Whether you just got grabbed at a critical moment or recently found yourself buried up to your neck thanks to Zero Suit Samus’s down special, knowing how to properly mash in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U can mean the difference between losing a stock or living to keep the fight going.
In their latest video, the Beefy Smash Doods took a scientific approach to figuring out what works best for getting out of these sticky situations. They came up with three rules to help maximize the amount of mashing the game can read while keeping the strain on hands and fingers minimal. Through these rules–avoiding the C-stick entirely, avoiding simultaneous button presses, and avoiding holding down buttons–they were able to determine that the safest escape method should be buttons-only or left-directional-stick-only.
To see this in action, as well as to hear the thought process behind their methods, be sure to check out the video below.
Last month, the Tokyo-based X-MANIA XVI brought out more than thirty teams for a three-on-three throwdown in Super Street Fighter II Turbom the game that has maintained a vital presence in the scene since its launch more than 20 years ago.
In the footage we’ve included below, James Chen takes the mic and offers insight over nearly seven hours of competition, which includes the teams tournament in its entirety as well as a large chunk of casual play. If you’ve been looking to get your Super Turbo fix, this is sure to scratch that itch.
There’s rarely a shortage of new M.O.D.O.K. material to help those who main the biggest head in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 keep their opponents at bay. Thanks to this combo option from Punisher, purveyors of the Jamming Bomb can now put down all who oppose them by landing a single throw.
The combo does burn three bars and also gets a couple of assist characters involved–Hawkeye and Rocket Raccoon in the example below–but being able to confirm a kill off this sort of situation without having to burn X-Factor to do so is certainly worth picking up.
Sakura’s regular combos just don’t seem as stylish as they used to thanks to Jay Rego’s new method of bringing classy levels of pain to opponents in Ultra Street Fighter IV. This option may not break an opponent’s health bar, but it will certainly break their spirit.
By taking advantage of the reeling state that Sakura’s neutral jump fierce causes on crouching opponents, she can time a follow-up jab to hit meaty, affording her just a touch more hitstun to work with when she moves on to the next attack. I don’t need to speak to how impractical this sort of thing is, but if you’d like to give it a whirl in an actual match, the video includes some reset options that could potentially result in landing the opening swing.
If you didn’t tune in live to check out the action at last weekend’s Tokyo Game Show Ultra Street Fighter IV tournament presented by Mad Catz, the folks at Capcom have picked apart the footage and grabbed their favorite five moments to let you relive a small chunk of the hype that took place.
With a bracket as stacked as we saw, every person who made the cut for these five moments has an impressive Street Fighter resume: MOV, EG|PR Balrog, AVM|Gamerbee, BE|Nemo…the list just goes on and on. But it really wouldn’t be a highlight reel from this year’s event without the reigning champion, YBK|Dashio, showing off some fancy footwork with Seth.
If you’re wearing headphones, be sure to check your volume before the final two highlights; EG|K-Brad’s hype reaches (understandably) high levels.
It’s only natural that players figure out ways to break apart aging games, performing with ease what was once thought as impossible. We see this sort of thing happen in fighters all the time, typically in the form of ridiculous combos, setups, or the like, but Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 players must be going for some kind of record because the onslaught of potentially game-changing discoveries to surface in recent weeks borders on alarming.
First we saw the Maluk shield change the way we think about team ordering, then we saw this strange interaction between tag-ins and screen spacing, and now Paulow3b and BE|Kane Blueriver have shared with us different methods for taking advantage of infinite properties on incoming characters.
For those out of the loop, keeping your character off the ground after eliminating someone with a TAC infinite carries the properties that make it possible over to when the second fighter enters the fray, allowing you to whittle them down the same way. This technique still requires that the first hit land before the victim makes a slow march toward an empty health bar, but as you’ll see below, it’ll be easy for anyone with a firm grasp on their infinite options to put this strategy to work when the stars align.
While not as new as more recent discoveries, very few players have taken the time to explore this technique’s applications. Even if you knew about this already, do yourself a favor and check out the video below for a more in-depth look at its properties.
If you’ve been waiting to get your hands on a copy of Rivals of Aether, you’ll be happy to know that the indie title went live on Steam early this morning. This early access version of the game comes equipped with six characters, five stages, training mode, local versus mode, and a fully-functional one-on-one multiplayer mode with Steam integration, making lobbies a breeze to create and join.
Do note that this is an early access title, which means that bugs, balance issues, and the like may crop up from time to time. If you prefer a fully-tested and polished title for your cash, you should wait until the final release to scoop up a copy for yourself, but if you can’t wait to get your wavedash on, now’s the perfect time to throw your fifteen bucks on the table.
We’ve included a trailer below for your perusal, and if this is the first you’re hearing about Rivals of Aether, you can learn more about the game here.
