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What's wrong with the VS games?

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Phillip McCoy

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Apr 27, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/27/98

Why does everyone hate the VS games? The concept behind them is good, and
when the first one came out, you know damn well that EVERY one of you went
running to see what it was all about. Even though they may be a little
confusing, they're still fun to play. I don't see what the big deal is about
hating VS.

Beef

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Apr 27, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/27/98

Personally, I don't hate them. I find them fun, but after playing them a
while, it rots your brain. Everything chains into everything, skilless
supers(cool, tho.), and scrub friendly characters. There is very little
strategy, the CPU patterns are very obvious and predictable and everyone's
jumping everywhere. Ooh, the humanity!

Mark
Poster and Speaker of Useless
Things, Holder of Big Sigs and Milwaukee Man
Extrordinaire.

mcar...@csd.uwm.edu

SF Code v5.0
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Quote o' the Week:
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Mickey Mouse.

Geoff Price

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Apr 27, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/27/98

In article <3544b...@news.via-net.net>, "Phillip McCoy"
<PMc...@via-net.net> wrote:

> Why does everyone hate the VS games? The concept behind them is good, and
> when the first one came out, you know damn well that EVERY one of you went
> running to see what it was all about. Even though they may be a little
> confusing, they're still fun to play. I don't see what the big deal is about
> hating VS.

I was with my 4 year old at the arcade the other day. Of course, it's too
much to ask of him to be able to play SF in a coordinated manner, so I
took him to the VS. machine. He's a Spiderman fan, but all we have there
is vs. X-men, so I selected Wolverine for him, told him Wolvie was real
cool with those claws and all, then instructed him to spin the joystick as
fast as he could and mash the punch buttons as fast as he could. Damn was
he good!! ('Course he was a bit open for supers... :)

--
Geoff Price
Ge...@CalibanMW.com

mitchell aldinger

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Apr 27, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/27/98

I don't personally hate the VS series. I just have no respect for it.
All it is is someone seeing if they can charge up their super faster
than the other person, and then wail on the buttons to get a 20 to 30
hit combo from it. Then there is the chain combos, might as well call
them dial a combo. I disliked them in Alpha and I dislike them in VS.

Chocobo

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

Phillip McCoy wrote:

The main reason would be that the games suck. It's true that most everyone went
running to see what they were all about, but not long afterwards, a lot of
people were running away. I don't know what you're talking about that's
"confusing"... basically the reason that people hate them is because there's no
skilled gameplay at all. In XSF, the whole point of the game was to set up your
opponent and go into an infinite combo. The strongest characters were the ones
with the easiest infinites. The whole air combo idea is stupid, anyone can do an
air combo and there's no originality involved or skill needed... certain
characters can just stick out whatever they want and be completely safe
(Wolverine, Strider)... the game just attracts scrubs, they can sit there and
mash and get a 20 hit combo, and think that they've mastered the game. There are
just too many things to mention...

Stilt Man

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

In article <Pine.OSF.3.96.98042...@alpha3.csd.uwm.edu>,
Beef <mcar...@csd.uwm.edu> wrote:

>On Mon, 27 Apr 1998, Phillip McCoy wrote:
>> Why does everyone hate the VS games? The concept behind them is good, and
>> when the first one came out, you know damn well that EVERY one of you went
>> running to see what it was all about. Even though they may be a little
>> confusing, they're still fun to play. I don't see what the big deal is about
>> hating VS.

>Personally, I don't hate them. I find them fun, but after playing them a

>while, it rots your brain. Everything chains into everything,

...but only so many of them in a useful fashion, which leaves the end result
little different than it was in SF2 when not everything chained into
everything.

>skilless supers(cool, tho.),

Comboing them takes no less skill now than executing Ken's TOD or any other
dizzying, once-repeatable combo back in SF2, and in the majority of cases
does less damage. This is yet another of the many arguments that baffles
me about old-schoolers slamming the versus series. "Oooo, Strider has a
100% combo, it's the end of the world because he'll dominate everyone with
it!" Never mind that Ken's TOD didn't exactly ruin HF or CE, and for the
same reason: against a decent player, he never landed it.

>and scrub friendly characters.

Also no different from SF2. In SF2 we had FB/DP pattern shotos. Now we've
got pixies. Your point?

>There is very little
>strategy,

There's actually quite a bit of strategy. You avoid making mistakes that
allow big combos (just like SF2), you avoid letting yourself get into a
bad position against the wrong character (just like SF2), you try to keep
people at the right distance where you can hurt them more than they can hurt
you (just like SF2), and you play cautiously because a decent opponent can
call out Colossus and bake you with a super at any moment if you're stupid
enough to mindlessly poke even if you do manage to get into the right
position to do it.

e.g. Venom vs. Strider. Venom wants Strider at range and without a close-range
ground game. If Venom has him there, he can literally stick his tongue out
at Strider and there's very little Strider can do about it except jump in.
Venom doesn't mind if Strider jumps in, because if Strider sticks out a move,
he gets air comboed or Colossus-into-Venom-Webbed. If Strider approaches
closer than a certain point, Venom sticks his crouching fierce or strong out,
neither of which Strider can cancel out with his sword (the strong is too
fast, the fierce out-reaches and out-priorities him) and the only one of which
he can retaliate to is the fierce, which gets eliminated if Venom simply fangs
afterwards. Oh, wait, was that an Ouroboros? Can you say, "push block"? Oh,
wait, was that a Ragnarok? Can you say "Venom Bite"? Oh, wait, was that a
Legion? Can you say "super jump"? Oh, wait, did Strider get in? Once again,
can you say "push block"? Oh, wait, he didn't stick out a move to block? The
toss risk favors you rather than him there: he can only toss you, you can
web him into an air combo that does two and a half times the damage, which
effectively makes Venom's webbing toss into a poor man's SPD if the player is
even a modest air-comboer.

It takes a cool head, and a bit of positioning, and knowing which moves to
stick out at which distances. But realistically speaking, it's nowhere near
as hard as the pixie-haters would have you believe if you know what you're
doing. You've just got a lot of arcades who haven't gotten any farther than
countering Strider's Ouroboros (in Seth's words, "scrubbilicious") now, just
as they didn't get past Ken's combos back in HF. Just because they might have
known what they were doing then doesn't mean they automatically know what
they're doing now.

>the CPU patterns are very obvious and predictable

So what else is new? At any point in any fighting game, there's _always_
an obvious and predictable pattern that wins you the game. For instance, in
HF you could walk past the computer at will with Bison simply by tossing them
over and over when you land after a head stomp. Only one or two characters
would even make an attempt to stop you.

>and everyone's jumping everywhere.

Not if they know how to play, they aren't. A good player will know how to
create offense on the ground better than in the air. Everyone's got an air
counter these days somewhere, and super jumping just gives your opponent
a free switch of characters without fear of retaliation, which also
incidentally tends to throw off any real hope of a crossover hit that you
might have been thinking of.

Once again... just like SF2, just with a few new ways to jump.

This has been the "versus heretic", signing off... :)

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The Stilt Man stil...@teleport.com
http://www.teleport.com/~stiltman/stiltman.html
< We are Microsoft Borg '98. Lower your expectations and >
< surrender your money. Antitrust law is irrelevant. >
< Competition is irrelevant. We will add your financial and >
< technological distinctiveness to our own. Your software >
< will adapt to service ours. Resistance is futile. >

Stilt Man

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

In article <35458AF7...@mindspring.com>,

Chocobo <cho...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>Phillip McCoy wrote:
>> Why does everyone hate the VS games? The concept behind them is good, and
>> when the first one came out, you know damn well that EVERY one of you went
>> running to see what it was all about. Even though they may be a little
>> confusing, they're still fun to play. I don't see what the big deal is about
>> hating VS.

>The main reason would be that the games suck. It's true that most everyone went

>running to see what they were all about, but not long afterwards, a lot of
>people were running away.

Funny. I see more people crowded around the versus games for more frequent
and longer periods of time than I ever did around the SF2 series. Which
people were running away?

>I don't know what you're talking about that's
>"confusing"... basically the reason that people hate them is because there's no
>skilled gameplay at all.

That's a matter of opinion.

>In XSF, the whole point of the game was to set up your
>opponent and go into an infinite combo. The strongest characters were the ones
>with the easiest infinites.

"Set up" being the operative word. Cyclops could end the game on a footnote
if he got his opponent into a corner... and any opponent stupid enough to let
a char whose moves are as vulnerable as Cyclops' back them into a corner
deserved it, too.

Only infinites I tend to use ever are Rogue's sonic boom or earthquake in the
corner. And I've beaten plenty of folks who were much more combo-proficient
at these things than I was with her.

>The whole air combo idea is stupid, anyone can do an
>air combo and there's no originality involved or skill needed...

Nor was there on a four-fierce Guile combo in SF2. Jump in, hold the stick
back, press the fierce button twice, push the stick forward, push it twice
again. Brain-dead easy. Never occurred to me how stupid it was until a
Guile player was asked how he did it and just sort of rolled his eyes and
demonstrated on the controls between rounds. One button, two joystick
movements, you just mash twice, move the stick, and mash twice again. On
WW, that was a repeat-until-die combo.

>certain
>characters can just stick out whatever they want and be completely safe
>(Wolverine, Strider)...

...(and, if positioned properly, many other characters in the game from many
more varied positions)...

>the game just attracts scrubs, they can sit there and
>mash and get a 20 hit combo, and think that they've mastered the game.

As opposed to a game that attracts scrubs, they can sit there and roll the
joystick and get a three hit combo that involves jumping in, holding the
stick down, hitting two buttons and then rolling the stick into a third
to get a dizzy and then repeat the same thing for 75% damage? That sort
of thing gets decried as a game-breaker in the vs. games, yet no one ever
seems to notice that it actually was easier to execute the combos that did
the huge damage back then. These days, you have to work a bit more with the
stick and buttons to get that kind of damage. There are some easy ways
(Wolvie poke into Berserker X or Fatal Claw, which nets you about 40%) and
there are some not-so-easy ways that don't happen as often (Colossus into
Shinkuu-FB, Soul Eraser, Venom Web, Weapon X, or what have you).

It's called "loss of perspective based on faded, jaded memories of happier
days when you could own the machine before the rules changed"...

>There are just too many things to mention...

...many of which are signs of people who haven't learned to play the game
beyond pixiedom. There _are_ counters for pixies and dial-scrubs. You
just have to find them, and not many old-schoolers have yet. Not surprisingly,
this newsgroup is dominated by old-schoolers, so the prevailing opinion here
is that the game sucks. The market seems to suggest otherwise, as do a few
heretics who manage to enjoy themselves and find some room for strategy in it
despite the self-assured wisdom of the naysayers.

Justin Boley

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

Stilt Man wrote:

> ...but only so many of them in a useful fashion, which leaves the end result
> little different than it was in SF2 when not everything chained into
> everything.

