Everyone has a fighting chance
Today, we have Venom cueing up a ton of hits in this combo video from Sean English. The second of his Venom combo videos, this one aims to be more impractical than the inaugural in the series.
The results are some heavy combos that puts proper english on the opponents, sending them caroming every which way across the screen. My personal favorite combo comes at 3:30, but your mileage may vary. Either way, there’s something for everyone in this combo video.
Source: Sean English
While XusesGB has been doing a great job in keeping the community abreast of what high level players are doing during their online training, he has not forgotten the little guys. Recently he asked the community to submit their own personal best rounds, and they most certainly delivered.
The result of the submissions are some amazing displays of talent from people that often don’t get their own time in the spotlight. The rounds range from amazing perfects to incredible against-all-odds comebacks.
This is the second and most certainly won’t be the last of Xuses’ community compilations, so make sure to be on the lookout for the next submission window.
Source: XusesGB
While XusesGB has been doing a great job in keeping the community abreast of what high level players are doing during their online training, he has not forgotten the little guys. Recently he asked the community to submit their own personal best rounds, and they most certainly delivered.
The result of the submissions are some amazing displays of talent from people that often don’t get their own time in the spotlight. The rounds range from amazing perfects to incredible against-all-odds comebacks.
This is the second and most certainly won’t be the last of Xuses’ community compilations, so make sure to be on the lookout for the next submission window.
Source: XusesGB
Editor’s note: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the writer and do not reflect Shoryuken.com as a whole.
“Download complete.”
Those are the words that sent everyone into a riot at Evolution 2016, when Seon-woo “Infiltration” Lee claimed his place at the top of the standings in Street Fighter V. As first seed, Infiltration was the expected victor and he had–without question or surprise–conquered every challenge to do so.
To be perfectly transparent, I have been an Infiltration fanboy before he became the Infiltration that everyone knows so well. I remember being in an arcade near Isu station in Seoul in 2010 when he walked in and started dominating. When I later found out through Ryan “Laugh” Ahn that Infiltration was attending Evolution 2010, I went around proclaiming that Infiltration would make Top 3 that year. The typical response I received for my pick was, “Who?”
Six years later, people know who. People even know why I would say this man–whom I am lucky enough to call a friend–is one of the best players in the world. But let me tell you this: I don’t expect him to win Capcom Cup.
The Strong Start
In Street Fighter V, no one came out of the gates swinging like Infiltration did. His first six tournaments saw six wins–three of which were international events, while the others were local Korean events. He qualified for Capcom Cup the first chance he got at Final Round. He finished second alongside Fuudo and Xian at Street Fighter V Crash in Seoul. He looked dominant even in the events he didn’t win.
It’s very evident that he came out wanting to make a statement about how he would remain the gatekeeper in Street Fighter V. He started the beta playing Nash and had no character crisis at any point. He dedicated himself to fully learning how to play Nash in the way people saw him play Akuma in the Street Fighter IV series.
Come Evolution 2016, he was the hands-down favorite against the entire field. When he clutched it out in an exciting grand finals against his teammate Fuudo–which featured him fighting out of loser’s bracket after Fuudo beat him in Winner’s Finals–there was no question who was the best. Had Capcom Cup been the week after Evo, everyone and their parents would have put Infiltration at the end of their brackets.
The All-Star Break
Growing up in the 1990’s, I was a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. I remember every season in around June, the standings would have the Cardinals either in command or in the running for their division. I would always look at that with hope. My grandmother, ever the cynic, would remind me of their constant failings by saying, “Just wait until the All-Star Break. That’ll change.”
Without fail, she was right. Every year, after the All-Star Game, the Cardinals would begin an implacable slide from first to worst and miss out on the playoffs. While Infiltration has no worries about missing the playoffs in his situation, everything that has happened since has been quasi-reminiscent of the Cardinals of yesteryear.
