TheRealBobMan

Hey, so it's known that Hemi Jack can absorb hits right? I don't see it in the wiki and that's kind of important. Bedman wont have to block them, seals are also protected, and it doesn't cancel Hemi Jack either. It's kinda like when Little Eddie takes a hit for Zato, or when a fish takes a hit for Dizzy. Except that he can take multiple hits. I'm messing with it right now and he can absorb all 3 hits of either of I-No's supers. You can hit him to push him out, but if you use the wrong move he'll just float back in during your recovery and hit you anyway. This could have some gimmicky but strong defensive applications in some matchups. I don't play Bedman so I'm guessing that most of the time that you'd want to use Hemi Jack, you'd probably need 75% meter to set it up with a YRC, or to YRC it to be safe. You have options like... get one of your Deja Vu seals, then summon it on oki, YRC into Hemi-Jack. If they weren't blocking they get hit by your seal during the super freeze for Hemi jack, which you might be able to confirm into knockdown (which might be timed so that they wake up into Hemi Jack). Otherwise you'd really only be able to summon it when you have Deja Vu pressure going and are willing to YRC it to be safe and resume pressure. Task A and Task A` both get canceled when starting Hemi Jack, so you might have some gimmicks there, but for the most part this seems like it would get in the way. You can probably set up the gimmick unblockable with the Deja Vu versions though, or maybe use the 2 hits on Deja Vu Task A to safely summon Hemi Jack without using a YRC. Anyway, I figure you guys have already talked about the difficulty in getting Hemi Jack out and know more about it than me. I just want to make sure you know that you can use it to take hits for you, which is especially good since it doesn't go away when it takes hits for you. If you cross them up and get Hemi Jack between you and them, you should have incredibly safe rushdown and pressure options. Hell, as I-No if I try to get on the other side of Bedman (so Hemi Jack is behind him) and use HCL, Bedman and any seals along HCL's hitbox wont get hit if the HCL reaches behind Bedman and touches Hemi Jack.

Could anyone weigh in on the mastering done for the "Guilty Gear Best Sound Collection" and "Guilty Gear Isuka" CDs so I have a frame of reference? I actually have those CDs so I know I'm not listening to a shitty rip.

I like how the new Babylon is just about 10ft to the left of where the old stage was in previous games. If you get way up into the air on the right side of the stage (Dragon Install VV > RC > VV > RC > VV) you can see some of it in the background.

Oh, so this isn't the full release?

What's this OBT stuff?

On the topic of muscle memory, a friend of mine once said: "A wise Asian fucker once said that your intent to kill should be so high that if your enemy cut off your head, your body would know what to do." You should be able to do at least your basic combos blindfolded (though sometimes confirming off of random hits into more advanced combos would require adjustments based on who you hit and where you hit them, which you can't do blindfolded). Eventually you should be able to play games like this ninja. After you've put some time into training mode to warm up, put some time into VS CPU play. You need to build your recognition/reaction pairings. The CPU can give you shitty habits, but you're also not going to be able to automatically 6P a poorly spaced jump-in (or even know when each jump-in is poorly spaced) unless you practice that. I recommend playing against the same CPU consistently for a chunk of time (like a week or two) before moving on to another CPU when you're new, and ideally you should get through all of them. Just don't overdo it training with the CPU since they might let you get away with ending block strings with a move that's really - on block, or let you wake-up super, or use some other tactic that's easy to bait and punish. You absolutely need to get practice in with real players, but vs CPU is valuable in the early stages of learning a game. They'll punish you for things like leaving a 1-frame gap in your block string, and also pressure you with moves almost at random. CPUs might make terrible moves that players wouldn't, except that you wont be able to consistently punish a player that does that kind of stupid shit unless you have some practice against it. It also helps with stage fright if you can do the same stuff vs a CPU. Eventually you'll phase out CPU play and put more time into training mode for Research and Development purposes. I spend less time in training mode practicing combos than I did a year or two ago, but I spend just as much time as before in training mode if not more. I just spend it figuring out new combos rather than practicing how to regurgitate stuff other people found, or I spend time figuring out options selects and move punishes. Going through every characters' challenge mode is great since you'll learn some of the basics of what they'll do and should easily then be able to record it in training mode to practice blocking it (great for stuff like Ram oki or Zato unblockables), and eventually figuring out optimized punishes for things. Also, practice the flashy/difficult/situational stuff as a reward after you've put some time into the more widely used stuff. It's fun to do things that way.

