so maybe he could team up with Pedro or anyone else who's short a teammate. Otherwise, we're shooting to arrive a little after 4PM, but we're good to stay late too. Looking forward to casuls. :D

Yay, still sounds like tap-to-air-tech, which shows they're committed to keeping the combo'd player active. It wouldn't surprise me if the R.I.S.C. meter gets better pay-off from instant-blocking, to give the blocking player incentive to be even more active too.

Plus R really is coming. Really. With better online matchmaking at least, and the ability to switch between patched and unpatched versions. Probably to hit PS3 before Xbox. (Original Japanese announcement, SRK's summary) EDIT: And Millia even-more-confirmed for Xrd! EDIT EDIT: System mechanic details translated!!

Wtf is pokemon style? Can I spend a turn calling back and replacing my partner mid-match? o.O Whatever, sounds like Ottawa's interested in sending two teams. If we get there early, will there be people around for casuals? Money needed to park? Think we'd all be popping our Foonzo cherries with this one, so tell us what we need to know.

^ I think all that Phil was saying was that it's character specific for every character in the game, so just takes some investment to learn.

My power bar, but we're counting that as a loan. :P

^ My Xbox and I are good for it. I also checked with Johnny, and there won't be anymore HQ until the last-HQ-night-ever on the 16th. *Le sigh*

How is this matchup playing out for other people? I've found it pretty rough, especially once Robo has meter. His 5HS keeps me hesitant to throw out the fancier, non-meaty oki, and Lvl3 Uppercut seems to call for some pretty hard baits at the cost of pressure. Maybe more j.D FD cancels in my oki would help? Lvl3 missiles are a complete pain for me to deal with too. If I don't feel an opening to StBT under them on the way in, I'm at a bit of a loss of how to deal with them. It's nice having an easy-mode knockdown with 6P>2DxxHCL, but what else should I be working with? The first seconds of the match seem especially important, and I'm curious how the opening gambit normally plays out.

2rio putting in work to reverse OCV (vs. MI/DI/SO). Koichi reminding us that the May match-up... still isn't the greatest. >.< 2rio vs Tsubu (A.B.A)

No, I agree, but nothing I said runs counter to being an open-minded and welcoming group, unless you're really going to hold it against a guy for voicing personal opinions about aesthetics after studying Art History. What I just try to make clear is that we're not trying to be a group with a narrow focus, other than the game we play. If there was a big enough player-base, sure, you could have "the clique that plays Guilty Gear and loves anime" versus "the clique that plays Guilty Gear and loves Portuguese-dubbed-sci-fi-spagetti-westerns, but is impartial to anime". (That might even be a good rivalry if the two sides were competitive enough!) Around here, however, there isn't a surplus of players, so we kind of have to stick together.... A problem only arises when people look at one fighting game community as being intrinsically tied to some other niche that they find uninteresting. It is exactly that rumour/perception of the Guilty Gear community being closely tied to other forms of anime culture that can make people from other fighting game communities hesitate in considering calling the GG community "home". At the same time, it's exactly those players-of-other-fighting-games who are most likely to grow our community: They have some FG fundamentals they already want to exercise, and some prior experience in working their way past skill-ceilings to "level-up" their game. You can't just bank on a random anime-fan having the drive to develop either just because they like drawings with Tsurime eyes. This genre is kind of hard to break into. Now, this isn't a problem with Tekken, Street Fighter, Marvel, or even Mortal Kombat on the large scale of things. (What, is someone going to argue that Mortal Kombat is part of the horror-movie fighting game community because Freddy Krueger was in the last game? No! They get together for the game.) This shouldn't even be a real problem here because the majority of people who experience the GG community don't get pulled aside by some strong anime community connection. The problem is that certain people outside the community have already painted us in this light — as if playing GG is a gateway drug that'll lead you down the path towards importing doujin. So why shouldn't we respond to that and work harder to defend our community's image, asserting the fact that we are a diverse and pluralistic group gathering around the game first? Why not publicly celebrate the ways that we break the stereotype when we can, in the hopes of garnering more interest from other FGC members who hear enough random chatter like "GG = anime/poverty"?

This is actually a really valid point. Topical too, considering how on the last Team St1ckBug tournament stream, the commentator even got into a long rant about the days before BB, when Guilty Gear wasn't considered "anime" in his area. When I look at my local GG scene, I don't see the core players as being especially interested in Japanese culture over anything else (unlike, say, Montreal's scene where they pile the doujinshi* high, and all play BB first xD), and the players we're attracting from the other fighting game scenes aren't either. Hell, when people have tried to talk to me about actual anime in person, if I didn't feel like I was to hurt someone's feelings and scare them away from our scene, I've been known to be quite vocal about how the I find the "anime" style of drawing to be visually unappealing (to use less-harsh words), and about how the only decent work of anime that I've been able to find was Cowboy Bebop in my teens. (Very sorry if you disagree, but let's not get off-topic. My point is as follows: ) Maybe this is what helped make my local GG scene look more accessible to the non-anime fans — that we were clearly not going to alienate new players with weeaboo side-chatter? We're fighting game fans, and other fighting game fans are the only people we can bank on holding to a challenging game like this. * I just learned this is the plural form minutes ago (thank you Google), so don't cry "closet otaku" at me.

I'll keep my eyes open for situations like that. The muscle memory I have drilled at the moment is for 5P>c.S (or 2P>c.S) if linking a c.S on its own isn't going to pick up. I can, for example, hold an S.dive longer so that the opponent can't air-tech the 2K and gattling into c.S for the same combos, and it does a very small amount of extra damage than if I had 5P'd. It looks like a lower juggle too, so maybe this would be useful for height control in VCL 6FRC6 combos? I just haven't stumbled on any juggle that looked like it needed the 2K. (Or else I'm missing some opportunities.)

Is there anything that incorporating 2K into my corner juggles would really enable that isn't doable otherwise, beyond converting off air-throws at certain ranges? Maybe something character-specific that I wrote off otherwise? I know I've seen Japanese players do it, but I can't remember at what point in their combos.

As long as you don't play that music while you do it.

From the mouth of Johnny: HQ's cancelled tonight on account of the storm. Leaves more time for me to play the Skullgirls beta I guess...

I can probably do it, though I'm not sure how early I could get there yet.

Awesome. Who do you play in GG, Psykotik? Rigel's on the money. If you have any background in the slightest in VSav I'll probably hound you for matches in that as well. We also sidetrack into Skullgirls, KOF, Melty, or random, illegitimate, pen-and-paper, endless-full-body-aegis-reflector, flavour-of-the-month fighters from time to time... just not Arcana.

Same. Either should work for me. Let's just not wait until last minute so I can schedule around it.

Well, I've got that Aigis to look up to that I wanted. P4A was sick.

Late wake-up DP. Figured out how to get the Twitch.tv app working on my Xbox. (Thank you American Xbox account.) Want me to bring my setup again this weekend for Evo watching purposes?

Phil, you should play more of your Johnny against my I-No. There are so many hype Johnny-only(-I-think) combos... tk-ing the head-first heavy-dive as an meterless extender while he bounces around, juggling with P-dive midscreen and airdashing back in because of his gangly legs in the air.... In fact, everyone should pick up Johnny anyway; he's getting buffed in Plus R. :^)

Moi. EDIT: Also, will you have the new furniture?

Heh, yeah, that would work well. Bella's DP is underrated too. It doesn't hit as far in-front but it is easy to combo off. Ran with that a few times with Squigly's cr.HP as a ghetto Cerecopter. (It's even easier to pick up from, but doesn't work as well versus incoming or off throws.)