Standing on top of the world at Evolution 2016, Infiltration stated that he would take a much-needed break. While he had been doing a lot of playing and traveling and needed a break, I was worried about how long a break we were talking.
Last time, I talked about the parallels between Xiaohai’s travel and recent success and Infiltration’s in 2012. Well, as much as the parallel rings true for Xiaohai right now, the inverse of the parallel is seeming to ring true for Infiltration. Where the Chinese contender has been traveling, playing a lot, and succeeding, the Korean champion has been resting on his laurels, slacking on finding competition, and struggling.
His very first event back after Evolution was ESL’s Brooklyn Beatdown–a full two and a half months later–where he finished 13th. As follow-up to that, he finished 9th at Southeast Asia Major in Singapore. It’s fitting to note that in the former event, none other than Xiaohai finished in the top spot–thus illustrating the point even further.
These are already cracks in the armor of one of SFV’s leading competitors. But that’s not all.
Who’s His Competition?
I’d be more apt to overlook some of this as growing pains in the current meta if Infiltration was training harder. The problem is that he is not training at a level even remotely close to players like Hajime “Tokido” Taniguchi or Xiaohai. He isn’t even coming close.
His first tournament win since returning to the circuit was at a local event in the United Arab Emirates, where the only player close to his level is Big Bird. While playing events in Korea, where he is the best by far, doesn’t mean much either, it would at least show him practicing. He hasn’t attended any ArcadeStream events since week 2 of the game’s release, and has only served as a commentator at the Spirit Zero events since Magic Stick Cup.
When he does load the game up, Infiltration only hits training mode. While he is setting up various situations in Training Mode, he is not applying them into real game situations. He has not played a single ranked match since March. While the merits of online play can be argued ad infinitum, when rivaling Tokido’s training regimen alone, Infiltration’s simply doesn’t add up. You cannot simply set up situations on yourself and expect other people to set them up the same ways.
His Demons Are Stronger
There were players obviously giving Infiltration trouble before his break. Momochi had his number when they played at Street Fighter V Crash, beating him in every game they played over the course of the event. Tokido was giving Infiltration problems–ultimately breaking past the titan at CEO this year. Fuudo gave him problems at Evolution 2016.
If everyone had taken breaks and the tournament circuit shut down leading up to Capcom Cup, I would say this would be no problem. But there was only a break for Infiltration. Everyone else kept working. If they were giving him problems then, I’m worried to see what they’ll do to him at Capcom Cup.
Pocket Characters?
It’s impossible to count Infiltration out however. We know this man very well from his time in the spotlight. We saw him play virtually every character in Ultra Street Fighter IV by the end of its life cycle. In Korea, players had already witnessed him playing Alex and F.A.N.G successfully in tournament.
He is very quick to absorb, understand, and execute various characters at a high level. Only a year into the game is a bit risky to throw new characters out into the wild, but if anyone is capable of doing it on the biggest stage, he is. If he has any new characters in training in secret for Capcom Cup, I’d expect to see them if the brackets shift that way.
Getting Rid of the Rust
It looks like Infiltration is trying to get the rust off from his break. He has attended three events in the last month, and is already confirmed to be in attendance for Canada Cup this week. With a month to go before Capcom Cup, we can expect the number of events he plays to ramp up a bit in an effort to regain his bearings. Will this regrouping time be enough? That remains the question.
Final Thoughts
It’s very hard to bet against Infiltration, but I’ve decided to rock the boat and do it anyway this year. He is a great player and, on the top of his game, he’d be a shoe-in for the win. The truth is, he’s not at the top of his game right now, and I’m not sure he has enough time to get his groove back.
However, he is a clutch player in a room full of killers. He thrives under pressure, and I can definitely see him getting top 8 at Anaheim. The rest will ultimately depend on how hard he pushes himself over the next month.
While the United States has typically been the hotbed of high level Mortal Kombat play, Europe is speedily catching up. The ESL has begun hosting a Community Cup in Europe featuring top players from various regions across the continent, and the event is showing diversity from across Europe as well as the spectrum of characters.