They wont be almost identical, but if you could play with only 1-2 frames worth of added timing based on the connection it wouldn't hurt as much, especially if you had the appropriate monitors. You're looking at delay imposed by: 1. The minimum amount allowed by the hardware between your button press and the game responding. Games are generally balanced around this unless the devs are incompetent. 2. Display latency. Your monitor takes time to display the image. There are some sub 10ms monitors out there that you'd want to use, though CRTs introduce 0 delay. We're moving away from CRT technology though. 3. Any latency caused by your input device. I think Teyah started a project where he compared some arcade sticks and found that some introduce 0-2 frames of delay compared to other sticks. As far as I can remember there was no way to test for the actual delay amount in milliseconds, but there can be a discrepancy between input devices (Pad vs one stick vs another stick). 4. Online latency. You're tacking this onto whatever else you already have to deal with. We're talking 2f minimum in most cases, where you can reduce other sources of lag down to around 1f. Every frame adds up. Since GG has delay based netcode you can experience spikes in latency, so timing that would allow you to IB one second is now getting you hit the next. That's not cool. Human reaction time is complicated. I started writing an article about this a long time ago but I keep getting distracted. I've been through at least 3 drafts so far... Anyway, there are different kinds of reactions with different speeds. Introducing latency to a situation where the game is balanced around your ability to react will create situations in which you react on time but get hit anyway. You wont be able to punish things on reaction as well, you wont be able to block things as well, and you're boned in situations that demand precision to deal with a tight trap. You might train yourself to block Zato unblocakbles 90% of the time under normal conditions, but then only get it 5% of the time because it's a 1-frame window, and that frame is constantly bouncing because of variable delay of 3-5 frames. So uh... it's not so much that you can't benefit from online play, but it's enough that you should still prefer offline play. You can still practice making reads, blocking obvious blockstrings, etc.

Oh sweet. I love reading this kind of thing. Thanks for the post!

You wont always have the resources. What if you want to play Xrd but can't afford a PS3 + a copy of the game? What if Dogura wanted to be what he is, but didn't have all of that money to spend on the arcades to have the opportunity to learn and get better? There was an interesting correlation brought up in Malcom Gladwell's book... I think it was "Outliers"... about hockey players. Basically, he noticed that a majority (like a 9:1 ratio) of pro hockey players were born within the same few month span. That few month span happened to be the cutoff point for children either being the youngest kid in the class for one year, or the oldest for another year. He asserted that since Hockey is a sport that requires a specific and limited play field, compared to something like Basketball in the United States (there's at least one court in practically every park, and all you need then is a ball to practice the core mechanics), the children that were offered the most opportunity to play had the best odds of getting good. The kids that turned out to have the best opportunities were the ones that displayed the highest "talent" or "aptitude". The ones that were the most talented at the time they were screened? The oldest kids - the ones that had the highest developed hand-eye coordination and motor skills. They were given more opportunities to play the game and decide if they wanted to keep playing, since not everyone could play because of the limited Hockey Rinks. I know that his books are written more for style and telling an enjoyable story than to be a scientific assertion of any kind of hypothesis, but that particular story makes a very good point about opportunities. As far as a personal anecdote, the valedictorian at my High School for my graduating class had a cumulative GPA of 4.5. CUMULATIVE!!! This means that all of his grades were "A"s, and that 1/2 of the classes he took were Advanced Placement. Except that there was a rule that you couldn't take Advanced Placement classes until your junior year, and that you were limited to exactly 1 that year. It's even more amazing because he went out of his way to be in a sport (I think he did Golf) and music as extra curricular activities so he could get even more accolades, meaning he took 0-period and after-school classes, which would have only served to hurt his GPA if he didn't take more than 12 AP classes. The guy had to work damn hard to maintain "A"s across all of that so he totally deserves recognition, but he had obvious opportunities that other students were denied in the name of "policy".

