Airk

... Do you play fighting games at all? the damn things have a lifespan of like a year between versions. Do you ever bother learning combos? Honestly, with the Western release of CP like 9+ months out at this point, it's a bloody long time to just do nothing, and you'd be much MUCH better served by playing the game.

Which is why air charging is stupid when you're at a range when your opponent could literally just superjump up and air throw you even if they didn't have a silly combo they can do.

Er, backwards compatibility was DE-confirmed. Like, there won't BE ANY. Unless you count cloud based streaming so that you have internet latency on your local games and DOUBLE internet latency on all your netplay. Haha. No.

Yeah; Because most of the time you're not REALLY reacting; You're thinking "Ragna is probably getting impatient here and I smell a 6B" so you mash jab or whatever, and then you hit and you're all "Yay! I predicted that!" . Or you get hit. But basically, you're just trying to out think your opponent.

This whole thing is SO dodgy. o.o StayFree, what exactly did Aksys SAY about the 360 version? "still not happening" someone's exact words?

This is me. Oh, and I'll have to dualmod my other stick somehow. -_-

No, you can't; Sure, in THEORY you can. In practice, no, you can't. Eventually, you'll get hit. You don't want to block forever because the longer you block, the higher your chances of missing something.

eBay. :P Edit: Also, is it just me, or does that article not actually say it's "exclusive"? I mean, yes, it's in the title, but the title is made up by Gameinformer, and none of the info in the article itself seems to say that Aksys said anything other than "Game is coming to PS3 next year" which we already knew. Not saying this necessarily means it's not exclusive, but I don't think this article is quite as cut and dried as it seems.

Great; but why would you EVER air charge in that position? The entire cast can punish that in some unpleasant way. I mean, yay, Plat can do 7k, so you should REALLY not do that against her, but this is sortof like saying "don't step out into the street without looking if you know there's a mac truck in the area." How about, just, don't step out into the street without looking?

Yeah, but TD plays Rachel, and Rachel cheats. :P (Wind, yo.) That said, I actually meant "asking me for advice is useless" not "this tactic is useless". Also, Argent, don't feel too bad, Elyon never answers my mail either. :P

Uh. "Servers" are provided by MS/Sony for matchmaking, everything else is peer-to-peer as far as I know. So no. :P

Yes, yes you do. I don't frametrap after 5BB. Yet. Mwahaha. Or something. I've seen Elyon around for a while, and he's...pretty equivalently good (and somewhat better than me, though not "blows me up for free") with like...5 characters or something. (Hakumen, Jin, Tsubaki, Hazama, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some.). Oddly, his D-card thing lists him having the most games as Tsubaki, but that was the only character I could fairly reliably beat him as. Woo. :P As for "stuff you might do instead"...uh... backdash, maybe? /useless.

Good games to DarkRanger and Argent Zero! Sorry to go, but reality is a nuisance like that. =/