? In SF2, hardly anything chained into anything. In MvC, with the
exception of Hulk and Venom, almost everything chains into almost
everything else, since zig-zag and stronger chains are now all over the
place. It's not the same. Even the useful chains also give you enough
time to decide whether you're going to tack on that super at the end,
which is a lot easier to do than

> >skilless supers(cool, tho.),
>
> Comboing them takes no less skill now than executing Ken's TOD or any other
> dizzying, once-repeatable combo back in SF2, and in the majority of cases
> does less damage. This is yet another of the many arguments that baffles
> me about old-schoolers slamming the versus series. "Oooo, Strider has a
> 100% combo, it's the end of the world because he'll dominate everyone with
> it!" Never mind that Ken's TOD didn't exactly ruin HF or CE, and for the
> same reason: against a decent player, he never landed it.

Huh? MvC super combos are brain-dead easy. Chain leading into a s.
RH, Captain Sword. Not only is the chain timing fairly liberal, but you
have (compared to old 2-in-1 timing, anyway) a large window to throw out
your qcf + PP. Same goes for every Wolvie BBX combo, since you're can
basically dial until you realize the chain is hitting, then spaz out the
motion and get your super.

> There's actually quite a bit of strategy. You avoid making mistakes that
> allow big combos (just like SF2), you avoid letting yourself get into a
> bad position against the wrong character (just like SF2), you try to keep
> people at the right distance where you can hurt them more than they can hurt
> you (just like SF2), and you play cautiously because a decent opponent can
> call out Colossus and bake you with a super at any moment if you're stupid
> enough to mindlessly poke even if you do manage to get into the right
> position to do it.

A half-witted opponent can also mash out Colossus if you were foolish
enough to be, say, attacking, since it's also very safe at close range.

<snip the rest>
Haven't played this hecksa skilled game enough to be any kind of source
on it, but can't Strider use short dashes and jabs/shorts to disrupt
Venom's positioning game? Never tried this strategy, just wondering if
it works.

--Justin

Justin Boley

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

Stilt Man wrote:

> >In XSF, the whole point of the game was to set up your
> >opponent and go into an infinite combo. The strongest characters were the ones
> >with the easiest infinites.
>
> "Set up" being the operative word. Cyclops could end the game on a footnote
> if he got his opponent into a corner... and any opponent stupid enough to let
> a char whose moves are as vulnerable as Cyclops' back them into a corner
> deserved it, too.

Did you deserve it if Sabertooth landed one extremely fast, early
jumping fierce on you and proceeded to kill you? Or if Rogue landed one
air-dashing chain?

> As opposed to a game that attracts scrubs, they can sit there and roll the
> joystick and get a three hit combo that involves jumping in, holding the
> stick down, hitting two buttons and then rolling the stick into a third
> to get a dizzy and then repeat the same thing for 75% damage? That sort
> of thing gets decried as a game-breaker in the vs. games, yet no one ever
> seems to notice that it actually was easier to execute the combos that did
> the huge damage back then. These days, you have to work a bit more with the
> stick and buttons to get that kind of damage. There are some easy ways
> (Wolvie poke into Berserker X or Fatal Claw, which nets you about 40%) and
> there are some not-so-easy ways that don't happen as often (Colossus into
> Shinkuu-FB, Soul Eraser, Venom Web, Weapon X, or what have you).
>
> It's called "loss of perspective based on faded, jaded memories of happier
> days when you could own the machine before the rules changed"...

Huh? Are you suggesting that because combos in the Vs. series involve
hitting more buttons and require occasional taps of down during the
chains before leading up to the skillful quarter circle motion and
two-button mash, that they are more difficult? Is that why Colossus
juggles are "not-so-easy"? What's hard about hitting two buttons at
once, waiting, and then doing your super? SF2 combos required practice
and timing. The 2-in-1 motions are not something you can just spaz out
100% of the time. A lot of the Vs. combos do not, since every normal
can be interrupted at any point in its animation, and chains require
simple dialing.

--Justin

shin...@hotmail.com

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

In article <3544b...@news.via-net.net>,

"Phillip McCoy" <PMc...@via-net.net> wrote:
>
> Why does everyone hate the VS games? The concept behind them is good, and
> when the first one came out, you know damn well that EVERY one of you went
> running to see what it was all about. Even though they may be a little
> confusing, they're still fun to play. I don't see what the big deal is about
> hating VS.
>
>

There is nothing confusing about them at all. Thats half the problem.
They are made to cater to those with little or no skill. All you do is
try to set someone up for a never-ending or 100% combo, mostly by typing
out a series of buttons with little or no timing, requiring little or
no spacing, providing you with little or no fun.

Unless you have a little lovegun and need big flashy pictures with big
booming noises to excite you.

Shin-ryu

-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==-----
http://www.dejanews.com/ Now offering spam-free web-based newsreading

VGO Ken

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

>Why does everyone hate the VS games?

Because they are little-skilled scrub-fests, and are very shallow. Good for
fun, that's it. And the balance is DISGUSTING.

>The concept behind them is good, and
>when the first one came out, you know damn well that EVERY one of you went
>running to see what it was all about. Even though they may be a little
>confusing, they're still fun to play. I don't see what the big deal is about
>hating VS.

Fun is all....... but all of us here are picky, and we want it to also be
challenging to learn, deep, and non-scrubby. :)

_________________________________________
(Eu)Gene Kern
Vortex Gaming Online
Senior Editor/Game Counselor
www.vortexonline.com
"Personal mistakes are one's greatest teacher."
"Bickerings are won with physical strength, but wars are won with wits."

Beef

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

On Tue, 28 Apr 1998, Stilt Man wrote:

> In article <Pine.OSF.3.96.98042...@alpha3.csd.uwm.edu>,
> Beef <mcar...@csd.uwm.edu> wrote:
> >On Mon, 27 Apr 1998, Phillip McCoy wrote:
> >> Why does everyone hate the VS games? The concept behind them is good, and
> >> when the first one came out, you know damn well that EVERY one of you went
> >> running to see what it was all about. Even though they may be a little
> >> confusing, they're still fun to play. I don't see what the big deal is about
> >> hating VS.
>
> >Personally, I don't hate them. I find them fun, but after playing them a
> >while, it rots your brain. Everything chains into everything,
>
> ...but only so many of them in a useful fashion, which leaves the end result
> little different than it was in SF2 when not everything chained into
> everything.
>

What do you mean, useful fashion? Chun Li walks up and does a short
into a standing forward into the Thousand Burst kick. Wolverine was the
same with a crouching jab, crouching strong into a berserker barrage X.
You could pick any character and chain right into a super VERY easily.

This is one character. How many others had a TOD like that? No one. In
XvsSF, everyone has at least one, and the majority of MvsSF have them as
well.

This is yet another of the many arguments that baffles
> me about old-schoolers slamming the versus series. "Oooo, Strider has a
> 100% combo, it's the end of the world because he'll dominate everyone with
> it!"

An old-schooler who says that isn't an old-schooler, just some wannabe.

Never mind that Ken's TOD didn't exactly ruin HF or CE, and for the
> same reason: against a decent player, he never landed it.
>
> >and scrub friendly characters.
>
> Also no different from SF2. In SF2 we had FB/DP pattern shotos. Now we've
> got pixies. Your point?
>

In street fighter there was Ryu, Ken, and Sagat with that pattern. Most
people with a sliver of skill could beat that pattern. All it took was
patience. In vs. it's nearly every character with some high yield/low
risk move that made a beginner a lot closer to a higher tier player.

> >There is very little
> >strategy,
>
> There's actually quite a bit of strategy. You avoid making mistakes that
> allow big combos (just like SF2), you avoid letting yourself get into a
> bad position against the wrong character (just like SF2), you try to keep
> people at the right distance where you can hurt them more than they can hurt
> you (just like SF2), and you play cautiously because a decent opponent can
> call out Colossus

Colossus? What game are YOU playing that you can call out Collossus?

and bake you with a super at any moment if you're stupid
> enough to mindlessly poke even if you do manage to get into the right
> position to do it.

Those big combos you had to look out for in SF2 were a bit harder to do
than chaining into a super. Positioning and zoning are almost null now
that you can super jump. There's almost no ground game anymore. People
stopped thinking, "Hey, if I jump, I'm gonna get DPed, or blocked and then
SPDed." Now, it's, "Hey, I'm gonna super jump and to hell with the
consequences because I can air block and tech hit out of that SPD.
With the inclusion of the super jump and the air block, there are more
people willing to jump in without regard for what happened. In HF and
Super Turbo, you had to think before you jumped because there was no air
block. There was also no s.j. to get right above the enemy and go back
and forth trying to cross them up.

> >the CPU patterns are very obvious and predictable
>
> So what else is new? At any point in any fighting game, there's _always_
> an obvious and predictable pattern that wins you the game. For instance, in
> HF you could walk past the computer at will with Bison simply by tossing them
> over and over when you land after a head stomp. Only one or two characters
> would even make an attempt to stop you.

That's on an easier level with one character. Sure there was the boring
firefight with Ryu, but now its a step further with just one combo used
over and over with no variety. Visions of spidey's air rave come to mind.

>>and everyone's jumping everywhere.
>
> Not if they know how to play, they aren't. A good player will know how to
> create offense on the ground better than in the air. Everyone's got an air
> counter these days somewhere, and super jumping just gives your opponent
> a free switch of characters without fear of retaliation, which also
> incidentally tends to throw off any real hope of a crossover hit that you
> might have been thinking of.
>

How many people know this? Not many unless they have net access. Most
scrubs just jam on strong.

> Once again... just like SF2, just with a few new ways to jump.
>

only different.

dpan...@kentlaw.edu

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

In article <3544b...@news.via-net.net>,

W/out going into an in-depth analysis, let me say that they require little to
no skill at all. I stopped playing these games the 10th day after XvSF came
out, when people at my arcade figured out (or read Gamest) how to
dial-a-combo. The game is "super" scrub-friendly, everything chains into
everything, --linking would require too much skill, b/c it involves >gasp<
timing. Button mashing is "super" annoying and wears down the controls (e.g.
people mashing when there shouldn't be mashing --true sign of a scrub),
infinities, risk-reward ratio is practically inverted (i.e. low risk = high
reward). To this day, all I do is pick fast characters and throw. I can do
some air combos, but I just just throw and and try to chain ground attacks
until I get my supers charged. Surprisingly, that is an effective strategy
and I can even squeek out a couple wins against experienced players (ones that
can do, at least, infinities). Any game that allows this type of strategy to
viable is a near worthless game, imo. But, like everyone else, I don't hate
the game. I neither think too highly of it, nor respect it. Anyone who
thinks it's the greatest game known to man, I label scrub.

Dale

dpan...@kentlaw.edu

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

In article <6i44mr$3u8$1...@user1.teleport.com>,
stil...@user1.teleport.com (Stilt Man) wrote:
>

> >I don't know what you're talking about that's
> >"confusing"... basically the reason that people hate them is because
there's no
> >skilled gameplay at all.
>
> That's a matter of opinion.

There is zero [0] gameplay or strategy. Unless you count gameplay or strategy
waiting for a time when the opponent left himself open.

> >In XSF, the whole point of the game was to set up your
> >opponent and go into an infinite combo. The strongest characters were the
ones
> >with the easiest infinites.
>
> "Set up" being the operative word. Cyclops could end the game on a footnote
> if he got his opponent into a corner... and any opponent stupid enough to
let
> a char whose moves are as vulnerable as Cyclops' back them into a corner
> deserved it, too.

