Coliseum

It’s time for your monthly Mix Up. Mix Up Night #23 is coming to you live from Maid Café CCOcha in Osaka, Japan. As usual, this month is mixing up the titles, keeping you fresh with Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Vampire Savior (via Vampire Resurrection). Tune into the MUN Twitch channel to catch the action from some of Japan’s best.

Watch live video from mixupnight on www.twitch.tv

Entry List

Source: Mix Up Night

Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown is still alive and well in Japan. Today Virtua Fighter Relationship (VFR) is hosting The 15th BEAT-TRIBE CUP, the grand finals for the VFR 2013-2014 season. This is the largest Virtua Fighter event of the year, with 120 teams of 5 players participating. If you’ll like the watch the action, check out the stream below from Game Newton, live from Tokyo Leisureland Pallet Town. For more information on the event, check out this helpful post from akai at virtuafighter.com.

Watch live video from GameNewton on www.twitch.tv

Source: BEAT-TRIBE, Game Newton, virtuafighter.com

Standard combo videos are a necessary part of spreading fighting game knowledge to other players and serve as an excellent teaching tool for those picking up fresh characters, a fresh game, or just taking their first steps into the genre as a whole. Even though combo videos do a world of good for the community, it’s common for them to include technology that may never see use outside of training mode due to incredible execution ceilings, unlikely setups that get things going or any number of other small factors.

That’s what makes this combo video from Zerms4 and Flying High stand out from the crowd. Each combo that you’re about to witness comes from online matches played over PSN and Xbox Live. While this sort of combo video has certainly been compiled before, it’s a markedly less common style of video than what we’re used to seeing on a daily basis.

The video offers a great variety of characters and features notable players like xWAx Weeberman, FatTreeWizard, CorkyJay and many more. You’ll see M.O.D.O.K. put down an opponent without using any meter after a long-ranged beam hit confirm, you’ll see some particularly dirty resets from Jill and you’ll see plenty of combos that begin from what look to be nothing more than stray hits. And the best part is that every bit of what you’re about to see is 100% viable for use in a real match.

Source: Flying High

Yesterday, we featured some practical happy birthday combos for Doctor Doom that maximize damage against multiple targets. Today, we’ve got a video of the Latverian capping out his damage with some insane level 3 X-Factor combos against single targets. As expected, once the foot dives start flying, things get out of hand pretty quickly. Sometimes the damage even breaks the 2 million point–why not? As video creator Aries says of the combos, “some are practical, some aren’t, but who cares. It’s Marvel [baby].”

Several of these combos are performed against Sentinel and make great use of his towering hurtbox, but a good deal of them work on regular-sized combatants as well. Stick around until the end for a special segment where Sentinel and Taskmaster try their hand at some level 3 X-Factor craziness.

Source: Aries

As with most Super Smash Bros. 4 content creators, the folks at Smash and Grab will soon be making the switch from the 3DS version of the game to the Wii U version for higher quality visuals to pair with their already high quality tutorials. The final Smash for 3DS hurrah from the team comes in the form of a character tutorial for Lady Palutena.

As with previous tutorials from Smash and Grab, you can expect to learn the kill thresholds for various moves, effective methods of spiking, various combos and how to approach the neutral game. One of the scarier parts of Lady Palutena is her throw game as her upair can kill from a grab at around 110%, a tactic which the video covers in-depth.

Smash and Grab also made tutorials for a few other members of the cast. To check those out, follow the links below.

• Bowser Jr.
• Zero Suit Samus
• Lucina

Source: Smash and Grab

Evolution 2011 world champion Keita “RZR|Fuudo” Ai recently discovered an interesting new option select in Ultra Street Fighter IV. The technique, which he calls “Ai-Shiki” (literally “Ai-style”) after his surname, allows a player to option select between a regular focus attack and a red focus attack depending on whether or not their opponent attacks them.

KarbyP has uploaded a video that explains how Fuudo does it.  In the video below, he presses fierce punch and roundhouse kick together immediately after a focus, and then inputs the command for a red focus (pressing jab, strong and forward) at the same time immediately afterwards to cancel the focus once its armor absorbs a hit (called an armor cancel) into the red focus.

The interesting thing, however, is that the method shown above has already been simplified. As Dooplis demonstrates in his own video, you do not need to armor cancel the focus attack with a taunt as focus attacks can themselves be armor cancelled directly into a red focus attack.

Give the video below a spin and see if you can find a use for this in your game.

Source: KarbyP, Dooplis

At this point in the life of the Street Fighter IV series, it’s fairly common knowledge that Sakura can follow up her EX Tatsu with a hit of some sort to put her opponent in a tough situation to react to. What may be less common knowledge is just how many different ways that Sakura can approach this sort of setup.

As shano shows in the video below, there are dozens of options at the fighter’s disposal, each heavily impacting exactly where Sakura lands once the reset is done. Some of the options put Sakura in a position where she can choose to dash or not dash to pick which side she’s on, some allow her to sail over her opponent and some of the corner setups just look so strange that opponents may very well still be scratching their heads when the new combo begins.

After all the EX Tatsu reset options have been exhausted, shano moves on to explore some tricky situations that Sakura can put her opponents in after a focus crumple. Many of these are the sorts of things that you’d guess she can do after the crumple’s aerial frames begin, but they’re still good to keep in mind to keep your opponents on their toes.

If you missed shano’s extensive Sakura combo tutorial, follow this link to check it out.

Source: shano

This weekend Versus Gameplay will bringing to you Absolute Battle 5, one of Texas’s largest fighting game events. AB5 will feature some of the best of Lone Star State and surrounding areas, including DL|FourWude, BT|Angelic, Ranmasama and Boost|Jan as well as quite a few talents from across the US, like EG|Ricky Ortiz, Snake Eyez, Filipino Champ and CTRL|RayRay (Check here for player profiles!). If those unable to attend the event in persons, PandaxGaming will streaming a selection of fighting game events as they happen.

Tournament Games

• BlazBlue Chronophantasma
• Dead or Alive 5 Ultimate
• Injustice: Gods Among Us
• Killer Instinct
• Persona 4 Arena Ultimax
• Super Smash Bros. Melee
• Tekken Tag Tournament 2
• Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3
• Ultra Street Fighter IV

Featured Events

In addition to the scheduled tournaments, Absolute Battle 5 will have a few featured events.

Ultra Fight Night: Battle in The Pandagon

This highlight event pits Texas’s finest against the out-of-towners in the popular Ultra Street Fighter IV and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The fight card for each game is scheduled to begin after completion of the titles’ respective pools.

Ultra Street Fighter IV Redemption Tournament

Tournament play is naturally of a harsh nature. Regardless of the quality of players competing, by the end of the first round of the losers bracket, a quarter of the players who started the tournament will be eliminated. The vast majority of players won’t make it out of their pools. The USFIV Redemption Tournament is a fun way to give players another chance to play in this 32-player single-elimination event limited to non-top 16 players only.

Stream

PandaxGaming will be providing a live broadcasts of the fighting game events. Friday kicks off with Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom team action, with singles pools for the main titles beginning Saturday.

Watch live video from PandaxGaming on www.twitch.tv

Below is a schedule for the event. All times are in Central Standard Time (UTC -6).

Sources: Versus Gameplay, PandaxGaming