<a href="http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=124575" target="_blank">FACE-PUNCHED PART 1 (My first tourney experience)</a>
So after the tournament I decided I was going to practice harder. I reluctantly dumped the pad and got an arcade stick. At first I was dubious of the switch, an arcade stick was a foreign instrument to me. With the shape I was at first completely lost, I was less playing the game, as I was molesting the controller.
Poorly at that! (If I'm going to molest something, I may as well do it right!)
It was really frustrating at first. Shoryukens would often become hadokens, and I couldn't keep from jumping, all the time.
In fact the first time I ever played on stick was at an arcade. I was meeting up another player from some forum (You know how hard it is to find an arcade now a days? Especially one with a particular game to play? I had to hire three private investigators and a nerd-bloodhound.) and going to play some games.
I went early on purpose, I wanted to be able to get some practice in on the stick before the others got there. After practicing a bit the rest of them showed up. I switched to Remy, as a charge character he'd be much simpler to play for someone having trouble with the motions.
(A charge character in a fighting game is a character who can "charge" a move by a direction, usually back or down, for about two seconds and then hitting the opposite direction and a punch or a kick. A lot easier for a noob to a stick, since it requires no quarter circle, or half circle motions.)
I won a few rounds, but was outclassed by these players who could play on stick. What made it harder to want to stick to it was the fact I knew I would have done better on pad. It was like starting all over.
After awhile I got online, started playing through some of the newer clients. (Anyone here play on 2DF or GGPO? Hit me up!) I decided as I was making the move to joystick it would probably be better to play someone that needed more technical execution to get better at stick more quickly. I got over the months pretty proficient with most of the cast (sans maybe Ibuki) and I had decided on Makoto as my new main character.
Mostly for a few reasons. I had always liked Makoto, but I had never really tried to play her. (Okay, I must say I initially thought Makoto was a guy, until I saw her dizzy animation...but hey I mistake girls for guys all the time...ruined my career as a doctor.) Also Remy is a defensive character, he has to charge his moves so he has to either be still (charging down or down back) or retreating. You can hide the charge in moves, and even partition the charge so that you can charge a flash kick and then dash and do it, but still you can't really be hyper aggressive with him. So I decide it may round out my game to pick Makoto, who really wants to chase you around, and use her command grab.
For me, my Remy is a reactionary character, I waited to see what you were going to do, and then reacted. Jumped in? Maybe a projectile, or a flash kick. If you start parrying those, maybe an ex-kick. Just mix it up. I waited until I saw a mistake and then attacked.
For Makoto the allure was I could force poor decisions. I could push the offense and create situations were people have to make decisions on the fly over and over in quick succession. Many times this causes someone to do something they wouldn't normally do if they had more time to think. So I had my new character! It was tournament time!
A few weeks shy of a year from my first tournament experience I brought my stick this time, and didn't really play many tune up matches. (Truth be told, I arrived kind of late since I got lost on the way. My sense of direction is...well okay there is terrible, and then there is what my sense of direction is. It's like I invented yet a new way to fail, then executed it flawlessly. Especially considering it was at the <b>same place</b> as last year! I know, failure.)
But I think it let me go in without overthinking it or getting intmidated by seeing good players.
My first round was up, and the guy selected Ken.
Now a Ken selection in this game usually comes with a lot of connotations. Ken, like most blondes, was either awesome or terrible. A lot of players pick Ken for the familiarity with his moves, and his easy setups into super. This means also that quite a lot of them weren't all that good. Ken could be really, really good however in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, so I was cautious.
I was going to test him as the round began to see which he was.
Like last year, I was going to start the round off with an attack. I know, I know, you're thinking, why? Why Shadow Theory? It didn't work last time <i>twice.</i> But I thought if doing it twice didn't work, three times was even <i>MORE</i> ingenious! At some point the law of averages should dictate it will work! (Don't look at me like that, it made sense at the time.)
Makoto has a dash punch that I started the round with and the time it took her to get to Ken seemed like forever. I stood waiting for the parry. (If it happened I was probably going to eat a combo for my stupidity.) However it hit!