Although the event is single elim, this week’s replays features players from Russia, Greece, and the UK. It also features characters such as Sektor and Grandmaster Sub-Zero that aren’t often seen in high-level play. If you are wanting to see how Europe is getting down in this game, then you owe it to yourself to watch these replays.
Source: PNDK&M via Roy Arkon
The Big House 5 was where Leffen began dealing with his visa issues to the United States. Without much in the way of travel, the Godkiller of Super Smash Bros. Melee spent a lot of time practicing in Sweden in solitude.
This month found his visa issues resolved, and a flurry began to make William Hjelte’s attendance of the tournament he was previous denied entry for possible. He ultimately made it, and Red Bull chronicled his return to the event. In the interview, they discuss Leffen’s return to the States, and his feelings in dealing with the fiasco he inadvertently found himself in.
Source: Red Bull eSports
Editor’s note: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the writer and do not reflect Shoryuken as a whole.
[Feature image: Xiaohai, second from the left]
Today–with us inching closer and closer to Capcom Cup–I feel like it’s a proper time to start analyzing the players that are going to be taking part and trying to fight their way toward a six-figure grand prize and the inherent bragging rights. In the inaugural session, I intend to talk about someone that has forced his name to the forefront, Team Qanba Douyu’s Zhuojun “Xiaohai” Zeng.
Xiaohai has been a player whose name, throughout the course of his career, has been on the tip of people’s tongues but not the first name to blurt out. That is starting to change this year, but he has not quite reached that pinnacle where his name is a knee-jerk reaction to the question, “Who is the absolute best?”
The Xiaohai that was on display at SoCal Regionals was seeking to change that. Having won the Wednesday Night Fights King of Fighters XIV and Street Fighter V events just prior to SCR, only to show up and replicate the same feat when it counted even more, shows that he has the skill and the understanding of the game to do it. Will that be enough for this Chinese player to become the man to beat next year?
Early Success
Most people didn’t know who Xiaohai was for the longest time because, simply put, he didn’t play games that mattered in the grand scheme in the West. Coming from Mainland China, the predominant game was King of Fighters ’98, which was only taken the most seriously in China, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, and Mexico. Given that, it’s obvious that no one in North America would know or really care about him. Matter of fact, the first time I personally heard his name was when he was playing exhibitions to showcase the Chinese free-to-play fighter Xuandou Zhiwang in 2011. I only discovered this tidbit by actually residing in China at the time.
Basing his success off of a game that was slept on in the West is a fatal error, however. In 2007, Xiaohai emerged as champion of KOF98 at Super Battle Opera in Japan. Despite SBO being part luck, one does not simply walk into Japan for a prestigious tournament and win the championship without a fight. If that’s not enough, he also was the final champion of The King of Fighters XIII at Evolution in 2014. Xiaohai has proven that he can handle high pressure situations with grace, and should he do so in Anaheim, he will be hard to root against.
Streakiness Strikes
I state that he has to do so, because simply put, he has the capability to beat himself with questionable and risky play. When he is hot, he is hot, and when he is not, well… you get the picture. Xiaohai began to exhibit this trait from his very emergence into the international scene. Outside of China, his play in Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition was unknown and untested. Making his debut at Evolution 2012 and subsequently making Top 8 put to bed any doubts regarding his ability to play against the best in the world.
But then top 8 reared its ugly head. Xiaohai narrowly found himself outside top 3 based off insanely terrible play–a meterless heavy spiral arrow right into Bruce “GamerBee” Hsiang. Had he tried any other approach, we may be talking about different results in the event. As it were, for performing an unsafe move in a game where risk/reward was so easily mitigated, he exited in 4th place.