Do people deserve to get infinit-ied (yes, I'm a lexicographer) when for some
reason or other, they get hit w/Wolverine's s.rh?

> Only infinites I tend to use ever are Rogue's sonic boom or earthquake in
the
> corner. And I've beaten plenty of folks who were much more combo-proficient
> at these things than I was with her.

That's just you. They're all useful in a multitude of situations.

> >The whole air combo idea is stupid, anyone can do an
> >air combo and there's no originality involved or skill needed...
>
> Nor was there on a four-fierce Guile combo in SF2. Jump in, hold the stick
> back, press the fierce button twice, push the stick forward, push it twice
> again. Brain-dead easy. Never occurred to me how stupid it was until a
> Guile player was asked how he did it and just sort of rolled his eyes and
> demonstrated on the controls between rounds. One button, two joystick
> movements, you just mash twice, move the stick, and mash twice again. On
> WW, that was a repeat-until-die combo.

Even the 4 fierce required some timing. You can't just dial the combo like
dialing for Domino's. The timing was more apparent as the engines progressed
(before it got "vs."), e.g. the last fierce had to be pressed right after
Guile got out of the sb animation, or there would be a pause long enough for
the opponent to block. The diff is that the 4-fierce was a "linked" combo,
where as virtually any combo in vs. is chained. "Linked" combos require more
skill b/c of the timing involved.

> >certain
> >characters can just stick out whatever they want and be completely safe
> >(Wolverine, Strider)...
>
> ...(and, if positioned properly, many other characters in the game from many
> more varied positions)...

Positioning in VS is next to irrelevant. Super jumps, double jumps, and
dashes make the positioning game a joke b/c those moves defeat any trap (e.g.
fb trap) you try to lay down. In fact, the trap-er is effectively penalized
since traps are too easy to get out of, and the trap-er is left in a
vulnerable position (e.g. stuck in fb animation).

> >the game just attracts scrubs, they can sit there and
> >mash and get a 20 hit combo, and think that they've mastered the game.
>

Granted, the timing to do air combos is different, but not harder, and in
retrospect, much easier. Like w/Alpha1, the chains allow you to be cautious
and break the chain and block before going thru w/it. Otherwise, if the combo
was a link, you'd have to be committed to attacking and risk the retaliation
if you failed to complete the link on time. W/chains, you get more time to
pull the combo off. W/links, not everything linked, so it took some time to
actually figure out what comboed. Seeing two c.rh's or two s.fierce's combo
is just ridiculous.

> It's called "loss of perspective based on faded, jaded memories of happier
> days when you could own the machine before the rules changed"...

No, it's called scrub-talk.

Wanderer

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

Justin Boley wrote:

>
> Stilt Man wrote:
>
> > >In XSF, the whole point of the game was to set up your
> > >opponent and go into an infinite combo. The strongest characters were the ones
> > >with the easiest infinites.
> >
> > "Set up" being the operative word. Cyclops could end the game on a footnote
> > if he got his opponent into a corner... and any opponent stupid enough to let
> > a char whose moves are as vulnerable as Cyclops' back them into a corner
> > deserved it, too.
>

> Did you deserve it if Sabertooth landed one extremely fast, early
> jumping fierce on you and proceeded to kill you? Or if Rogue landed one
> air-dashing chain?

You mean to tell me you didn't expect that from a Sabertooth player?
Lord knows I DO when I see one coming in. So I don't sit there! Shit,you
can even use the scrubby jump-back and jab/Drill Claw/FB/whatever and
smoosh him. People learned real fast NOT just to jump in with
Sabertooth. Scrubs eat the killer chains,and those of us who didn't
start with the SF series got the idea and got out of the way,rather than
waiting. With XSF,every character has that "golden range"-a portion of
the playing field where their game stuffed almost anything. Sometimes
it's simple-you don't play FB tag with Cyclops players,and you don't
turtle in a corner against Rogue. Other times,not so simple-Dhalsim,or
Magneto. People going for infinites are PREDICTABLE,if you know what the
infinites are.

Going back to Sabertooth. I'd have a wave of Sabertooth players-all of
which kept going for the infinites and 50%+ combos. They all start the
same way. Jump in,knock em up,dial-a-combo.

These Sabertooth players promptly:

1: Ate an pop-up EM Disruptor or air RH.
2: Got sucked into a point-blank Tempest.
3. Got push-blocked out of position to continue the stupiditya,and then
comboed in turn.

> Huh? Are you suggesting that because combos in the Vs. series involve
> hitting more buttons and require occasional taps of down during the
> chains before leading up to the skillful quarter circle motion and
> two-button mash, that they are more difficult? Is that why Colossus
> juggles are "not-so-easy"? What's hard about hitting two buttons at
> once, waiting, and then doing your super? SF2 combos required practice
> and timing. The 2-in-1 motions are not something you can just spaz out
> 100% of the time. A lot of the Vs. combos do not, since every normal
> can be interrupted at any point in its animation, and chains require
> simple dialing.
>
> --Justin

I seem to see it this way-the VS. game is all about NOT letting yourself
get positioned for a massive combo,and counters/interrupts to said
attempts. Part of that ability to avoid is inherent in the mobility of
the VS. engine's characters-super jumps,push-block,well timed
tag-outs...and that IS a significant difference there. People whining
about Striderine have been told much the same-it's only a 100% death
combo if you let the moron actually hit with Oh-you-bore-us,and it's
PREDICTABLE,not quick instant death. My best XSF and up games have been
ones where people understood this. Not the ones who try and play Capcom
vs Marvel like it was SF Whatever.

-Paul T.

Raizerion

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

[nonsensical series of comparisons between SF and MvC snipped]

Damn...I'm shocked, you've shown us a few ways in which the gameplay of the VSX clan
is comparable to the first unrefined SF2 games of 5-7 years ago.

Now do you get the point? You should, you've proven it before I've had a chance to
speak.

Personally, I find MvC enjoyable. It's lack of definition, balance or structure
makes it a loose comfortable game and perfect for relaxed sparing among friends.
These same factors make it impossible for MvC to be a realistic competition game.
That's not to say MvC cannot be played skillfully...It just can't even enter the
ring with ST, 2i, MSH or even SF2.

I think the real hatred of VS stems from the fear that CapCom is becoming a bit too
fond of this loose imprecise gameplay. The skill required to play SF, DS or XM has
arguably decreased since the high point of ST, DS1 and MSH respectively. By
continuing to degrade the SF engine, CapCom is essentially...Selling out to the
masses and abandoning the "old-schoolers" who laid their foundation.

Raizerion

Milo D. Cooper

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

> Stilt Man wrote:

>> Beef wrote:
>>> Phillip McCoy wrote:
>>> Why does everyone hate the VS games? The concept behind them is good, and
>>> when the first one came out, you know damn well that EVERY one of you went
>>> running to see what it was all about. Even though they may be a little
>>> confusing, they're still fun to play. I don't see what the big deal is about
>>> hating VS.
>>
>> Personally, I don't hate them. I find them fun, but after playing them a
>> while, it rots your brain. Everything chains into everything,
>
> ...but only so many of them in a useful fashion, which leaves the end result
> little different than it was in SF2 when not everything chained into
> everything.

Someone else already responded to this ridiculous observation,
so I'll leave it alone.

>> skilless supers(cool, tho.),
>
> Comboing them takes no less skill now than executing Ken's TOD or any other
> dizzying, once-repeatable combo back in SF2, and in the majority of cases
> does less damage. This is yet another of the many arguments that baffles
> me about old-schoolers slamming the versus series. "Oooo, Strider has a
> 100% combo, it's the end of the world because he'll dominate everyone with
> it!" Never mind that Ken's TOD didn't exactly ruin HF or CE, and for the
> same reason: against a decent player, he never landed it.

In pre-Alpha SF, you couldn't chain into supers. In pre-Alpha
SF, you didn't have supers that did 50% damage (with the possible
exception of Balrog, who was, surprise, the best character in the
game). In pre-Alpha SF, there weren't more than one or two char-
acters who could chain into 30% or more damage off a f*cking low
short, instead of the majority of the cast. In pre- (and includ-
ing) Alpha SF, you couldn't jump in with ambiguous air chains
without fear of anti-air retaliation due to completely safe air-
blocking.
My point is that the Vs. games are chock-f*cking FULL of scrub-
freindly features, the kind of stuff that rewards maneuvers with
gains out of proportion to the difficulty with which their exe-
cuted. THAT'S why they're GARBAGE. Yes, you probably won't see
experienced players getting infinited regularly, but there *are*
pixie chains of at least 20% damage during virtually every match,
and all off the simplest of moves (short and jabs). If you can
connect with attacks that are quicker and safer than anything
else in the game, then dial into a damage extension that removes
a quarter of your opponent's K.O. meter, why waste time developing
the mental skills required to be effective in previous Capcom
fighters?

>> and scrub friendly characters.
>
> Also no different from SF2. In SF2 we had FB/DP pattern shotos. Now we've
> got pixies. Your point?

Are you *serious*?? FB/DP is NO match for pixie chain crap;
that's why Ryu and Ken have never even come close to being the
best fighters in a Vs. game. In SF, if your opponent antici-
pated a FB/DP pattern, you paid a hefty price; FB/DP was ef-
fective, but the cost was post-attack vulnerability. Where's
the post-attack payment of executing a damned jab or short, or,
in some cases, even a Wolverine berserker barrage or Strider
sword slash?? Except for Akuma, the shotos weren't even the
best fighters in most of the SF games, and in Alpha 2, when
they kicked more @$$ than ever they did before, it wasn't be-
cause of their FB/DP capability.

>> There is very little
>> strategy,
>
> There's actually quite a bit of strategy. You avoid making mistakes that
> allow big combos (just like SF2), you avoid letting yourself get into a
> bad position against the wrong character (just like SF2), you try to keep
> people at the right distance where you can hurt them more than they can hurt
> you (just like SF2), and you play cautiously because a decent opponent can
> call out Colossus and bake you with a super at any moment if you're stupid
> enough to mindlessly poke even if you do manage to get into the right
> position to do it.

And heck, if you don't want to get involved in all of that
strategy, or if your opponent manages to get you into a jam,
you can always super-jump your way out of any positional mess,
or air-block, or tag out (thereby forcing him to alter his
positional game plan), etc. "Keep people at the right dis-
tance" is a full-on JOKE in the Vs. games; I'll thank you not
to appropriate aspects of non-Vs. strategy in support of your
position, aspects that don't exist in a Marvel fighter.

Why all the text, when you're just advising someone to
turtle? Why can't I respond the same way, on the side of
Strider? For example: I start the match with a legion.
Block damage. Now I'm ahead. What are you going to do?
Venom fang? Colossus/Psylocke, or combo you if you do
the strong or fierce version, or any version in the corner.
Attack with normals? Push-block. Web throw? Yeah, right.
Death bite? Super-jump. Venom web? Black, then dash into
combo of choice. Creating hypothetical scenarios works
both ways, smart guy.

>> [...]

Of course, with absolute air-blocking in the game, the
special anti-airs are all suicide, and unfortunately, the
pixie air normals usually out-prioritize the ground normals
of anyone else.