Maybe the ingenious thing about ingenious people is the fact that they keep doing stupid stuff, then eventually it works, making them look like they were right the whole time. (When they're still morons.)
Makoto can link her command grab off of the dash punch, so I grabbed him, did my combo to dash punch again and got the knockdown. From there I knew I was in control. My skills on the stick were still a bit wonky, and it caused an episode I call: "The Fear".
I had him stuck in the corner, and I wanted to go for an EX Tsurugi (sp?) right off the ground. If I did it immediately upon jumping, I really shortened the time he could counter it. But, I still had my issues with the stick and instead of doing the move I super jumped backwards, a full screen away, letting him out of the corner.
I was rather annoyed. It's hard to get a competent player into the corner and to lose that advantage because I jumped away? I thought about jumping back in, but Ken would just shoryuken me. I had given up the position!
Or had I?
I noticed the Ken player was still kneeling, a full screen a way. I dashed up once, just to see what he would do (Makoto has one of the fastest dashes in the game) and he stayed there. I dashed up again, risking the shoryu and he stayed in the corner! He was so afraid of making a decision and getting hit for it, he had let me re-corner him!
I was so happy, because it meant I had been confusing enough for him in previous rounds that he had apparently blanked as to a gameplan. (Sadly I would later found out he was President Bush's top adviser. See! I can be topical too.)
I won my first round! It was awesome! I had already improved on last year! (Which more goes to say that I really sucked the year before.)
I wandered out of the ballroom to go get a drink. I found out there were people playing games upstairs, including some of the players I knew, I had awhile for my next match so I thought I'd check it out. Little did I know, I was about to make an ass of myself. Accidentally, but still.
I never knew people played games out of their hotel rooms <i>during</i> the tournament. I suppose it's because not all the games start at the same time, and not every game is played on each day, so people not playing on one day just get in some nice casual play in the meantime. There were people playing Marvel vs Capcom 2, and there was a girl there. No one would play her because they wanted to stay warm for the tournament and I guess they feared that she, as a girl, wouldn't be a good person to practice with.
I don't play Marvel vs Capcom 2 competitively, but I do play it, so I thought I'd play her if no one else was going to.
One thing to know about Marvel vs Capcom 2 is it's an interesting community of gamers. MvC2 is one of the few fighting games that really is only played in tournaments in the United States. Predominately by people on either coast. It's also, really, really, thuggy. Like, oddly so. Matches go down between players with really big sidebets, upwards of a 1000 bucks! (Search Duc vs Sanford on youtube to see one at Evo where you can hear the crowd chanting like a soccer/football crowd) People talk a lot of trash (and they have a lingo all their own). Heck, it wasn't over Marvel but one of the good players on the east coast was shot! It's a really macho, in your face sort of crowd, who are fun to watch, but sort of scary to be in sometimes.
The little aside is necessary because I make an ass of myself trying to fit in. I was playing this girl, and I picked my characters and since it's a casual game I'm just focusing on having fun, getting rid of some of my stress between rounds. She beat one of my characters and had a large life lead, she linked Cable's super into itself on my next character nearly taking him out, and suddenly all the guys who didn't want to play her come to watch the game.
Here's some kid, about to lose to a girl! Even worse, a girl they all thought wasn't worth playing! So I suddenly felt this pressure not to lose, or well, not to lose badly. I could hear the trash talking starting, "Kid ain't got $%*(&", "How does it feel to get raped by a girl?" etc, etc.
I was being emasculated by a videogame! I got serious, used every trick I knew in the game, like, all two of them, and barely eeked out a win.
I got lost in the moment, hopped up and said (I cringe even in recollection):
"YOU JUST GOT RAPED BITCH!"
The room went silent.
Like really silent.
The kind of Silent everyone goes when they realize the forgot the wedding cake at the bakery.
The kind of Silent everyone goes when they see the red bead of a sniper rifle laser sight on their chest.
The kind of Silent everyone goes when they are told that they have anal cancer.
<i>That</i> kind of silent.
I was mortified! For a second I had just lost my bearings and forgot I was playing a girl (who would much more likely take offense to being called a bitch than a guy, ironically enough) and that it was just casual. The atmosphere had turned so negative that I was just was...I don't know...
