Category: Fighting Games

Yesterday, Aksys Games announced that the latest entry in the Blazblue series, Blazblue: Chronophantasma EXTEND, will be making its way to western shores at a to-be-determined date over the summer.

To provide a quick look at what this updated title will include, Arc System Works uploaded a brand new gameplay video that highlights various segments of story mode, offers a momentary glimpse at mission mode, hints at a shop feature, and shows Arakune doing what Arakune does best: filling the screen with negative edge bugs.

This newest addition to the BlazBlue series will be available to play on Playstation 4 and Xbox One as well as Playstation 3 and the Playstation Vita once it makes its way to North America.

Source: Arc System Works

In preparation for Tekken 7, which will be making its North American debut at Final Round 18, Aris Bakhtanians from Avoiding the Puddle has created a new video centered around movement.

In the tutorial below, Aris discusses the importance of the game’s movement system and how it can be used to tie two moves together for a basic, but effective, strategy. While the demonstration itself uses Tekken Tag Tournament 2, the lessons that are taught here can apply to any game in the series.

Source: Avoiding the Puddle

Over the past few months, Northern California has been stepping their collective game up with regards to consistent events, and one of the big groups behind all this is competitive gaming organization ShowDown. Their weekly Churning the Butter tournament has only been running for a couple weeks, and yet they are garnering a player base on par with other local tournaments around the country. And, as we highlighted in videos from their second outing, some fantastic talent is showing up to throw down and improve their own game.

Tonight, they have once again taken over Folsom Street Foundry in San Francisco, California to put on an Ultra Street Fighter IV tournament for the regional players. If you’re interested in seeing what the NorCal cats have up their sleeves, be sure to check out the stream below and show your support. You can also head on over to Twitch if you prefer to chat.

Watch live video from showdowngg on www.twitch.tv

Want to check these tournaments out for yourself? Well, you’re in luck, because even if you missed out this week, Churning the Butter is held every Thursday at 8 PM PDT during ShowDown’s game night at Folsom Street Foundry.

Source: ShowDown

Combo videos serve a variety of purposes in the fighting game community. While generally seen as a source of entertaiment, they can also open our minds to techniques once thought impossible, highlight matchup-specific craziness, or even dwell on the simplest of maneuvers.

To say combo videos are special would be an understatement, but a brand new endeavor curated by frequent content creator Mikadok serves an entirely different (and more heartfelt) purpose.

Last month, we were devastated to hear of the passing of Monty Oum, a former Midway and Bandai Namco Games developer who had since shifted his talents to machinima and animated endeavors. Before that, though, he was just like us: a member of the community who loved fighting games.

In lieu of flowers, his loved ones only asked that folks do something creative.

To honor this wish, Mikadok gathered together a group of combo video makers that included folks like Smash and Grab, JusticeSoulTuna, j8slim, HexElf, and Rotbah, among others. What resulted is an exhibition just under 43 minutes in length, packed to the brim with ridiculous footage from BlazBlue: Chronophantasma, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, Street Fighter x Tekken, King of Fighters XIII, Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX, Chaos Legion, Tales of Vesperia, and more.

Give it a spin below and let us know what you think.

Source: Mikadok

Back in December, we featured a Decapre tutorial from CH3RNOBYL that takes an intimate look at the masked fighter’s normal attacks in Ultra Street Fighter IV. The tutorial included frame data, hitboxes, block strings, frame traps, and everything else associated with her buttons.

There is, of course, a lot more to mastering a Street Fighter character than simply knowing which button to press and when to do so, so today, we’ve got another Decapre tutorial from the same source, this time with a focus on her special moves and their applications. In this video, you’ll learn how to properly space her aerial Spiral Arrows as well as what sort of invulnerability frames you can expect from her Stinger and plenty more.

As with his previous video, the commentary over this tutorial isn’t in English, so be sure to turn on English subtitles if they’re not on already.

As an added bonus, we were also sent a Decapre combo video that will help players put all of this information together and get the most of every hit-confirm.

Source: N2L|CH3RNOBYL, thanks Brian K. for sending these in.

True block strings allow players to maintain pressure through well-timed button presses mixed in with special moves, but if there are gaps in the timing, or if certain attacks just don’t quite fit together perfectly, punish options begin to present themselves. These windows are small and defenders need to know to expect them in order to be able to perform a proper punish as opposed to just waiting until the block string is over.

Dudley’s duck, as you’ll see in the video below, allows for a great number of these situations to turn into huge damage in Ultra Street Fighter IV. Many of the punish options–mostly those involving canceling a normal into a fireball–don’t come as a huge surprise, but then there are things like meeting Yun’s EX lunge punch with Dudley’s EX duck, which may not have been so readily apparent even to veterans of the character.

Of course, since this is a video from Forbidden Technique, they’ve not only included what version of ducking will net punishes in an alarming amount of scenarios, but have also offered up optimal combos to tack on and keep opponents scared to apply pressure.

Source: Forbidden Technique TV