If this were the lone evidence of streaky play, people would be much more willing to turn a blind eye to that performance. Sadly, not a lot has changed, as in a round table featuring UltraDavid, Sajam, Michael Martin, Tasty Steve, and James Chen, the general consensus on Xiaohai was that he is, in fact, streaky. This was heading in to SoCal Regionals, so obviously the gap in 4 years hasn’t been bridged quite enough.
During Street Fighter V Crash in Korea, his team–GZ Dojo–found him struggling more than his compatriots, Haojun “Dakou” Su, and Abao. While he was struggling to find wins, the latter two were the proverbial glue to hold their team together and clean up. His struggles could ultimately have contributed to GZ Dojo’s finish outside of Top 4–the only sponsored team to miss the final day.
The Travel Factor
Perhaps one of the biggest factors that could be attributed to his inconsistent play could be his practice habits, which could not be helped in some ways. Being a citizen of the People’s Republic of China has often hindered his ability to make events outside of East Asia. Even his attendance of Evolution 2012 was an unknown, due to the difficulty of Chinese obtaining visas from the United States outside of student visas.
Given those limitations, he has been mostly been relegated to practicing against players in arcades in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Hong Kong. Online play, in China, is shaky at best, and is only good in close proximity–if you are even lucky to have found players that own consoles in the midst of what was a ban on sales of home consoles in the communist country until 2015. Given all these compounded issues, Xiaohai didn’t have much luck in finding quality practice–usually relying on his and training partner Dakou’s abilities to play multiple characters well to learn various match-ups he would face in tournaments.
This year has changed his travel issues obviously, as he’s been seen globetrotting the world as much–if not more–than perennial travelers such as Seon-woo “Infiltration” Lee and Hajime “Tokido” Taniguchi. His consistent results of making typically no worse than top 16 can easily be attributed to more practice against a smorgasbord of play styles and characters. Just like the aforementioned Infiltration–who struggled in his overall performance until being sponsored by Western Wolves and gaining the subsequent ability to travel more–the factor of attending more events as certainly helped Xiaohai elevate his game beyond middling status, which has found him qualified early for Capcom Cup and currently sitting in 2nd place in the world rankings. He also is one of only a few players to have won multiple majors this year–joining the likes of Infiltration, Tokido, Daigo Umehara, GamerBee, and Justin Wong.
Who He Played to Get to the Top
Here’s Xiaohai, sitting at the top of the heap; here’s who Xiaohai had to topple to get to the top of his respective heaps. His win in G-League was obviously–being in China–going to be comprised of a weaker field. Having to face down Xian–who admittedly held a disadvantage in the Cammy match-up by using F.A.N.G and Ibuki–makes the Grand Finals a cake walk for Zeng, despite Xian’s incredible skill on winning with low tier characters. He also had to dispatch Fuudo–one of the best R. Mikas in the world–and GO1–one of the best Chun-Lis in the world as of G-League. Not only did he dispatch them, but he did so decisively with none of those matches having less than a two-win gap between himself and his opponents.
SoCal Regionals saw him play shakier opponents. Grand Finals saw him play Tatsuya Haitani, whom he defeated in Winner’s Finals. The results saw Haitani reset the bracket on Xiaohai in a 3-0 victory. If Xiaohai is a player viewed as inconsistent, the round table at SCR commented that Haitani himself doesn’t seem comfortable within the game yet. For Xiaohai to struggle against the Japanese Necalli when it mattered most is very telling about his aforementioned inconsistency.
Recovery
If there existed questions about his consistency, he was certainly trying to answer them on Sunday. In KOFXIV, Xiaohai answered back to ArcadeShock’s Reynald–who put him into loser’s bracket–decisively. By the end of the set, Xiaohai had broken down Reynald’s problematic Mian in such a way that Reynald looked visibly frustrated and forlorn. The runner up resorted to grasping at straws to attempt to find an answer to Xiaohai, by subtituting Mature for Chin, then Mature for Mian, then reversed that decision and ran Mian/Nakoruru/Chin to his doom. By the end, it was clear that Xiaohai had entered Reynald’s head and found Reynald sitting in the corner when he arrived.