I apologized immediatley, and the girl looked at me for a long time, like she was trying to think of what to say.
Then busted out laughing.
A sigh of relief. She said it wasn't a big deal (which it was, I never talk like that in games! I'm usually so nice, Marvel is evil I tell you, evil!) and said she actually appreciated more being treated just like one of the guys.
I said my goodbyes and headed back down to the tournament.
I won my next match, I forget which character I faced, and was knocked into the losers bracket by a Yun. My next match was against a Pink Chun.
Chun Li is a hard matchup, she's the best character in the game and all of her regular moves have wicked priority. She can stuff a lot of things with her back fierce and her cancel into super does tons of damage. (And she has so many things she can combo it off of!)
It's hard because Makoto needs to get up close, and that back fierce punished me every time I tried to dash in. Jumping in was safer, as I can parry the fierce then and try to do something, but it was really hard.
Using my face to block her kicks for two rounds didn't work. And I lost.
I was out! I didn't even place in the money or anything. I had won a couple, which was a great improvement.
It was a really fun time, but I don't know, maybe tournament gaming is a little too pressure filled for me. I love it, but among all of the players I don't know if I love to the extent they do, to put that much time into it. I would miss the next year of the tournament due to a tornado, and this next year will maybe be my next time back. Maybe to play in Street Fighter IV, but it will have only been out about a month the time the tournament happens, so who knows.
The great thing about tournaments though is getting to play a lot of people who like fighting games. Where else do you find people who like 2D fighting games now a days? If you run into someone they may play Tekken, Soul Calibur, or Smash, but how many people just want to get in a set of Capcom vs SNK 2 now?
So that aspect of it is very cool, but now with online play becoming more viable (2dfighter.com and ggpo.net ftw!) I can get matches in without having to pay to get my butt kicked, which may be enough for me.
Also moving for school has put me far away from the people I used to play with, and everyone in my new place loves FPS games.
Though with BlazBlue, KoFXII, SFIV, Tekken 6, etc all coming next year, hopefully some more people will join in on the fun!
I hope to be able to instill "The Fear" at least one more time.
If all else fails I can always get a hockey mask and a machete.
So after the tournament I decided I was going to practice harder. I reluctantly dumped the pad and got an arcade stick. At first I was dubious of the switch, an arcade stick was a foreign instrument to me. With the shape I was at first completely lost, I was less playing the game, as I was molesting the controller.
Poorly at that! (If I'm going to molest something, I may as well do it right!)
It was really frustrating at first. Shoryukens would often become hadokens, and I couldn't keep from jumping, all the time.
In fact the first time I ever played on stick was at an arcade. I was meeting up another player from some forum (You know how hard it is to find an arcade now a days? Especially one with a particular game to play? I had to hire three private investigators and a nerd-bloodhound.) and going to play some games.
I went early on purpose, I wanted to be able to get some practice in on the stick before the others got there. After practicing a bit the rest of them showed up. I switched to Remy, as a charge character he'd be much simpler to play for someone having trouble with the motions.
(A charge character in a fighting game is a character who can "charge" a move by a direction, usually back or down, for about two seconds and then hitting the opposite direction and a punch or a kick. A lot easier for a noob to a stick, since it requires no quarter circle, or half circle motions.)
I won a few rounds, but was outclassed by these players who could play on stick. What made it harder to want to stick to it was the fact I knew I would have done better on pad. It was like starting all over.
After awhile I got online, started playing through some of the newer clients. (Anyone here play on 2DF or GGPO? Hit me up!) I decided as I was making the move to joystick it would probably be better to play someone that needed more technical execution to get better at stick more quickly. I got over the months pretty proficient with most of the cast (sans maybe Ibuki) and I had decided on Makoto as my new main character.
Mostly for a few reasons. I had always liked Makoto, but I had never really tried to play her. (Okay, I must say I initially thought Makoto was a guy, until I saw her dizzy animation...but hey I mistake girls for guys all the time...ruined my career as a doctor.) Also Remy is a defensive character, he has to charge his moves so he has to either be still (charging down or down back) or retreating. You can hide the charge in moves, and even partition the charge so that you can charge a flash kick and then dash and do it, but still you can't really be hyper aggressive with him. So I decide it may round out my game to pick Makoto, who really wants to chase you around, and use her command grab.