If it makes you feel better, everyone has these issues when they're new, and you have a leg up already because you recognize you have them. A good way to work on remembering to confirm into your BnBs is to play vs the CPU in training mode and focus on "Okay, when I get a hit in, I do this..."; Don't worry too much about how you get those hits, because how you get hits vs the CPU doesn't necessarily have much to do with how you get them vs people. Just use this to practice remembering what to do when you hit. You can do these things simultaneously. It's not like there's some training regimen where you need to spend X total hours learning how to not mash, and the sooner you put in X hours, the sooner you can move on to something else. It's more like you need to play Z matches, and try to remember not to mash. If you can try to remember not to mash, then you should feel free to do other stuff too. The only thing that I can safely say "You really REALLY should work on this first" is...execution. If you can't reliably make your character do what you want them to do, then nothing else matters because all your mindgames, spacing, and whatnot will go right out the window when you fail to do what you intended to. Execution must come first. After that? Learn 1-2 combos - try to pick widely applicable ones. A grounded BnB and anti-air BnB would be good for P4A. Bonus points if you can add a super at the end, but not required. Then play. The only way to learn spacing/footsies/movement is to play. And play a lot. You'll lose a lot. 4 for 20 isn't bad at all. But the only way to learn this stuff is by playing. You can know everything there is to know about the game, but only playing can teach you say, at just what range your airdash will carry you over that projectile to hit your opponent rather than getting anti-aired. The simple answer is that you go where the projectiles aren't. Odds are your opponent isn't reacting to your movements, but rather, just throwing stuff out and letting you run into it. You can use evasive action to pass through a lot of stuff. You can highjump/double jump - while airblocking - to avoid a bunch more. And sometimes you just have to carefully walk forward a step or two, block and repeat. There are no global solutions - you have to try things and see what works. Blocking is always relative to your OPPONENT, regardless of what direction the "attack" looks like it's coming from. It's absolutely critical that you know at least in a general sense what every single one of your character's moves is good for (the answer for some of them might be "nothing" but you still need to know that.). You will never get out of a beginner state without this knowledge. For characters you don't play, it's important to know what their options are. You don't necessarily need to know the buttons, or the motions or the frame data, but you need to know "That flipkick needs to be blocked high." and "that was his R-Action; I can punish that after I block it" and stuff like that. Well, there are multiple things at work here: #1) Fundamentally, getting hit less than the other guy is how you win. So being better at blocking their stuff than they are at blocking yours is crucial. #2) Conversely, if you can't get any hits in, you're going to lose, so you need to learn how to get hits in. #3) What you do after you get that hit is important, but not as important as the other two - you NEED to be able to confirm most hits into SOMETHING, even if it's just a couple of hits. Few things are more frustrating than losing to an opponent that you outplayed, but who got twice the damage you did everytime he hit you. So you need to not only be able to "get a hit in" but turn that hit into damage. Start with the 1-2 combos mentioned above. Then, as you improve, look at your replays (save and watch your replays!) and say "Okay, I'm getting good damage when I just land a 5A, but I get nothing for my sweep; Is there a combo I can do off that?" and learn a new combo that way, rather than trying to learn a ton of advanced combos all at once.

I did pretty much this exact thing about 9 months ago, OMG, huge difference.

The 200-300 milliseconds thing is for reacting to stuff like a green square turning red, where: A) The change is immediately and clearly noticable. Things like throws and overheads in this game are often not distinguishable from other attacks until well into their startup frames. Check on the first "frame" of animation of Ragna's 6B . You think you're going to differentiate that from his standing animation or any of his other attacks? No, you are not. So you've already "lost" some of the startup time of that attack, because you're not going to be able to tell the attack is started at that point. This is true for most moves, because that's how you make the animation fluid. B) The Green->red square change is the ONLY thing you're watching for. This too, is rarely the case in fighting games. You have to watch for at least two things at any given time, and in reality it's more than that, because of all the delays and the like that can happen. So yeah. It's all well and good to say "that is reactable" but realisitically, you don't get the kind of situation that is reflected in the tests that produced those results. An opponent is never just standing there, OR doing an overhead.

I can tell! I just always think "That guy looks a lot like Kiba."

I actually enjoyed it a lot more when you started getting weird, because the first round was WAY too much like me playing against a good Jin. x.x GDI, air ice swords.

Well, not really. I just ran it through the calculator, and doing it off 5BB > 22D is only like 100 damage better than doing it off 5BB > 5CC because the 5CC adds enough damage to mostly offset the proration. 5B > 5C > 22D does like 50 damage less than just confirming off 5B, and 5B > 5CC > 22D does about 50 less than THAT, so really, it's the 5BB that costs you all the damage on that hit confirm.

Yes, obviously "winning" (Which is what the Dan rankings represent) is only "notable" if your opponents are strong, but I'm not seeing evidence of styling on low skill players here?

I long ago learned to ignore the commentary on Kiba's streams except for entertainment value. Also, great play... oh no wait... MISTAKES? Mod privileges! Revoked! :P

What about 5BB > 22D > same stuff? That would be an easier confirm than 5B, but it's not clear what it would do to the damage. I'd assume it would be better than 5BB > 5CC because you'd be losing less damage from the crush trigger?

Yeah, I was going to say, no matter how bad Surf thinks he is, how many 15th Dan Tsubaki players are there? He must be doing something right. :P

Yes, this! Also, thanks shtkn - that's a good idea.

I'm not sure how much watching a pause happen in slow motion is going to help you, but I guess it makes it easier to measure, like, how far the opponent needs to fall or something. I'm just psyched they finally put in input display for Challenge mode. I mean seriously. Why was that ever not there? Now I just have to cross my fingers for more and more practice mode options. (Still hoping for random counter hits, myself.)