> and super jumping just gives your opponent
> a free switch of characters without fear of retaliation,

Ha, where I play, the pixie players will sometimes super-
jump just to get you to bring in the other character. I'd
love to see you try your hand here in California.

> which also
> incidentally tends to throw off any real hope of a crossover hit that you
> might have been thinking of.

Switching during a super-jump can be *more* dangerous than not
switching, especially against Wolverine, with his b.s. toe tap
into chain into super, or versus Spider-Man, with his Maximum
Spider, if the switch comes too late.

--
/|_Milo D. Cooper____EverQuest character modeler_|\
\| www.milos-chalkboard.net www.everquest.com |/

Milo D. Cooper

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

> Stilt Man wrote:

>> Chocobo wrote:
>>> Phillip McCoy wrote:
>>> Why does everyone hate the VS games? The concept behind them is good, and
>>> when the first one came out, you know damn well that EVERY one of you went
>>> running to see what it was all about. Even though they may be a little
>>> confusing, they're still fun to play. I don't see what the big deal is about
>>> hating VS.
>>

>> The main reason would be that the games suck. It's true that most everyone went
>> running to see what they were all about, but not long afterwards, a lot of
>> people were running away.
>
> Funny. I see more people crowded around the versus games for more frequent
> and longer periods of time than I ever did around the SF2 series. Which
> people were running away?

That says much about your gaming scene. Here in California, SF's
heyday saw from two to three times as many machines of a single ver-
sion of SF in some arcades, and players that would stay at the arcade
for twelve hours or more per day -- fresh, exciting, unique matches
the while, not this endless turtle, super-jump, and chain stuff.
There were times when we barely had elbow room, the arcades were that
packed, and I've never heard of lines for a Vs. game that stretched
out of an arcade's front doors.

>> [...]

>> The whole air combo idea is stupid, anyone can do an
>> air combo and there's no originality involved or skill needed...
>
> Nor was there on a four-fierce Guile combo in SF2. Jump in, hold the stick
> back, press the fierce button twice, push the stick forward, push it twice
> again. Brain-dead easy. Never occurred to me how stupid it was until a
> Guile player was asked how he did it and just sort of rolled his eyes and
> demonstrated on the controls between rounds. One button, two joystick
> movements, you just mash twice, move the stick, and mash twice again. On
> WW, that was a repeat-until-die combo.

Again, another retro-argument from one who has embraced
Capcom's deliberately-engineered scrub scene. WW?? We're
on the side of the paragons: HF and ST, even Super in some
cases. Assail *those* versions, not Capcom's *first*
bloody game, which will obviously sport unintentional im-
perfections (as opposed to the Marvel games' very inten-
tional ones). Besides, Guile in WW and Ken in HF are both
*one* of many characters; the Marvel games have several
pixies *each*; that, or (in the case of XMvSF) a bunch of
dudes with infinite combos, which is probably worse. Cer-
tainly, *everyone* has air combos (which are, indeed, stu-
pid).
Come to California. Get worked. You ARE Bison.

Kevin Eav

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

In article <6i43fu$2mj$1...@user1.teleport.com>, stil...@user1.teleport.com (Stilt Man) wrote:

The argument here, Stiltman, isn't whether the game has the same -elements
of gameplay- that previous SF2 games had, but the decrease in skill-level
it took to get the most -out- of those games, and the general lowering in
skill level the players just coming into the games now have, as opposed to
earlier. Maybe it's just that people were, to some extent, 'learning
together' before, but you can't deny that it takes far less effort to pull
off the 'top level play' in a vs. game than it did in SF2. The skills are
'still there', for the most part, but the skill bell curve is flattening
out.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Ultima

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

Useless factor: So-so
Rambling factor: Highish

Warning: Read at your own discretion
************************************

Raizerion wrote:

[SLASH]

> Personally, I find MvC enjoyable. It's lack of definition, balance or structure makes it a loose comfortable game and perfect for relaxed sparing among friends. These same factors make it impossible for MvC to be a realistic competition game. That's not to say MvC cannot be played skillfully...It just can't even enter the ring with ST, 2i, MSH or even SF2.

*Shrugs* I think it could enter the ring at least, but it would be
thrown out BUshwhacker-style ;)

> I think the real hatred of VS stems from the fear that CapCom is becoming a bit too fond of this loose imprecise gameplay. The skill required to play SF, DS or XM has arguably decreased since the high point of ST, DS1 and MSH respectively. By continuing to degrade the SF engine, CapCom is essentially...Selling out to the
> masses and abandoning the "old-schoolers" who laid their foundation.

*claps*

Well said. I think that's it precisely. By and large, the Vs games
aren't worthy of hatred - Hell, I'd pick them over many others in a
flash (*cough* MK, KI, Primal Rage, and several others I'd rather not
mentione right now). AS has been noted, they can be played with skill -
in my experience, the best players at the VS games have also been pretty
good (well, locally anyway) on the regular SF games (though to be
honest, I've only non-vs. games I've played some of them on are SFA2 and
SF3). So the problem isn't with the games themselves. Lord knows there's
much worse to play. However, it's what they represent that really irks
some of us - the endless scrubbifying and watering-down of the engine in
order to rake in more cash, an effect I'm sure that any fan of anything
gets truly saddened over.

Worse, because they are a business, it's unlikely that they're going to
reverse or even stop the trend (because when they do try, like they have
with the SF3 series, it falls flat on their face since they can't please
everybody... or anybody in this instance). That's why all this hype of
SFZ3 is rather unfortunate - I'll reserve judgement until it arrives,
and then give the game 4 weeks tops before players have found the Next
Big Screw Up(tm). I only hope I'm wrong and such a thing is never found,
but I'm not counting on it...

--
Ultima
http://www.concentric.net/~Ultima1 - Street Fighter RPG, Final
Fantasy VII, Fan art, and miscellaneous rambling...

SFCode Ver 5.0:
{V+ MB+ Rl+ Cr+[SFA2] I[III]+ Ax[I,III]+}
[ac- +cc+(!ccRl&MB) ch- cn- c m+ 2+ n++ os+ p+ r@++ sp- st ta--
t(t+SCR) tm-- tr-:- th--@- v+(v++SFA2)]

"If you were stuck on a deserted island, and you could only
choose between MK and SF to be stuck with, and you choose MK,
then you deserve to be on that island" - Slasher Quan

"If an arcade doesn't contain some version of SF or SS in it,
then's it's not an arcade"

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

In article <3546362A...@milos-chalkboard.net>,

Milo D. Cooper <mi...@milos-chalkboard.net> wrote:
>> Stilt Man wrote:
>>> Chocobo wrote:
>>>> Phillip McCoy wrote:
>> Funny. I see more people crowded around the versus games for more frequent
>> and longer periods of time than I ever did around the SF2 series. Which
>> people were running away?
>
> That says much about your gaming scene. Here in California, SF's
>heyday saw from two to three times as many machines of a single ver-
>sion of SF in some arcades, and players that would stay at the arcade
>for twelve hours or more per day -- fresh, exciting, unique matches
>the while, not this endless turtle, super-jump, and chain stuff.
>There were times when we barely had elbow room, the arcades were that
>packed, and I've never heard of lines for a Vs. game that stretched
>out of an arcade's front doors.

Side note: even in the less populated areas -- New Hampshire's
Funspot was great for this -- the lines were.. impressive for CE. For
example, the lines once got so great that when ppl would put a token up to
play, they had to stack them up two deep across the cabinet. That's a
helluva line, Stilt, and Very Shitty has never had anything close...

> Come to California. Get worked. You ARE Bison.

Shaun
--
Tired of Student Government Insiders?
Tired of Student Government?
Tired of Students?
Tired?

nicholas louis rogal

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

On Wed, 29 Apr 1998, Stilt Man wrote:

> In article <35463261...@milos-chalkboard.net>,

> Milo D. Cooper <mi...@milos-chalkboard.net> wrote:

> >> Stilt Man wrote:
> >>> Beef wrote:
> >>> Personally, I don't hate them. I find them fun, but after playing them a
> >>> while, it rots your brain. Everything chains into everything,
>
> >> ...but only so many of them in a useful fashion, which leaves the end result
> >> little different than it was in SF2 when not everything chained into
> >> everything.
>
> > Someone else already responded to this ridiculous observation,
> >so I'll leave it alone.
>

> And I responded to that in turn: poke-into-super tends to get you waxed
> in a hurry if it's blocked. That wasn't a problem in SF2 in most cases.

>
> >>> skilless supers(cool, tho.),
>
> >> Comboing them takes no less skill now than executing Ken's TOD or any other
> >> dizzying, once-repeatable combo back in SF2, and in the majority of cases
> >> does less damage. This is yet another of the many arguments that baffles
> >> me about old-schoolers slamming the versus series. "Oooo, Strider has a
> >> 100% combo, it's the end of the world because he'll dominate everyone with
> >> it!" Never mind that Ken's TOD didn't exactly ruin HF or CE, and for the
> >> same reason: against a decent player, he never landed it.
>
> > In pre-Alpha SF, you couldn't chain into supers.
>

> So? You didn't need to. In pre-Alpha SF, chaining into a combo consisting
> entirely of normal moves and normal specials netted you a dizzy and a repeat
> for shades of 60-90% damage.
>
Ok, here is the diffrence. In pre-Alpha SF, you rarely saw a TOD
combo, hell you rarely saw much in the way of 30% combos, you could only
land them in very specific situations. in the Vs series that's all you
have. Hell i'd offer to say i never even his someone and not combo a third
of their life away.

> >In pre-Alpha
> >SF, you didn't have supers that did 50% damage (with the possible
> >exception of Balrog, who was, surprise, the best character in the
> >game).
>

> No, you just had combos that did.
>
Which could only be landed in specific, difficult to set up
situations. Most of off jumpins which was 100 times more risky than it is
now. You could not dash-short into aircombo into super for 40% damage,
their was a positioning game, and ground game that is not completely but
for the most part missing from the VS series.

> >In pre-Alpha SF, there weren't more than one or two char-
> >acters who could chain into 30% or more damage off a f*cking low
> >short, instead of the majority of the cast.
>

> So? Obviously the ones that could didn't rule the game, so what difference
> does it make that there are a good number who can now?
because now the ones that can do rule the game. And it's because
of speed, the pixies are too fast, you HAVE to play them to be
conpetitive at high skill levels. Sure at low skill levels who cares, but
when your playing high skill levels, you have to play them if you want to
win. Personally that's what i don't like about it.

>
> >In pre- (and includ-
> >ing) Alpha SF, you couldn't jump in with ambiguous air chains
> >without fear of anti-air retaliation due to completely safe air-
> >blocking.
>

> Can't really in most vs. games, either. Air counters are still around, be
> it by tossing them when they land or punting them into orbit with Rogue or
> jab shadow blade or short flash kick or...

yea right.. no one has ever said jump-in's are completly safe in
vs, but they are much MUCH more safe, than in classic SF or even alpha.

>
> >> Also no different from SF2. In SF2 we had FB/DP pattern shotos. Now we've
> >> got pixies. Your point?
>
> > Are you *serious*?? FB/DP is NO match for pixie chain crap;
> >that's why Ryu and Ken have never even come close to being the
> >best fighters in a Vs. game.