For me, my Remy is a reactionary character, I waited to see what you were going to do, and then reacted. Jumped in? Maybe a projectile, or a flash kick. If you start parrying those, maybe an ex-kick. Just mix it up. I waited until I saw a mistake and then attacked.
For Makoto the allure was I could force poor decisions. I could push the offense and create situations were people have to make decisions on the fly over and over in quick succession. Many times this causes someone to do something they wouldn't normally do if they had more time to think. So I had my new character! It was tournament time!
A few weeks shy of a year from my first tournament experience I brought my stick this time, and didn't really play many tune up matches. (Truth be told, I arrived kind of late since I got lost on the way. My sense of direction is...well okay there is terrible, and then there is what my sense of direction is. It's like I invented yet a new way to fail, then executed it flawlessly. Especially considering it was at the <b>same place</b> as last year! I know, failure.)
But I think it let me go in without overthinking it or getting intmidated by seeing good players.
My first round was up, and the guy selected Ken.
Now a Ken selection in this game usually comes with a lot of connotations. Ken, like most blondes, was either awesome or terrible. A lot of players pick Ken for the familiarity with his moves, and his easy setups into super. This means also that quite a lot of them weren't all that good. Ken could be really, really good however in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, so I was cautious.
I was going to test him as the round began to see which he was.
Like last year, I was going to start the round off with an attack. I know, I know, you're thinking, why? Why Shadow Theory? It didn't work last time <i>twice.</i> But I thought if doing it twice didn't work, three times was even <i>MORE</i> ingenious! At some point the law of averages should dictate it will work! (Don't look at me like that, it made sense at the time.)
Makoto has a dash punch that I started the round with and the time it took her to get to Ken seemed like forever. I stood waiting for the parry. (If it happened I was probably going to eat a combo for my stupidity.) However it hit!
Maybe the ingenious thing about ingenious people is the fact that they keep doing stupid stuff, then eventually it works, making them look like they were right the whole time. (When they're still morons.)
Makoto can link her command grab off of the dash punch, so I grabbed him, did my combo to dash punch again and got the knockdown. From there I knew I was in control. My skills on the stick were still a bit wonky, and it caused an episode I call: "The Fear".
I had him stuck in the corner, and I wanted to go for an EX Tsurugi (sp?) right off the ground. If I did it immediately upon jumping, I really shortened the time he could counter it. But, I still had my issues with the stick and instead of doing the move I super jumped backwards, a full screen away, letting him out of the corner.
I was rather annoyed. It's hard to get a competent player into the corner and to lose that advantage because I jumped away? I thought about jumping back in, but Ken would just shoryuken me. I had given up the position!
Or had I?
I noticed the Ken player was still kneeling, a full screen a way. I dashed up once, just to see what he would do (Makoto has one of the fastest dashes in the game) and he stayed there. I dashed up again, risking the shoryu and he stayed in the corner! He was so afraid of making a decision and getting hit for it, he had let me re-corner him!
I was so happy, because it meant I had been confusing enough for him in previous rounds that he had apparently blanked as to a gameplan. (Sadly I would later found out he was President Bush's top adviser. See! I can be topical too.)
I won my first round! It was awesome! I had already improved on last year! (Which more goes to say that I really sucked the year before.)
I wandered out of the ballroom to go get a drink. I found out there were people playing games upstairs, including some of the players I knew, I had awhile for my next match so I thought I'd check it out. Little did I know, I was about to make an ass of myself. Accidentally, but still.
I never knew people played games out of their hotel rooms <i>during</i> the tournament. I suppose it's because not all the games start at the same time, and not every game is played on each day, so people not playing on one day just get in some nice casual play in the meantime. There were people playing Marvel vs Capcom 2, and there was a girl there. No one would play her because they wanted to stay warm for the tournament and I guess they feared that she, as a girl, wouldn't be a good person to practice with.
I don't play Marvel vs Capcom 2 competitively, but I do play it, so I thought I'd play her if no one else was going to.