Despite the reset in Street Fighter V, Xiaohai recovered brilliantly, and shut down Haitani’s Necalli in similar fashion to what he did in KOF. Whereas most flowers wilt under this pressure, Xiaohai bloomed. His reaction to adversity was telling, and will be his greatest asset going into the throes of a stacked bracket in Anaheim.
Final Thoughts
Betting on Xiaohai–much with his play style–comes with inherent risks. He can falter, he can make bad decisions, and he can get inside his head to much. But have you seen him when he’s in someone else’s head?
Come Capcom Cup, I expect Xiaohai to place top 3 at least. Yes, he is a shark in a pool of sharks, and can be eaten in the midst of the greatest test of his career. But–after Canada Cup–if he maintains the fire that he displayed at SoCal Regionals, this very well could be his time to be king of the hill.
Degica Games is keeping busy on the promotional trail of their newest title Blade Arcus, and now fans of the game have even more to look forward to, come Thursday.
Firstly, Thursday will see the release of a new patch for Blade Arcus: this patch’s goal is to improve the netcode of the game. There are no balance updates involved in this patch.
Secondly, Degica Games will have none other than Evil Geniuses’ Justin Wong on their Thursday Night Fights stream this week. The stream will start at 7:00 PM PST, and will feature Wong playing some Blade Arcus and Koihime Enbu matches, along with semi-hourly giveaways. If you are interested in how to play either of these titles, watching one of the best in the business at breaking down game mechanics will certainly be a helpful tool!
Source: Mitchell Scott of Degica Games
This year has seen of rise of fighting games in the general esports scene. We have transcended previous highs with larger events, more exciting results, and even seeing partnership with major media channels such as ESPN and Yahoo!
In order to commemorate such accomplishments, the Esports Industry Awards has nominated Fighting Game Community events and alumni for various categories in their upcoming awards ceremony.
The most prominent one would most certainly be Evolution 2016 being nominated for Live Event of the Year. The event, which garnered over 5,000 entrants in Street Fighter V alone, a near sellout at Mandalay Bay Events Center, and 200,000 unique viewers on ESPN2, has a formidable chance of winning the award.
Other notable nominees are in categories such as New eSports Game of the Year (Street Fighter V), eSports Publisher of the Year (Capcom), eSports Game of the Year (Street Fighter V and Super Smash Bros.), Console Player of the Year (Gonzalo “ZeRo” Barrios, Adam “Armada” Lindgren, Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma, Nathan “Mister Crimson” Massol, and Justin Wong), and UK Player of the Year (Ryan “Prodigal Son” Hart and Benjamin “Problem X” Simon).
Source: Markman (Twitter)
It was recently discovered and revealed by both TOOLASSISTED and desk that Street Fighter V’s Urien has a glitch, in which he can not only combo into throw off of certain reflected projectiles, but he can do so from a full screen away. This is obviously unintentional, and will likely see a patch addressing that in the near future–but it still remains one of the craziest and most shocking glitches seen in Street Fighter V to date.
While initially it was hypothesized that the glitch was triggered by the opponent performing a kara-cancelled projectile, desk has uploaded a video dispelling those rumors. As explained in the video, two conditions cause the glitch to happen. Firstly, the opponent must do one normal move before discharging their projectile. Secondly, Urien must not perform any normal move prior to the reflected projectile hitting his opponent. If any of these two conditions are not met, the situation will result in the glitch not happening.
Another observation from desk is that the glitch is performed, the next hit following the projectile will not be damage-scaled. This shows that when the conditions are met–although the game will deduct damage from the opponent’s health bar–the game disregards the projectile as being connected within a combo.
Even still, desk believes that there is still more to the glitch, and needs further research. He thus, at the end of the video, asks the community to submit their research and questions to him for a planned follow-up to this video.
Source: desk