The game shows you the next 3 incoming blocks and allows you to store a block for later use. It's not purely reaction to random blocks one at a time (that would probably be pretty lame anyway). When you have the advance notice of the next 3 blocks, yes, it's going to take you time to learn recognition, but once you have that developed you can move at a high speed because of the mental buffering you'll be able to perform. You'll be dealing with block 1 and 2 while reacting to the third block and planning what to do next. And like Dude Butts said, at that level of practice/skill/experience you'll have plans laid out ahead of time for how to deal with certain block combinations relative to the tower you're building. Being able to stock a block helps you to optimize for a high score while also giving you some ammunition to prevent a really screwy pattern of incoming blocks from messing you up too bad. 'Recognition > Reaction' sets can be developed and trained until they're second nature. If you want to argue that some people develop that kind of thing faster than others, I'll let you have that. However, if it takes one person 4500 hours and another 4200 hours to get to that skill level, that 300 hour difference, which is a lot of time by most standards (37.5 days of 8hrs/day worth of practice), is probably not that big a deal to someone that already was willing to invest 4200 hours of their life into something they liked. And of course, those 300 hours have to be spent with serious effort. 300 hours to one person wont achieve the results that 300 hours for another person will. That's not talent, but rather knowing how to train, or having learned how to learn. Time efficiency, chunking, knowing when additional time into one tested skill isn't worth as much as time spent training another tested skill, etc. Sometimes skill at one task transfers directly to another task. Sometimes the effort you put into learning the skill will help you learn a completely unrelated skill faster, even if what you learned doesn't directly transfer to the new task.

Do we know if Sdive still gets something on CH? IIRC, 2K/2S are getting vertical hitbox buffs so you can't low profile under them anymore. I consider this a bug fix more than a buff because I thought it was absolutely stupid, just like Kdive and Sdive getting stuff on CH now when they didn't before. They already prorate, and Sdive scales really hard on top of that, so why do you only get a combo when RCing an air hit? Just adding more forced prorates on top of prorates. Air Hit Sdive > RC > optimized combo is like 80 damage. We get more damage off of a ****ing throw RC, and it's not like it's airthrow only either. Anyway, having Elphelt roll under 2K was bogus when considering she could also roll through Desperation and Fortissimo because of the projectile invul. Glad that's gone. Any mention on if any of the dives get extra properties when fully charged? Any mention of Hdive being different like in the 1st test? Any mention of how the extra active frames affect SM (if they're still there)? Did they come out of startup or recovery? I'd love it if the grounded version started on frame 17 so I could throw bursts out of shit like 2S. STBT-H buff is huge. CH 5H now leads to massive unprorated damage in the corner (CH 5H > STBT-H > j.D > VCL > loop), and CH 2H is almost as good (has the prorate though). It might not be as easy to fish for compared to +R because we don't have the same f.S (it's -9 instead of +5), but you bait them into going over or under your pressure, then CH 5H if they try to go under. It also helped more when the threat of CH 6H scared people into trying to go low... The buff should also help with 5D corner combos. Pretty hyped for the new STBT-H.

I'll happily play in 2f delay compared to a connection that fluctuates wildly between 4-7f at absolute best. Though yeah, rollback allowing delay of as low as 1f would be pretty sweet.

Just wait until the ISPs are forced to give us non-shitty internet for an affordable rate. The netcode could be better, but this will still help out a great deal.