<snip>

>
> And the pixies aren't the best fighters in most of the vs. games, either.
> In XSF, you knew how to block, you knew how to beat Wolvie. Cammy, more or
> less the same deal. In MvC, same thing with Wolvie and Strider. Spider Man
> is about the only pixie who's actually still that good at the highest levels,
> because he has a distance game of his own if he gets stuck against a good
> positional player. Strider and Wolvie, blocking and 3-button push is all
> you need.
ok stilt i don't believe you at all here, push blocking is
worthless against a good pixie, so you push block, what does that get
you? You don't gain anything, push blocking isn't going to win you the
match. Plus turtling an entire match is boring... and whats to stop the
pixie from doing the same thing.
Secondly what the hell do you mean pixie's arn't the best
characters in the vs games? who is then. Although i do agree spiderman is
the most deadly of the pixie's in MvC.

>
> >>> There is very little
> >>> strategy,
>
> >> There's actually quite a bit of strategy. You avoid making mistakes that
> >> allow big combos (just like SF2), you avoid letting yourself get into a
> >> bad position against the wrong character (just like SF2), you try to keep
> >> people at the right distance where you can hurt them more than they can hurt
> >> you (just like SF2), and you play cautiously because a decent opponent can
> >> call out Colossus and bake you with a super at any moment if you're stupid
> >> enough to mindlessly poke even if you do manage to get into the right
> >> position to do it.
>
> > And heck, if you don't want to get involved in all of that
> >strategy, or if your opponent manages to get you into a jam,
> >you can always super-jump your way out of any positional mess,
> >or air-block, or tag out (thereby forcing him to alter his
> >positional game plan), etc.
>

> Position is still important. If you're not in position to attack, you're not
> anywhere in this game. A good player will know how to keep you out of position
> to attack, and will pick characters who can both keep you out of that position
> but also have good ground-to-air counters so that super jumping in doesn't
> help you. In MvC it just gets worse, because they can bring in Colossus and
> tag you when you stick out your super-jumping attack and bake you with a super.
>
> Yes, position is less permanent in the vs. games than it was in SF2. Frankly,
> I like that way. But it's still important enough that just picking a pixie
> won't cut it if you don't know how to get in better than your opponent knows
> how to keep you there. There are methodical defensive players out there who
> know very well how to do that. These are your Cyclopses, your Morrigans, etc.

> [slash]
>
> And I super jump up and go a little forward when I hit the zenith of it.
> No block damage whatsoever, and you go through the rest of the match with
> me up a super meter on you and even in all ways. The rest of your hypothetical
> depends on this part, so it's not even worth bothering to quote.
You didn't answer his point, which is how can venom make an
offense against strider?

Terence Byron Cox

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Apr 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/28/98

Milo,

Why do you bother responding? I have fallen victim to the idea often
enough that if I just take the time to explain the aspects of the 'vs'
engine that lend it more to a adrenaline game and less of a complex
strategy game, that I will somehow be accomplishing something. Wrong.
Unless the poster is listed as 'Mr. Capcom', don't bother. Or better
yet, just write it once, and then copy it as your default reply.

We all know that safe chains = why use ANY other attack. We all know
that the only character who ever REALLY had something akin to a lethal
uppercut/fireball trap was Super Sagat. We all know that universal moves
like dashes, super jumps, parries (whoops.. wrong version), AC (whoops,
wrong again), etc. lend to making the characters similar and kills the
diversity needed for diverse strategy. Recycled frames (sorry this is
from another post) means that you can rely on the move still (same
speed, same hit location, etc.). I really think that it is a waste of
time. BUt it's your call.

Later,

Terry

END

Stilt Man

unread,

Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

In article <3545D0...@sas.upenn.edu>,
Justin Boley <jbo...@sas.upenn.edu> wrote:

>Stilt Man wrote:
>> There's actually quite a bit of strategy. You avoid making mistakes that
>> allow big combos (just like SF2), you avoid letting yourself get into a
>> bad position against the wrong character (just like SF2), you try to keep
>> people at the right distance where you can hurt them more than they can hurt
>> you (just like SF2), and you play cautiously because a decent opponent can
>> call out Colossus and bake you with a super at any moment if you're stupid
>> enough to mindlessly poke even if you do manage to get into the right
>> position to do it.

> A half-witted opponent can also mash out Colossus if you were foolish

>enough to be, say, attacking, since it's also very safe at close range.

That's what I'm saying. A half-witted one might do so, but that tends to
waste your Colossuses quite a bit. There's a certain amount of reading
involved: do you think they're going to attack or not? If they're not,
you're better off using a more renewable resource than Colossus. If they
are, you're better using Colossus.

In short, it's a mind game. How well do you know what your opponent's going
to do?

><snip the rest>
>Haven't played this hecksa skilled game enough to be any kind of source
>on it, but can't Strider use short dashes and jabs/shorts to disrupt
>Venom's positioning game? Never tried this strategy, just wondering if
>it works.

Not really, no. If Strider approaches closer than about half again his
longest sword reach on the ground, he's within reach of Venom's tongue.
The tongue comes out practically instantly, and has zero recovery time.
If Strider does guess on when Venom sticks it out and uses his sword,
it *trades*, and if he guesses wrong, he usually gets whapped for it.
On the ground, Strider has a very, very hard time getting in on Venom.

Going through the air doesn't work much better, because Venom's launcher
goes clean through Strider's aerial moves. Which gives one of several
choices: (1) Strider sticks out a move and gets air comboed out of the
launcher. (2) Strider doesn't stick out a move and air blocks the launcher,
which just pushes him back to where he started. (3) Strider doesn't stick
out a move and Venom tosses him when he lands, also getting Strider air
comboed. (4) Strider does stick out a move and Venom push-blocks him back
where he came from.

Strider's other options? Ouroboros is overrated and useless; Venom push-blocks
him at every turn without any real likelihood of damage or closing. Legion
lets him whittle, but a venom fang also is a fairly safe whittle, too, so that
doesn't really help Strider much. I won't go into what happens after a
blocked Ragnarok. Strider's best real shot is to call for a helper and pray,
or get a partner that can fight Venom better than he can... because this fight
goes pretty badly for Strider if Venom keeps his cool and doesn't screw up.

Stilt Man

unread,

Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

In article <Pine.OSF.3.96.98042...@alpha3.csd.uwm.edu>,
Beef <mcar...@csd.uwm.edu> wrote:
>On Tue, 28 Apr 1998, Stilt Man wrote:
>> In article <Pine.OSF.3.96.98042...@alpha3.csd.uwm.edu>,
>> Beef <mcar...@csd.uwm.edu> wrote:
>> >Personally, I don't hate them. I find them fun, but after playing them a
>> >while, it rots your brain. Everything chains into everything,

>> ...but only so many of them in a useful fashion, which leaves the end result
>> little different than it was in SF2 when not everything chained into
>> everything.

>What do you mean, useful fashion? Chun Li walks up and does a short
>into a standing forward into the Thousand Burst kick.

Which gets her pulverized if it's blocked.

>Wolverine was the
>same with a crouching jab, crouching strong into a berserker barrage X.

Ditto.

>You could pick any character and chain right into a super VERY easily.

And, for the most part, likewise. On the other hand, in SF2 you could do
just about any combo you wanted safely if it were blocked. The characters
that couldn't were the weaklings. MvC is not that much different from SF2
in this regard: you save the hard-hitting combos for when they'll hit, and
do smaller ones that are safe when they won't.

>> This is yet another of the many arguments that baffles
>> me about old-schoolers slamming the versus series. "Oooo, Strider has a
>> 100% combo, it's the end of the world because he'll dominate everyone with
>> it!"

>An old-schooler who says that isn't an old-schooler, just some wannabe.

Then I guess the vast majority of the old-schoolers on this forum are just
wannabes, because that sort of thing is exactly what they tend to complain
about.

>> >and scrub friendly characters.

>> Also no different from SF2. In SF2 we had FB/DP pattern shotos. Now we've
>> got pixies. Your point?

>In street fighter there was Ryu, Ken, and Sagat with that pattern. Most
>people with a sliver of skill could beat that pattern. All it took was
>patience. In vs. it's nearly every character with some high yield/low
>risk move that made a beginner a lot closer to a higher tier player.

Bullshit. Most people with a sliver of skill can beat a dialing pattern
pixie with the same ease that they used to beat a FB/DP pattern shoto in
SF2, and with the same virtue taking primary importance: patience.

>> >There is very little
>> >strategy,

>> There's actually quite a bit of strategy. You avoid making mistakes that
>> allow big combos (just like SF2), you avoid letting yourself get into a
>> bad position against the wrong character (just like SF2), you try to keep
>> people at the right distance where you can hurt them more than they can hurt
>> you (just like SF2), and you play cautiously because a decent opponent can
>> call out Colossus

>Colossus? What game are YOU playing that you can call out Collossus?

MvC. You've heard of it?

>> and bake you with a super at any moment if you're stupid
>> enough to mindlessly poke even if you do manage to get into the right
>> position to do it.

><MvsC examples snipped to keep interest>

>Those big combos you had to look out for in SF2 were a bit harder to do
>than chaining into a super.

Matter of opinion. If you know the mechanics involved, it's easy to do either
one. Combo-happy Ken scrubs were all over the friggin' place in SF2 days,
just as combo-happy pixies are all over the friggin' place now. The difference
is that, if you can land it, the combo-happy Ken could whack off 85-100% of
your life with one or two buttons. Now it takes most of the buttons to whack
off 50%. Refresh my memory... which one are we complaining about, again?

>Positioning and zoning are almost null now
>that you can super jump.

Overrated. People who do nothing but super jump all day can be annoying if
you don't know what to do against them, but it's nothing that you're really
going to have to worry about.

>There's almost no ground game anymore.

Speak for yourself. Around here, he who controls the ground controls the
machine. The jumping game has its place, but only as a substitute when you
can't control the ground.

>People
>stopped thinking, "Hey, if I jump, I'm gonna get DPed, or blocked and then
>SPDed." Now, it's, "Hey, I'm gonna super jump and to hell with the
>consequences because I can air block and tech hit out of that SPD.

The air block might work. Tech hitting out of the SPD won't. Even Morrigan's
Vector Drain is relatively difficult to tech hit out of; you either do it
practically before she's got you or it's over, you're in for the full ride.

>With the inclusion of the super jump and the air block, there are more
>people willing to jump in without regard for what happened.

I know. Around my neighborhood, we call those guys "idiots".

>> >the CPU patterns are very obvious and predictable

>> So what else is new? At any point in any fighting game, there's _always_
>> an obvious and predictable pattern that wins you the game. For instance, in
>> HF you could walk past the computer at will with Bison simply by tossing them
>> over and over when you land after a head stomp. Only one or two characters
>> would even make an attempt to stop you.

>That's on an easier level with one character. Sure there was the boring
>firefight with Ryu, but now its a step further with just one combo used
>over and over with no variety. Visions of spidey's air rave come to mind.

Actually, in MvC the pixie patterns don't work real hot against the computer
at all.

>>>and everyone's jumping everywhere.