Around the holidays a few years ago, my family gathered to consume hams slathered with honey, pies filled with various fruits, and my brother-in-law’s latest batch of homegrown ghost pepper salsa, which I inhaled with reckless abandon. After effectively burning away my lips and inner cheeks, I checked in on my oldest nephew. He was watching a Modern Warfare streamer whose name I don’t recall. I’d not yet played the then-recent version of the game, so I sat down and had a beer, partially to nurse my wounded mouth, but mostly because I was interested in seeing the game in action in the hands of someone who knew how to play it.
Halfway through the beer, my brother-in-law came in to ask if his salsa had unmanned me, but before I could come up with a witty retort, he dropped another question: “Hang on a second, are you guys just watching someone else play a game?”
He left the room shaking his head, again, before I could reply.
Gaming as a spectator sport hasn’t been around all that long, so a bit of confusion–sometimes even outright hostility–toward the act of watching high-level competition, or even a favorite streamer on Twitch, is not only understandable, but expected. And there’s a good chance that everyone reading this has run into a situation similar to mine. Everyone reading this can also likely come up with plenty of reasons to kick back and get lost in the play of others, thanks to some stream or another, be it tournament or a favorite weekly series.
Gerald Lee from Core-A Gaming put out a video earlier today discussing what he believes makes watching fighting games superior to watching their real world counterparts. Lee cites the fact that fighting games don’t require judges to determine a victor and that no one (typically) receives physical injuries from partaking in digital competition as two of the pluses that the fighting genre holds over things like boxing and UFC.
The video also touches on the lack of physical fitness required to compete at the top level in fighting games and how that may have a good deal to do with the less-than-positive reception they sometimes receive, or at least why they’re nowhere near as popular as their traditional sports variants. It’s easy to see how a certain degree of satisfaction can be drawn from watching two combatants at the height of human fitness slug each other in the jaw until one of them falls down, but something that those on the outside of the gaming sphere looking in may not understand is the level of thought that goes into every button press, be it a jab or a half-step backward. That the competitors pressing those buttons can be literally anyone from anywhere, regardless of age, gender, physical fitness, disability, you name it, makes this point all the more beautiful. Those taking home the prize at a major tournament may not be able to bench press a small car, but they can solve any problem thrown their way with unparalleled accuracy and speed, a skill that certainly demands respect.
People have been stepping into arenas to settle matters by way of bloodshed since humanity has had the skills to record such events, so a more traditional take on this sort of activity maintaining popularity makes sense. But if fighting games can, in fact, deliver the same sort of excitement without many of the negative aspects–as Lee suggests, and I wholeheartedly agree–we may all live to see a time when our genre of choice eclipses even the mightiest of mainstream sports.
We’ve got a beautiful thing here in the fighting game community. We may not be as big as League of Legends, Dota 2, or any number of other massive competitive scenes, and we may not be as familiar to the general public as boxing and UFC, but we’ve got more heart than all of them combined. We’ve got a community of individuals who do everything they can to help grow the scene, and many of those individuals take part in streams and tournament organization. With that in mind, I close with a question: which streams will you be watching this weekend?
Be sure to check out Core-A Gaming’s full video below. It’s loaded with excellent information that didn’t make it into this article, and everyone who loves chucking hadoukens should absolutely give it a watch and encourage their friends to do so as well.
Summer Jam 9 held a host of singles brackets, but there were also some team tournaments strewn about the lineup. One such team tournament took place in Ultra Street Fighter IV. If you missed this showdown, Team Spooky’s recent uploads included the replays for the entirety of this bracket. Below, we’ve embedded the losers, winners, and grand finals matches for your perusal.
These final matches include gameplay from Team Yomi, comprised of BX3|Phenom, YOMI|Cardell and YOMI|Joel; team Superstars, made up of EG|K-BRAD, YOMI|Dieminion and KIG|Problem X; and Team Light Skin, which brought together Tempo|ChrisG, F3|AlucarD, and Veloc1raptor. While the footage is all good, we got to see two OCVs over the course of the tournament, which we can thank Problem X and ChrisG for bringing to the stage.
For full results from Summer Jam 9, head over to our coverage hub.
When watching high-level competition, it’s easy to get lost in the moment directly following a good play or to miss some of the small pieces that lead up whatever that play may have been. Breaking down these little bits of information is part of what makes watching top players so exciting.
It’s been some time since Stunfest 2015, but Jay Rego just finished his analysis of the second grand finals match between MCZ|Daigo Umehara and EG|Momochi in Ultra Street Fighter IV. This analysis comes as a text overlay across slow motion footage of the fight, with appropriate pauses to show every little bit of information with the reasoning behind them.
Much of what Rego discusses in the breakdown ties back to the topics that he covered in another recent video relating to deception and forcing opponents into certain mental states to catch them unaware–an incredibly important part of any level of serious play.
Rego also includes an interesting breakdown of the number of fireballs and focus attacks used in these first two games of the set, so be sure to check that out at the end of the video as well.
If you’d like to see the first segment of Rego’s analysis, which covers game one between these titans, you can find it here.