One thing to know about Marvel vs Capcom 2 is it's an interesting community of gamers. MvC2 is one of the few fighting games that really is only played in tournaments in the United States. Predominately by people on either coast. It's also, really, really, thuggy. Like, oddly so. Matches go down between players with really big sidebets, upwards of a 1000 bucks! (Search Duc vs Sanford on youtube to see one at Evo where you can hear the crowd chanting like a soccer/football crowd) People talk a lot of trash (and they have a lingo all their own). Heck, it wasn't over Marvel but one of the good players on the east coast was shot! It's a really macho, in your face sort of crowd, who are fun to watch, but sort of scary to be in sometimes.
The little aside is necessary because I make an ass of myself trying to fit in. I was playing this girl, and I picked my characters and since it's a casual game I'm just focusing on having fun, getting rid of some of my stress between rounds. She beat one of my characters and had a large life lead, she linked Cable's super into itself on my next character nearly taking him out, and suddenly all the guys who didn't want to play her come to watch the game.
Here's some kid, about to lose to a girl! Even worse, a girl they all thought wasn't worth playing! So I suddenly felt this pressure not to lose, or well, not to lose badly. I could hear the trash talking starting, "Kid ain't got $%*(&", "How does it feel to get raped by a girl?" etc, etc.
I was being emasculated by a videogame! I got serious, used every trick I knew in the game, like, all two of them, and barely eeked out a win.
I got lost in the moment, hopped up and said (I cringe even in recollection):
"YOU JUST GOT RAPED BITCH!"
The room went silent.
Like really silent.
The kind of Silent everyone goes when they realize the forgot the wedding cake at the bakery.
The kind of Silent everyone goes when they see the red bead of a sniper rifle laser sight on their chest.
The kind of Silent everyone goes when they are told that they have anal cancer.
<i>That</i> kind of silent.
I was mortified! For a second I had just lost my bearings and forgot I was playing a girl (who would much more likely take offense to being called a bitch than a guy, ironically enough) and that it was just casual. The atmosphere had turned so negative that I was just was...I don't know...
I apologized immediatley, and the girl looked at me for a long time, like she was trying to think of what to say.
Then busted out laughing.
A sigh of relief. She said it wasn't a big deal (which it was, I never talk like that in games! I'm usually so nice, Marvel is evil I tell you, evil!) and said she actually appreciated more being treated just like one of the guys.
I said my goodbyes and headed back down to the tournament.
I won my next match, I forget which character I faced, and was knocked into the losers bracket by a Yun. My next match was against a Pink Chun.
Chun Li is a hard matchup, she's the best character in the game and all of her regular moves have wicked priority. She can stuff a lot of things with her back fierce and her cancel into super does tons of damage. (And she has so many things she can combo it off of!)
It's hard because Makoto needs to get up close, and that back fierce punished me every time I tried to dash in. Jumping in was safer, as I can parry the fierce then and try to do something, but it was really hard.
Using my face to block her kicks for two rounds didn't work. And I lost.
I was out! I didn't even place in the money or anything. I had won a couple, which was a great improvement.
It was a really fun time, but I don't know, maybe tournament gaming is a little too pressure filled for me. I love it, but among all of the players I don't know if I love to the extent they do, to put that much time into it. I would miss the next year of the tournament due to a tornado, and this next year will maybe be my next time back. Maybe to play in Street Fighter IV, but it will have only been out about a month the time the tournament happens, so who knows.
The great thing about tournaments though is getting to play a lot of people who like fighting games. Where else do you find people who like 2D fighting games now a days? If you run into someone they may play Tekken, Soul Calibur, or Smash, but how many people just want to get in a set of Capcom vs SNK 2 now?
So that aspect of it is very cool, but now with online play becoming more viable (2dfighter.com and ggpo.net ftw!) I can get matches in without having to pay to get my butt kicked, which may be enough for me.
Also moving for school has put me far away from the people I used to play with, and everyone in my new place loves FPS games.
Though with BlazBlue, KoFXII, SFIV, Tekken 6, etc all coming next year, hopefully some more people will join in on the fun!
I hope to be able to instill "The Fear" at least one more time.
If all else fails I can always get a hockey mask and a machete.
Rotflmao 