>> Not if they know how to play, they aren't. A good player will know how to
>> create offense on the ground better than in the air. Everyone's got an air
>> counter these days somewhere, and super jumping just gives your opponent
>> a free switch of characters without fear of retaliation, which also
>> incidentally tends to throw off any real hope of a crossover hit that you
>> might have been thinking of.

>How many people know this? Not many unless they have net access. Most
>scrubs just jam on strong.

I figured it out without needing my net access. Sure, I'm probably a little
brighter than the average player, but not by that much, and not by enough that
someone seeing me do it won't pick it up.

>> Once again... just like SF2, just with a few new ways to jump.

>only different.

DIFFERENT, sure. But "different" doesn't mean "worse".

Stilt Man

unread,

Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

In article <35463261...@milos-chalkboard.net>,
Milo D. Cooper <mi...@milos-chalkboard.net> wrote:

>> Stilt Man wrote:
>>> Beef wrote:
>>> Personally, I don't hate them. I find them fun, but after playing them a
>>> while, it rots your brain. Everything chains into everything,

>> ...but only so many of them in a useful fashion, which leaves the end result
>> little different than it was in SF2 when not everything chained into
>> everything.

> Someone else already responded to this ridiculous observation,
>so I'll leave it alone.

And I responded to that in turn: poke-into-super tends to get you waxed

in a hurry if it's blocked. That wasn't a problem in SF2 in most cases.

>>> skilless supers(cool, tho.),

>> Comboing them takes no less skill now than executing Ken's TOD or any other
>> dizzying, once-repeatable combo back in SF2, and in the majority of cases
>> does less damage. This is yet another of the many arguments that baffles
>> me about old-schoolers slamming the versus series. "Oooo, Strider has a
>> 100% combo, it's the end of the world because he'll dominate everyone with
>> it!" Never mind that Ken's TOD didn't exactly ruin HF or CE, and for the
>> same reason: against a decent player, he never landed it.

> In pre-Alpha SF, you couldn't chain into supers.

So? You didn't need to. In pre-Alpha SF, chaining into a combo consisting

entirely of normal moves and normal specials netted you a dizzy and a repeat
for shades of 60-90% damage.

>In pre-Alpha

>SF, you didn't have supers that did 50% damage (with the possible
>exception of Balrog, who was, surprise, the best character in the
>game).

No, you just had combos that did.

>In pre-Alpha SF, there weren't more than one or two char-

>acters who could chain into 30% or more damage off a f*cking low
>short, instead of the majority of the cast.

So? Obviously the ones that could didn't rule the game, so what difference

does it make that there are a good number who can now?

>In pre- (and includ-

>ing) Alpha SF, you couldn't jump in with ambiguous air chains
>without fear of anti-air retaliation due to completely safe air-
>blocking.

Can't really in most vs. games, either. Air counters are still around, be

it by tossing them when they land or punting them into orbit with Rogue or
jab shadow blade or short flash kick or...

> My point is that the Vs. games are chock-f*cking FULL of scrub-

>freindly features, the kind of stuff that rewards maneuvers with
>gains out of proportion to the difficulty with which their exe-
>cuted. THAT'S why they're GARBAGE. Yes, you probably won't see
>experienced players getting infinited regularly, but there *are*
>pixie chains of at least 20% damage during virtually every match,
>and all off the simplest of moves (short and jabs). If you can
>connect with attacks that are quicker and safer than anything
>else in the game, then dial into a damage extension that removes
>a quarter of your opponent's K.O. meter, why waste time developing
>the mental skills required to be effective in previous Capcom
>fighters?

Okay, Milo. I'm going to rewrite this paragraph only slightly, and it's
still going to be 100% applicable, and I defy you to tell me where the
lack of parallel lies.

"My point is that the SF2 games are chock-f*cking FULL of scrub-friendly

features, the kind of stuff that rewards maneuvers with gains out of

proportion to the difficulty with which their [sic] executed. THAT'S

why they're GARBAGE. Yes, you probably won't see experienced players

getting TOD'ed regularly, but there *are* roundhouse/forward/FB chains
of at least 75% damage during virtually every match, and all off the
simplest off moves (jumping roundhouse). If you can anticipate a FB
being thrown, then dial into damage extension that dizzies and repeats
to remove three quarters of your opponent's KO meter, why waste time
developing the mental skills required to be effective in Mortal Kombat?"

Loosely translated, you're spouting drivel here. I've said it a million
times: take a combo-happy Ken out of SF2 and the round is OVER from the
first real mistake. That's not even the case in most circumstances with
a pixie these days, because most of the easy pixie infinites are gone, and
the few real gross combos are either very difficult to do or require your
opponent to be drooling at the controls to hit them with it.

>>> and scrub friendly characters.

>> Also no different from SF2. In SF2 we had FB/DP pattern shotos. Now we've
>> got pixies. Your point?

> Are you *serious*?? FB/DP is NO match for pixie chain crap;
>that's why Ryu and Ken have never even come close to being the
>best fighters in a Vs. game.

You mistake my meaning. In _SF2_ we had pattern shotos. Just about every
arcade was dominated by them. You had people claiming to know what they're
doing at the game just fine screaming about how cheesy it was. Now, substitute
"pixie" for "FB/DP" and you've got the same situation, except that the egos
involved are a bit bigger because people tend to assume that they're going
to automatically know something because they were good at a previous version.

Pixies can be stopped. In XSF, just knowing how to block got you a win over
Wolverine, who was the only real pixie in that game. In MvC, that still gets
you fairly far against Wolvie or Strider. It's not like either one of those
two has any particularly safe whittles; the only one is Strider's Legion and
Ouroboros... which are ONLY useful as whittles, because your opponent has
to be a complete idiot to actually get HIT with things that slow.

>In SF, if your opponent antici-
>pated a FB/DP pattern, you paid a hefty price; FB/DP was ef-
>fective, but the cost was post-attack vulnerability. Where's
>the post-attack payment of executing a damned jab or short, or,
>in some cases, even a Wolverine berserker barrage or Strider
>sword slash??

Wolvie's berserker barrage is bait to get tossed. Strider's rushing sword
slash is bait for a lot worse than just getting tossed. Take either of their
regular moves and just block them and you're fine even without knowing much.
Figure out a few decent quick reach moves and you're more than fine, because
neither one of those two has reach to work with.

>Except for Akuma, the shotos weren't even the
>best fighters in most of the SF games, and in Alpha 2, when
>they kicked more @$$ than ever they did before, it wasn't be-
>cause of their FB/DP capability.

And the pixies aren't the best fighters in most of the vs. games, either.

In XSF, you knew how to block, you knew how to beat Wolvie. Cammy, more or
less the same deal. In MvC, same thing with Wolvie and Strider. Spider Man
is about the only pixie who's actually still that good at the highest levels,
because he has a distance game of his own if he gets stuck against a good
positional player. Strider and Wolvie, blocking and 3-button push is all
you need.

>>> There is very little

>>> strategy,

>> There's actually quite a bit of strategy. You avoid making mistakes that
>> allow big combos (just like SF2), you avoid letting yourself get into a
>> bad position against the wrong character (just like SF2), you try to keep
>> people at the right distance where you can hurt them more than they can hurt
>> you (just like SF2), and you play cautiously because a decent opponent can
>> call out Colossus and bake you with a super at any moment if you're stupid
>> enough to mindlessly poke even if you do manage to get into the right
>> position to do it.

> And heck, if you don't want to get involved in all of that
>strategy, or if your opponent manages to get you into a jam,
>you can always super-jump your way out of any positional mess,
>or air-block, or tag out (thereby forcing him to alter his
>positional game plan), etc.

Position is still important. If you're not in position to attack, you're not

anywhere in this game. A good player will know how to keep you out of position
to attack, and will pick characters who can both keep you out of that position
but also have good ground-to-air counters so that super jumping in doesn't
help you. In MvC it just gets worse, because they can bring in Colossus and
tag you when you stick out your super-jumping attack and bake you with a super.

Yes, position is less permanent in the vs. games than it was in SF2. Frankly,
I like that way. But it's still important enough that just picking a pixie
won't cut it if you don't know how to get in better than your opponent knows
how to keep you there. There are methodical defensive players out there who
know very well how to do that. These are your Cyclopses, your Morrigans, etc.

>> e.g. Venom vs. Strider. Venom wants Strider at range and without a close-range

[slash]

And I super jump up and go a little forward when I hit the zenith of it.
No block damage whatsoever, and you go through the rest of the match with
me up a super meter on you and even in all ways. The rest of your hypothetical
depends on this part, so it's not even worth bothering to quote.

>>> [...]

> Of course, with absolute air-blocking in the game, the
>special anti-airs are all suicide, and unfortunately, the
>pixie air normals usually out-prioritize the ground normals
>of anyone else.

Venom's strong launcher, no (except Spidey's roundhouse). Morrigan's standing
roundhouse, no. Morrigan's jab shadow blade, no (she'll land before any pixie
other than Spidey will be able to retaliate... if they start learning to
retaliate, you roundhouse into the occasional soul fist for the same effect).
Zangief's lariat, no. Ryu's crouching fierce, doubtful. The list goes on.
And that's just MvC.

> Switching during a super-jump can be *more* dangerous than not
>switching, especially against Wolverine, with his b.s. toe tap
>into chain into super,

...which depends on him being above where the person comes out at the instant
of the switch... by the time he gets over to them if he's not, the recovery
is over and they've got scads of warning to do a DP sort of thing on him.

>or versus Spider-Man, with his Maximum Spider, if the switch comes too late.

...if. If it doesn't, and he misjudges it... "Challenge BAKED." :)

(bonus points for anyone who can tell me what game that quote comes from...)

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

unread,

Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

In article <6i60kq$9po$1...@user2.teleport.com>,

Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <Pine.OSF.3.96.98042...@alpha3.csd.uwm.edu>,
>Beef <mcar...@csd.uwm.edu> wrote:
>>On Tue, 28 Apr 1998, Stilt Man wrote:
>>> In article <Pine.OSF.3.96.98042...@alpha3.csd.uwm.edu>,
>>> Beef <mcar...@csd.uwm.edu> wrote:
>>> ...but only so many of them in a useful fashion, which leaves the end result
>>> little different than it was in SF2 when not everything chained into
>>> everything.
>
>>What do you mean, useful fashion? Chun Li walks up and does a short
>>into a standing forward into the Thousand Burst kick.
>
>Which gets her pulverized if it's blocked.

Stilt, just stop. Do you know why Yun, Yang, and Ibuki are
so powerful in 2i? Because those chains allow me to see if something is
being blocked. Yang doesn't do short, forward, rekka ken x3 if the short
and forward are blocked. Well, Chun, Striderine Man, and what-not do
the same thing.

>>> me about old-schoolers slamming the versus series. "Oooo, Strider has a
>>> 100% combo, it's the end of the world because he'll dominate everyone with
>>> it!"
>
>>An old-schooler who says that isn't an old-schooler, just some wannabe.
>
>Then I guess the vast majority of the old-schoolers on this forum are just
>wannabes, because that sort of thing is exactly what they tend to complain
>about.

Old schoolers complain because his 100% combo starts from
something as innocuous as a *JAB*. I don't like it when an ill-advised
fireball cost you 1/2+ off the jump in and the ensuing dizzy. A jab?
That's crazy.