*Sigh* I just wrote up a very detailed post and Dustloop decided to eat it for no reason. I'll try to give you the short version: You want to use Note to press him to not use Little Eddie. Shoot it near the ground 98% of the time to try to kill Little Eddie, which means he's going to either use the traversal move to get him to dodge it, or he'll unsummon. Once the note gets close he'll Drunkard Shade. If you're at the right spacing (don't Note from too close - try to do it at 2/3 screen or more) you can dash over the Note to punish Zato, but from too far away the best you'll get is HCL for knockdown. If you have meter you can YRC for an airdash confirm over the note though. This also kinda works vs Leo. If he's in stance (allowing him to use the counter) shoot a Note along the gorund from about 2/3 screen away. He can't jump over it or block it, so he has to reflect it. You can now dash over it and punish, though just like with Zato if you're too far away the best you'll get is HCL. If you extend too far in either of these situations you'll eat a CH 6P into a combo. While BeautifulDude has a strong neutral game, his high/low mixup is actually really predictable. If he's above a certain vertical height when coming at you with j.K, he's 99% of the time going for another j.K. 6K is now pretty easy to react to, so you mostly need to watch out for his command throws. The last time I played against him, almost all of his damage came from confirms off of the Counter Hits I let him get away with in neutral and Damned Fang into Unblockable (I hate that you can't burst from OTG because of the throw). Also, he plays pretty safe, so if you get in on him and he confirms that you're not dropping your pressure in some stupid way, he's going to Dead Angle. I don't like the use of that particular airdash pressure string into a throw attempt. When they block the j.P you want to go into 2K to not leave a gap, or j.D to try to mix them up, or VCL YRC as a frametrap if you think they'll disrespect you. In the corner, that frame trap is going to lead to serious damage with a VCL loop because of the RISC you build with the pressure string and the lack of proration on the VCL. However, this airdash string also gets blown up by FDing the first two hits (someone skinny like Zato will probably make the third j.K whiff, so he'll get a definite punish). If you want to throw off of this you'll want to use different strings, and to prevent them from being conditioned you'll want to be using different strings from time to time anyway. *Edit* To add to this a little, a dive at the end of this string isn't going to hit because you're too low (someone that knows the matchup will disrespect on reaction), and dives are slower than j.D so it's even easier to disrespect than that option. You're only going to catch someone with Dive > throw if they're really scared to hit a button. You'd also want to use Kdive instead in this instance since it recovers 3 frames faster than Pdive. j.K > j.P > j.S > j.K - the j.K at the end barely connects, and only if you get the string going fast enough after the airdash starts up. Use for similar purposes as the string ending in j.P, but you can't really j.D at the end for a mixup. The high/low in this case is more the j.K at the end. j.K > j.S > j.H - the j.H whiffs depending on how early you start the string and how fast you chain. This is the one that's most likely to allow you to throw, but only do it when you know they're scared, and try to condition with a non-whiff j.H first. Most people will attempt to throw when they think you'll land and they'll get away with it because you'll either leave the gap, or wont (meaning they're still in block stun and 5H wont come out). In most situations you can land into 2P and tick throw off of that anyway. Also, don't be afraid to tick-throw off of Note from time to time. You can also get away with walk-up throw if you condition them to not counter poke by using max-range meaty 6P oki, but that's pretty matchup specific and doesn't give you as much of a reward as before anyway (still good reward, but limited because of your meterless combo tools at that range - you're almost definitely going to have to use 5H > j.H > Sdive, and Sdive will scale your combo pretty bad on top of 6P's prorate). I'll occasionally drop pressure on a dash in j.K/j.S to go for throw, but you rarely want to do this. The reward isn't worth the risk most of the time. It's the reward you get by scaring them into disrespecting you that you want. That leads to VCL YRC actually hitting them on oki instead of your following mixup, which is huge damage in the corner.

"Free throws" was a basketball analogy right? How do you get better at something where there is zero player interaction (they can't interfere with your attempt to make that basket)? Practice. However, even though what he's trying to learn right now doesn't have the same kind of difficulties, there are things you're overlooking when he puts it into practice. I don't even mean baiting bursts, or learning to vary block strings. Learning to do difficult inputs gets even more difficult when done from neutral situations you didn't practice from. A basic example is going from block to 6P if you practiced 6P while walking forward. A more complex example is I-No dashing in, then landing into 2S > 623146K. Practicing 2S > 632146K is one thing since you can input it as 63[2S]2146K, but if you're doing 665>2S>632146K the input is a lot harder. When you're at the point where you can do stuff in training mode without much trouble, you'll want to start throwing in some vs CPU time. If you notice that you're flubbing an input under certain circumstances, replicate them in training mode to train that muscle memory too. Early on you'll need plenty of time with vs CPU to make sure you can do the things you want to do from any position. Maybe you have trouble doing certain inputs facing left, and while you get it in training mode you can't do them in a match when you don't have enough focus to think about how you're doing the input. Anyway, depending on the combo (which also then depends on the matchup within the game), practicing blindfolded can help. You might have combos that require certain kinds of adjustment based on screen position, character weight, and hitbox, but some aspects of combos will stay the same. I might have to modify what I do after I-No's HCL 6FRC6 based on the situation each time I do it, but the input for HCL 6FRC6 is going to be the same, and the timing only varies depending on the attack level of the move I chained it from. It's a decent candidate for practicing blindfolded and it's a pretty ****ing hard string to do.

