One of the fastest and most effective ways to improve as a fighting game player, regardless of the game, is learning when attacks can be punished and the ways in which you can go about properly doing so. Every time an unsafe move goes without being punished, it’s like throwing away what could have turned into hundreds of free damage. Since many punishes are specific not only to the character you’re playing, but the one you’re playing against, finding exact guides online can be difficult. This really brings home the importance of knowing how to create your own punishes effectively.
If you’re still in the dark on how to go about doing something like this, Bafael has created a handy guide that covers the different sorts of punishes that are important to have ready in Ultra Street Fighter IV and the sort of thinking that goes into figuring out these things on your own. He also notes the importance of using punish opportunities to score advantageous positioning, because it’s not always just about pumping out big damage numbers.
Follow this link to check out previous Ultra Street Fighter IV Primers, as well as in-depth character tutorials from Bafael.
The folks at OverClocked ReMix recently started accepting submissions for an upcoming album dedicated to Community Effort Orlando 2015. This album will be similar to the one that they released during Apex 2015 earlier this month.
As this year’s tournament is set to be held in June, we’ve still got plenty of time before we’ll be filling our earholes with some sweet fighting-inspired tracks, but it’s exciting to see the folks at OverClocked ReMix involved with such a major event.
Here’s the tentative list of games from which the album will draw its inspiration:
Ultra Street Fighter 4
Super Smash Bros. Melee
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3
Killer Instinct
Tekken Tag Tournament 2
Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-
Persona 4 Arena Ultimax
Divekick
Mortal Kombat X
There’s no confirmed group of contributing artists at the moment because submissions are still open, so if you’ve got a relevant track that you’ve been working on or know someone who has, have them head over the OverClocked ReMix forums to check out the guidelines for getting it into the right hands.
In order to highlight Arc System Works’ most popular fighting game franchise, Team Spooky’s NerdJosh recently started hosting private Guilty Gear sessions featuring both Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- and Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus. These events have come to be called SoCasuals after their region of origin, which is honestly pretty catchy.
While many of these matches come in the form of first-to-five sets, which NerdJosh often streams, the dedicated YouTube playlist is packed with plenty of other footage to sate even the heartiest Guilty Gear hunger. To get a taste of what you can expect from the stream, as well as the archives, check out this set between the aforementioned nerd himself and Foo.
You’ll find the full playlist here. If you want to catch the matches live, be sure to follow NerdJosh on Twitch. Please note that, since this is an in-house stream, viewers can expect a bit of NSFW language as well as alcohol consumption from time to time because, hey, everyone can use a drink after getting nailed with a Potemkin Buster.
The inclusion of custom special attacks in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS turned a lot of heads when the game hit shelves. Naturally, everyone wanted to know what kind of tournament legality these moves would be seeing once major events started taking place.
As the one of the largest Smash events of the year, Apex 2015 obviously ran a tournament for the latest iteration of the popular Nintendo franchise, but didn’t have custom loadouts turned on. This is understandable because the game has only been out for a few months now and a last-second decision to allow some very different additions to characters would have mucked things up more than it was worth.
But with such a major event out of the way, now could be the time to start taking a serious look at these options, not only to allow different playstyles to surface for characters, but also to potentially dethrone the current top tiers.
At their most recent Smash Attack event, Team Spooky ended the night with an exhibition match between IQHQ|Gohan and Ho3K|JohnNumbers. What was special, however, is that both players were allowed to customize their character’s moveset.
One of the things that’s immediately noticeable is that Wii Fit Trainer becomes a completely different character with these options in play, sporting an up special that allows her to float around for an incredible amount of time, among other things. Captain Falcon’s customs, on the other hand, are a bit more subtle, as you can’t rightly take away the racer’s signature punch and still have him be the same character, though the adjustments are definitely there.
As you can see above–if you haven’t taken a serious look at custom moves before–this does stand to change the game quite a bit. Some have made the argument that time spent to unlock all of the moves on every console at an event wouldn’t be worth it. Luckily a single 3DS version of the game with all of the moves can transfer the data to every available Wii U, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
There is, of course, the concern of added setup time and “move checks” as opposed to button checks, which could make an already lengthy event stretch on longer than normal; that too is being looked into.
So what do you think about custom moves and their place in major tournaments? Let us know in the comments!
If you can’t wait to snag a copy of Mortal Kombat X in April, you’re not alone. With everything we’ve seen relating to the game lately, it’d take a person of stone to not feel the hype building just over the horizon. But that release is still two months away.
So now what?
To help fill the time between now and when we can all once again use Goro’s four arms to pummel our best friends, the folks at Elite Tournament Chile have put out a Kung Lao combo video that serves as an excellent segue into what’s to come. The exhibition features ten minutes of bone breaking badassery as Mcfly pushes the warrior of the bladed hat’s limits.
Chances are that you’ll see at least a few things in this video that you’ve never seen before, so give it a watch and let us know what you think.
Marvelo recently uploaded a team synergy video that shows how well Nova, Sentinel, and his signature Strider can play together in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Strider’s Vajra assist proves to be an excellent means for extending combos, though the real star of the show is Sentinel’s Drone assist, as it allows for Nova to keep the hits coming even after he’s activated a midscreen Super Nova. This makes for some impressive looking, efficient, and damaging corner carries.