>>> >and scrub friendly characters.
>>> Also no different from SF2. In SF2 we had FB/DP pattern shotos. Now we've
>>> got pixies. Your point?
>>In street fighter there was Ryu, Ken, and Sagat with that pattern. Most
>>people with a sliver of skill could beat that pattern. All it took was
>>patience. In vs. it's nearly every character with some high yield/low
>>risk move that made a beginner a lot closer to a higher tier player.

>Bullshit. Most people with a sliver of skill can beat a dialing pattern
>pixie with the same ease that they used to beat a FB/DP pattern shoto in
>SF2, and with the same virtue taking primary importance: patience.

This is silly. Pixie dialing is essentially unretaliable, even at
the lower levels. FB/DP isn't.

>>Those big combos you had to look out for in SF2 were a bit harder to do
>>than chaining into a super.
>Matter of opinion. If you know the mechanics involved, it's easy to do either
>one. Combo-happy Ken scrubs were all over the friggin' place in SF2 days,
>just as combo-happy pixies are all over the friggin' place now. The difference
>is that, if you can land it, the combo-happy Ken could whack off 85-100% of
>your life with one or two buttons. Now it takes most of the buttons to whack
>off 50%. Refresh my memory... which one are we complaining about, again?

Yah, but Ken had to have a much larger openning than in MvC.

>>Positioning and zoning are almost null now
>>that you can super jump.
>Overrated. People who do nothing but super jump all day can be annoying if
>you don't know what to do against them, but it's nothing that you're really
>going to have to worry about.

It losses all positioning no matter what you do, though.

>The air block might work. Tech hitting out of the SPD won't. Even Morrigan's
>Vector Drain is relatively difficult to tech hit out of; you either do it
>practically before she's got you or it's over, you're in for the full ride.

Tech hitting is ass easy in these games. Period.

>>> Once again... just like SF2, just with a few new ways to jump.

LOL.

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

unread,

Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

In article <6i62nn$c53$1...@user2.teleport.com>,

Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <35463261...@milos-chalkboard.net>,
>Milo D. Cooper <mi...@milos-chalkboard.net> wrote:
>> In pre-Alpha SF, you couldn't chain into supers.
>
>So? You didn't need to. In pre-Alpha SF, chaining into a combo consisting
>entirely of normal moves and normal specials netted you a dizzy and a repeat
>for shades of 60-90% damage.

Chaining? You don't know the meaning of the word.

>>In pre-Alpha
>>SF, you didn't have supers that did 50% damage (with the possible
>>exception of Balrog, who was, surprise, the best character in the
>>game).
>No, you just had combos that did.

You couldn't do them off low shorts though. A) There's an
execution/timing difference in splash, jabx5, SPD (SuperSF2) and
jab,jab,F,Fjab+short, repeat. Or any of the other chain-into TODs from
XMvsSF. Or the F'ing millions of 100% combos in MvC.

>>In pre- (and includ-
>>ing) Alpha SF, you couldn't jump in with ambiguous air chains
>>without fear of anti-air retaliation due to completely safe air-
>>blocking.
>
>Can't really in most vs. games, either. Air counters are still around, be
>it by tossing them when they land or punting them into orbit with Rogue or
>jab shadow blade or short flash kick or...

You can't be serious. You just can't. I super jump to land mid
close. You DP. It wiffs, and I short into dial into death. I've done
this. It was my THIRD F'ING GAME, and I was TODing with the shittier
characters. Even if they do jump at and airblock the DP, you've gained a
sliver of damage and they're probably closer now.

Because there are consequences to jumping in for that infinite.
Namely, you get DPed, and then you're knocked down. Now that they've got
a KD, they can try a crossover (ouch). They can tick. They can do a
blocked combo, which gives them position and time.
There's no similarity for short->forward->TOD.

>Loosely translated, you're spouting drivel here. I've said it a million
>times: take a combo-happy Ken out of SF2 and the round is OVER from the
>first real mistake. That's not even the case in most circumstances with
>a pixie these days, because most of the easy pixie infinites are gone, and
>the few real gross combos are either very difficult to do or require your
>opponent to be drooling at the controls to hit them with it.

>>>> and scrub friendly characters.

>> Are you *serious*?? FB/DP is NO match for pixie chain crap;
>>that's why Ryu and Ken have never even come close to being the
>>best fighters in a Vs. game.
>You mistake my meaning. In _SF2_ we had pattern shotos. Just about every
>arcade was dominated by them. You had people claiming to know what they're
>doing at the game just fine screaming about how cheesy it was. Now, substitute
>"pixie" for "FB/DP" and you've got the same situation, except that the egos
>involved are a bit bigger because people tend to assume that they're going
>to automatically know something because they were good at a previous version.

>Wolvie's berserker barrage is bait to get tossed. Strider's rushing sword

>slash is bait for a lot worse than just getting tossed. Take either of their
>regular moves and just block them and you're fine even without knowing much.
>Figure out a few decent quick reach moves and you're more than fine, because
>neither one of those two has reach to work with.

Strider has nigh dhalsim range, wtf are you playing?

>>Except for Akuma, the shotos weren't even the
>>best fighters in most of the SF games, and in Alpha 2, when
>>they kicked more @$$ than ever they did before, it wasn't be-
>>cause of their FB/DP capability.

>And the pixies aren't the best fighters in most of the vs. games, either.
>In XSF, you knew how to block, you knew how to beat Wolvie. Cammy, more or
>less the same deal. In MvC, same thing with Wolvie and Strider. Spider Man
>is about the only pixie who's actually still that good at the highest levels,
>because he has a distance game of his own if he gets stuck against a good
>positional player. Strider and Wolvie, blocking and 3-button push is all
>you need.

MSH - top char: Spider Man (several(at least 2, if not more)
infinites off chains, IIRC)
XMvsSF - top char: Cyke (two or more infinites - start from a
standing f!cking JAB or throw)
MSHvsSF - top char: Wow, a non-dialer.
MvC - top char: Capt'n Striderine Man (too many TODs to list)

Stilt Man

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Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

In article <Pine.SOL.3.96.980428...@ux5.cso.uiuc.edu>,

nicholas louis rogal <ro...@students.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>On Wed, 29 Apr 1998, Stilt Man wrote:
>> Milo Cooper wrote:
>> > In pre-Alpha SF, you couldn't chain into supers.

>> So? You didn't need to. In pre-Alpha SF, chaining into a combo consisting
>> entirely of normal moves and normal specials netted you a dizzy and a repeat
>> for shades of 60-90% damage.

> Ok, here is the diffrence. In pre-Alpha SF, you rarely saw a TOD
>combo, hell you rarely saw much in the way of 30% combos, you could only
>land them in very specific situations. in the Vs series that's all you
>have. Hell i'd offer to say i never even his someone and not combo a third
>of their life away.

I know I do. Morrigan can combo for 40 or 50% at times if she manages to
Colossus-Eraser or OTG Silhouette Blade someone, but most of my damage with
her happens from soul fists, shadow blades, small chains, and vector drains.
With Venom I get most of my damage from tongue tags and jab venom fangs,
although he gets the occasional air combo when an opponent gets frustrated
and does something stupid.

> > >In pre-Alpha
>> >SF, you didn't have supers that did 50% damage (with the possible
>> >exception of Balrog, who was, surprise, the best character in the
>> >game).

>> No, you just had combos that did.

> Which could only be landed in specific, difficult to set up
>situations. Most of off jumpins which was 100 times more risky than it is
>now. You could not dash-short into aircombo into super for 40% damage,
>their was a positioning game, and ground game that is not completely but
>for the most part missing from the VS series.

Actually, where I come from, *most* of the game is played on the ground between
anyone any good. That's where you can do the most damage, and where you can
set up the nastiest combos. Getting the right position on the ground is
everything where I play, because enough characters have largely uncounterable
ground-to-air counters that getting your licks in on the ground is the safest
overall way to go.

> > >In pre-Alpha SF, there weren't more than one or two char-
>> >acters who could chain into 30% or more damage off a f*cking low
>> >short, instead of the majority of the cast.

>> So? Obviously the ones that could didn't rule the game, so what difference
>> does it make that there are a good number who can now?

> because now the ones that can do rule the game. And it's because
>of speed, the pixies are too fast, you HAVE to play them to be
>conpetitive at high skill levels. Sure at low skill levels who cares, but
>when your playing high skill levels, you have to play them if you want to
>win. Personally that's what i don't like about it.

I don't find that at all. The low skill players play the pixies, and the
high skill players play all manner of characters. I've seen Hulks that can
crush pixie scrubs, I've seen CapComs that can play keepaway games so heinous
that the pixies get frustrated to death, I've seen Carnages that make the
pixies look downright TAME, and I play a pressure-playing Morrigan/Venom team
that tends to render pixies largely inert unless they're extremely good at
it, at which point they get annoying but by no means unstoppable. Heck, I
even see some War Machines that can beat all but the best players with an
annoyance/keepaway game.

>> >In pre- (and includ-
>> >ing) Alpha SF, you couldn't jump in with ambiguous air chains
>> >without fear of anti-air retaliation due to completely safe air-
>> >blocking.

>> Can't really in most vs. games, either. Air counters are still around, be
>> it by tossing them when they land or punting them into orbit with Rogue or
>> jab shadow blade or short flash kick or...

> yea right.. no one has ever said jump-in's are completly safe in
>vs, but they are much MUCH more safe, than in classic SF or even alpha.

Perhaps. But still not as safe as staying on the ground.

>> > Are you *serious*?? FB/DP is NO match for pixie chain crap;
>> >that's why Ryu and Ken have never even come close to being the
>> >best fighters in a Vs. game.

>> And the pixies aren't the best fighters in most of the vs. games, either.

>> In XSF, you knew how to block, you knew how to beat Wolvie. Cammy, more or
>> less the same deal. In MvC, same thing with Wolvie and Strider. Spider Man
>> is about the only pixie who's actually still that good at the highest levels,
>> because he has a distance game of his own if he gets stuck against a good
>> positional player. Strider and Wolvie, blocking and 3-button push is all
>> you need.

> ok stilt i don't believe you at all here, push blocking is
>worthless against a good pixie, so you push block, what does that get
>you?

It gets you distance on the ground, which against a pixie is element numero
uno to beating them. Sure, pixies have speed, but they don't have reach.
Projectiles have reach. Some of the characters without projectiles have
reach. Morrigan's got a soul fist. Venom's got a whole range of quick,
safe moves. CapCom's got his blasts, Ryu's got his FBs, MegaMan has his
MegaBusters, Zangief has his roundhouse/SPD ticks, Carnage has Venom's
largely identical range of moves with a good dose of really strong coffee
thrown into it, Hulk's got his gamma wave... insert non-pixie here and you've
got at least a few moves that have better reach than a pixie's pokes. Deny
the pixie the close range on the ground and they're at a disadvantage if you
play it right.

This forces them to take to the air. Or maybe it lets you take to the air.
Hulk beats Strider if he's got altitude advantage, because Strider's air
defense on the ground just plain sucks. SUCKS. Spidey's isn't that much
better. Taking to the air sort of works, but there's numerous characters
who can match them there when the altitude is the same, too. Wolvie's actually
got the best air defense of the three, which is somewhat of a balance for
the fact that he's the weakest of the three in pixie tactics these days.