I posted about this stuff back on the 2nd page of this thread. The lower bound for damage (against pot, will most likely need to remove one rep of c.S > VCL) is 210, which is 50% health. The upper bound (Chipp) is 291. Meterless. As a punish for jumping away from our throw that only would have done 60 damage (55 because scaling), or up to 160 if we had RC'd it into a combo. If only we got combos even 1/2 this good off of CH 6H at mid screen. : (

That makes me happy. Can't afford it right now, but it's definitely affordable so maybe I can get it soon after launch.

You can't jump cancel 6P, so you'd need to combo it into c.S or 5H in most cases.

Awww man, base price of 4536 Yen + domestic shipping + their service fee + overseas shipping... this is going to cost like $100 isn't it.

Ebten exclusive... what does that mean for someone in the United States who wants to buy it? And holy crap, 4 CDs? Sweet.

If you condition 2P > tic throw, then 2P > 2H will catch mashing, and 2P > 2S can catch jump attempts. It's a true block string, but if you're trying to jump you're not blocking lo... oh wait... fuck. Anyway, I-No had some good frame traps before, and 1.1 should help a little bit. Since STBT-H will allow follow ups on regular hit, CH 5H will actually be worth something, so stuff like '2P > 5H', or '5K > 5H', or even max range '2H > recover > 5H' will be good because you can combo into STBT-H for some corner push and damage. It'll be even better than 2H CH since 5H doesn't have the 80% prorate. This was a tactic I used a hell of a lot in +R because f.S was amazing for setting up a 5H/6H trap. If they try to go low under your f.S zoning, CH 5H for corner push into 50%, and if they went over it you had a CH 6H for corner push into 50%. Current f.S isn't as good for this (5H wont reach at max f.S range), but maybe you can still surprise people with it from time to time at close f.S range if you delay the 5H slightly (since f.S is so - on block) to make them think you just messed up when you wanted c.S. Normally I wouldn't suggest such a thing, but getting f.S when you want c.S is so goddamn common with I-No that people will probably fall for this.

BS does not prorate tension gain like Faultless, Dead Angles, or Cancels, but from my testing I'm pretty sure it does increase tension pulse by about as much as IB does.

That would be j.2H, but her j.H also has a good hitbox. I don't have enough experience in Xrd to really comment on this matchup (I've played against May a handful of times online and once in tournament), but in AC the matchup was like a 7:3 and in +R it's like 65:35. It's really hard to counter poke against May, and she used to stun us in 1.5 regular combos or 1 CH 6P. Overall I feel like the matchup should be a lot better in Xrd, but her hitboxes are still tough to deal with. To answer your question, you're probably not going to be able to 6P through her j.H or j.2H unless you're spaced perfectly and time it perfectly. It's really risky to try. A lot of her moves are slow to start, so you'll want to IB to create gaps and FD to push her out and make her whiff, depending on the situation.

Yeah, as good as he is, sometimes I wish he'd stop being flashy for the sake of flashy and just use something simple that happens to be the right move. It's fun as hell to watch him, but it's painful to watch him lose because he's using j.D FDC in situations where it's not necessary.

Combos off of VCL YRC oki when the other player gets hit by the VCL itself definitely benefit from this. Linking j.D into a VCL loop in the corner is like 250 damage, whereas if you hit them too fast with a less optimal move (like j.S) by accident instead of confirming the hit, you're looking at like 200 (proration + not getting the most optimized follow up).