Many of these combos remain meter neutral or only wind up costing a single bar in order to pull off, which is pretty impressive considering that they reliably push over one million damage. Check it out and let us know what you think.
It makes sense to be able to punish a move when it whiffs. It makes just as much sense to be able to punish a move when it’s blocked. But it doesn’t make much sense to be able to punish a move after it hits.
This isn’t the sort of thing that we see very often, but if you check out the clip below from Bafael, you’ll see that Cody can toss out a Bad Spray after being hit by Gouken’s roundhouse Tatsu and, sure enough, the aging fighter can’t block in time to keep from eating a mouthful of sand.
This isn’t the sort of thing that’s going to change the face of the matchup, but Gouken players should be wary of how they end their corner combos when facing off against the pinstriped pugilist.
Traditional fighting games rely heavily on footsies and, therefore, proper space control in order to secure victories. Games in the Super Smash Bros. series are much the same, but the constant running, stopping, jumping, and pivoting looks a lot different than the game of inches that we typically see unfold in titles like Ultra Street Fighter IV.
There’s a lot to the way movement works in Smash, so much so that going about figuring out what to do and when to do it can be downright discouraging to newcomers. To help break down how some of this plays out in Super Smash Bros. Melee, Kevin “PewPewU” Toy has created a playlist of in-depth tutorials on the subject. In the videos below, you’ll learn about Shield Stops, Run Cancels, No Impact Landing, and a lot more.
If Apex 2015 made you go out and grab a GameCube to get in on the Melee action, or dig that dusty one you already own out of the attic, be sure to check out these tutorials to help get things going as quickly as possible.
Landing an Instant Kill in Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- isn’t always the most practical option, but thanks to this video from juliodzulfigar, Sin Kiske now has several new methods to end a match with a bit of extra pizzazz.
How many methods, you ask? Seventeen.
On top of a demonstration for each kill combo, you’ll also find inputs, required positioning and meter, and anything else you might need to know regarding character specifics.
And as if getting hit by an Instant Kill isn’t demoralizing enough already, juliodzulfigar has also included a combo that leaves just enough space for Sin to toss out a taunt before carrying things to the knockout blow. It’s beautiful.
Back in 1995, Nintendo made a bold move: they cast aside the constraints of 2D and strode bravely into the foreground with their short-lived Virtual Boy system. It’s not that virtual reality was invented by Nintendo–far from it–but the company did make the mid-90s sensation affordable, and (sort of) portable. Sadly, this product only appealed to a small audience and was discontinued not even a full year later in early 1996.
Chances are that if you weren’t among the few who owned a Virtual Boy, you likely knew someone who did. I remember the day my neighbor got one: all the local kids gathered around while he unboxed it and tried different positions to sit in to get comfortable. The floor, on some pillows, on the couch, on his small desk–from which it promptly tumbled–eventually settling on the spacious kitchen table. When my turn finally came around, I was positively enthralled for all of thirty seconds before realizing that Mario’s hat and shirt should be red, but the rest of the world probably shouldn’t be.
That was the only time that I ever used the Virtual Boy and I never regretted not saving up my allowance to snag one of my own. It says a lot about the success of a cutting-edge game system if a kid who fancied himself a gamer didn’t have any interest in owning one. Maybe that’s because the game’s limited library just didn’t have the sort of options that would have made me want to pick one up.
While much of the world may have forgotten the Virtual Boy, the console still holds a small, loyal following to this day. So loyal, in fact, that members have gone so far as to produce a homebrew port of Street Fighter II for the system that barely was. While the mere creation of such a project is already a feat in itself, it turns out that the resulting game was so large that it wouldn’t fit on a normal Virtual Boy game card, so the creators not only had to code the game, but also had to build a new cartridge just to hold their work so that it could actually be played.
From what video footage shows, the extra effort was worth it, because the game looks pretty damned good. Although depicted in the expected red and black formate, the graphics are honestly impressive for the system. The backgrounds have nice 3D effects and move around based on the position of the fighters–E. Honda’s stage is an excellent example of this–the sound effects and voices are spot-on, and even the music is accurate.
Now comes what may be the most important question: how are the controls? As SpeedyInk mentions in his review of the game, they’re as tight as you’d expect in a Street Fighter title, but there is one small problem: the Virtual Boy controller doesn’t have nearly enough face buttons. Instead of extra buttons, it has a second D-Pad, which the coders mapped to throw the appropriate punches and kicks associated with the directional inputs triggered. It honestly sounds like a nightmare, but all is not lost; to help remedy the controller situation, as well as to add yet another feat to the game’s long list, the game has the ability to support a Super Nintendo pad. It’s not a stick, but it has to be better than those two D-Pads.
Those lucky enough to own copies of this gem also have a fully-realized box that mimics, in every way, the packaging that Nintendo would have shipped with products of their own in back in the day. They even included a full-color instruction manual, something that the gaming world has all but forgotten these days (but that’s a topic for another time).
So where can you get your copy? Well, you can’t. Unless you’ve got some connections within the Virtual Boy community, you’re pretty much out of luck. There hasn’t been, nor will there be, any mass distribution of this title due to various legal issues that should be expected with such a project containing copyrighted characters. This homebrew version of the game on which many of us cut our teeth was not built for profit, it was a labor of love–and one that appears to have produced something very special.
To see the game in action and to take a closer look at the instruction manual and box, check out the video below from Vectrex Roli.