Deny a pixie the ground chains and pick your air counter right and it's a game,
no matter who or how good the pixie is.

> Secondly what the hell do you mean pixie's arn't the best
>characters in the vs games? who is then. Although i do agree spiderman is
>the most deadly of the pixie's in MvC.

Let's see. In XSF, my personal "top tier" list reads Rogue, Charlie, Bison,
maybe Ryu and Dhalsim. Wolvie and Chunster were probably the two main pixies
to concern yourself with, and neither one of them was particularly powerful
in XSF.

In MSF? Cyclops got a lot stronger because his optic blasts got a lot safer.
Cyclops MAULED pixies with the turtle game. Ryu was still up there pretty
high. Spidey was pretty good, breaking a pixie into the top tier but not a
match for Cyclops.

In MvC? Haven't really formulated a concrete tier structure in my mind yet.
Morrigan is in the top tier. That much I'm fairly convinced of. Too much
power to control the pace in intelligent hands not to be up there. There's
no situation she can't handle in some way or another. Spidey is probably
up there too, but NOT simply because he's a pixie. Yes, he can pixie with
the best of them, but the reason I'd put him up there is because he also can
play a distance game against enemies that it's ill-advised for him to attack
head-on, because most of those people don't have a way to get close to him if
he plays keepaway. Strider I'd put at second tier. He can sort of play the
distance game, but not as well as Spidey can; his projectiles are weaker and
more vulnerable to counter-attack than incessant air web balls. Wolvie I'd
put at second tier as well because he just plain lacks that flexibility, but
I wouldn't put him below Strider overall because he DOES have a much more
fearsome offense due to the fact that he still retains his ability to chain
pokes into supers. Strider crushes Wolvie head-on, but there are a number
of situations where I'd rather have Wolvie than Strider just because Wolvie
can shred you for 40-50% from one poke, while Strider... can't.

>> > Why all the text, when you're just advising someone to
>> >turtle? Why can't I respond the same way, on the side of
>> >Strider? For example: I start the match with a legion.

>> [slash]

>> And I super jump up and go a little forward when I hit the zenith of it.
>> No block damage whatsoever, and you go through the rest of the match with
>> me up a super meter on you and even in all ways. The rest of your
>> hypothetical depends on this part, so it's not even worth bothering to quote.

> You didn't answer his point, which is how can venom make an
>offense against strider?

Jab venom fangs and long-range pokes on the ground. The ground game goes to
Venom in the stand-off, forcing Strider to take to the air, where Venom has
him at an even force disadvantage. If Strider blinks, it's worth 10% of his
life each time. Venom doesn't need to worry about blinking, because his reach
is better and Strider can't get closer than that either on the ground or in
the air. Whittling with the Legion is about Strider's only halfway effective
move if Venom doesn't budge.

Lord BBH

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Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

In article <6i6gdr$i34$1...@user1.teleport.com>, stil...@user1.teleport.com
(Stilt Man) writes:

<snip>

>Let's see. In XSF, my personal "top tier" list reads Rogue, Charlie, Bison,
>maybe Ryu and Dhalsim. Wolvie and Chunster were probably the two main pixies
>to concern yourself with, and neither one of them was particularly powerful
>in XSF.

Wha...? Charlie I can understand, but Rogue and Bison? Where are Cyclops and
Sabretooth. Cyclops was hands-down the strongest character barring infinites,
and WITH infinites he's still god since he can start one off his rushing grab
(or just about any of his throws except the Strong one)

I was a huge Rogue fan, and got a lot of winning streaks with her, but she's
definitely not top-tier.

>In MSF? Cyclops got a lot stronger because his optic blasts got a lot safer.
>Cyclops MAULED pixies with the turtle game. Ryu was still up there pretty
>high. Spidey was pretty good, breaking a pixie into the top tier but not a
>match for Cyclops.

How did Cyclops get BETTER?!?! His Optic Blast lag is far longer and comes out
slower than it did in XSF (he mauled pixies much better in the first one), his
dashing grab is SLOW AS HELL and a frickin CHARGE move... not to mention a
slower Mega Optic Blast that won't even combo and is punishable. How did he get
better again? Pass the pipe.

>In MvC? Haven't really formulated a concrete tier structure in my mind yet.
>Morrigan is in the top tier. That much I'm fairly convinced of. Too much
>power to control the pace in intelligent hands not to be up there. There's
>no situation she can't handle in some way or another. Spidey is probably
>up there too, but NOT simply because he's a pixie. Yes, he can pixie with
>the best of them, but the reason I'd put him up there is because he also can
>play a distance game against enemies that it's ill-advised for him to attack
>head-on, because most of those people don't have a way to get close to him if
>he plays keepaway. Strider I'd put at second tier. He can sort of play the
>distance game, but not as well as Spidey can; his projectiles are weaker and
>more vulnerable to counter-attack than incessant air web balls. Wolvie I'd
>put at second tier as well because he just plain lacks that flexibility, but
>I wouldn't put him below Strider overall because he DOES have a much more
>fearsome offense due to the fact that he still retains his ability to chain
>pokes into supers. Strider crushes Wolvie head-on, but there are a number
>of situations where I'd rather have Wolvie than Strider just because Wolvie
>can shred you for 40-50% from one poke, while Strider... can't.

Strider does 1/3 off a low Short WITHOUT a super. As for Morrigan, I think
she's pretty good but she's definitely not top-tier either.

----
Matt Hall BBH on EFNet
FAQs and stuff at ftp://users.aol.com/kensou/

"Trying is the first step towards failure." - Homer Simpson

Kuroyume

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Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

stil...@user1.teleport.com (Stilt Man) wrote:

[...]

>There's actually quite a bit of strategy. You avoid making mistakes that
>allow big combos (just like SF2), you avoid letting yourself get into a
>bad position against the wrong character (just like SF2), you try to keep
>people at the right distance where you can hurt them more than they can hurt
>you (just like SF2), and you play cautiously because a decent opponent can
>call out Colossus and bake you with a super at any moment if you're stupid
>enough to mindlessly poke even if you do manage to get into the right
>position to do it.

>It takes a cool head, and a bit of positioning, and knowing which moves to

>stick out at which distances. But realistically speaking, it's nowhere near
>as hard as the pixie-haters would have you believe if you know what you're
>doing. You've just got a lot of arcades who haven't gotten any farther than
>countering Strider's Ouroboros (in Seth's words, "scrubbilicious") now, just
>as they didn't get past Ken's combos back in HF. Just because they might have
>known what they were doing then doesn't mean they automatically know what
>they're doing now.

>Not if they know how to play, they aren't. A good player will know how to

>create offense on the ground better than in the air. Everyone's got an air
>counter these days somewhere, and super jumping just gives your opponent
>a free switch of characters without fear of retaliation, which also
>incidentally tends to throw off any real hope of a crossover hit that you
>might have been thinking of.

>Once again... just like SF2, just with a few new ways to jump.

Translation of this whole post: The Marvel scrubs at my arcade suck.
The VS games have rotted my brain so badly that I think the game is
skillful because I can beat these braindead pixie users.

The mere suggestion that the Marvel engine produces strategy anywhere
near that of SF is absurd.

Stick with Bison posts, Generation M'er...

--
Bob Painter
bpai...@rohan.sdsu.edu

Justin Boley

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Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

Stilt Man wrote:

> > Ok, here is the diffrence. In pre-Alpha SF, you rarely saw a TOD
> >combo, hell you rarely saw much in the way of 30% combos, you could only
> >land them in very specific situations. in the Vs series that's all you
> >have. Hell i'd offer to say i never even his someone and not combo a third
> >of their life away.
>
> I know I do. Morrigan can combo for 40 or 50% at times if she manages to
> Colossus-Eraser or OTG Silhouette Blade someone, but most of my damage with
> her happens from soul fists, shadow blades, small chains, and vector drains.
> With Venom I get most of my damage from tongue tags and jab venom fangs,
> although he gets the occasional air combo when an opponent gets frustrated
> and does something stupid.

I think what he's referring to is the fact that any opening big enough
for a jab/short usualls means ground chain -> air combo -> air finisher
for big damage.

> > Which could only be landed in specific, difficult to set up
> >situations. Most of off jumpins which was 100 times more risky than it is
> >now. You could not dash-short into aircombo into super for 40% damage,
> >their was a positioning game, and ground game that is not completely but
> >for the most part missing from the VS series.
>
> Actually, where I come from, *most* of the game is played on the ground between
> anyone any good. That's where you can do the most damage, and where you can
> set up the nastiest combos. Getting the right position on the ground is
> everything where I play, because enough characters have largely uncounterable
> ground-to-air counters that getting your licks in on the ground is the safest
> overall way to go.

I'll put my response to the Strider/Venom matchup here, since it fits.
Venom's ground game, according to you, is to get in to the max range of
his c. strong and poke away. Failing that, he has s. fierce, or of
course a "well-spaced" jab Venom Fang for free block damage. Strider,
on the other hand, _does_ have range...I'm not big on my Strider
normals, but let's try s. fierce for the sake of example. Once Strider
blocks that c.strong, or backs up a little, he can use his sword reach
to bat away Venom's normals, including the instant c. strong. Since
Strider has a zig-zag chain on the ground, he can simply pick whatever
long-range normal he likes, dial to his heart's content, and add a
blocked Ghram to keep himself safe. When I say "sword slash", I don't
mean "qcf + p", I mean his regular, one-button, insane-range slashes.
Venom can turtle Strider effectively from tongue range, but why does
Strider have to stay there? To dial off his jab? He doesn't even need
to.
So, there's your take on the ground game, which is lots of c. strongs
and jab Venom Fangs all day long, and there's mine, which is sword
swipes, dialing, and blocked specials all day long. Personally, I don't
find either to be that exciting. I don't know about anybody else, but
it's part of why I don't like the Vs. ground games.

> >> >In pre- (and includ-
> >> >ing) Alpha SF, you couldn't jump in with ambiguous air chains
> >> >without fear of anti-air retaliation due to completely safe air-
> >> >blocking.
>
> >> Can't really in most vs. games, either. Air counters are still around, be
> >> it by tossing them when they land or punting them into orbit with Rogue or
> >> jab shadow blade or short flash kick or...
>
> > yea right.. no one has ever said jump-in's are completly safe in
> >vs, but they are much MUCH more safe, than in classic SF or even alpha.
>
> Perhaps. But still not as safe as staying on the ground.

"Perhaps"? Air blocking saves you from every evil you can encounter in
the air except an air throw, which you can shut down with a jab and an
air chain. Classic and alpha had nothing like that.

> > ok stilt i don't believe you at all here, push blocking is
> >worthless against a good pixie, so you push block, what does that get
> >you?
>
> It gets you distance on the ground, which against a pixie is element numero
> uno to beating them. Sure, pixies have speed, but they don't have reach.
> Projectiles have reach. Some of the characters without projectiles have
> reach. Morrigan's got a soul fist. Venom's got a whole range of quick,
> safe moves. CapCom's got his blasts, Ryu's got his FBs, MegaMan has his
> MegaBusters, Zangief has his roundhouse/SPD ticks, Carnage has Venom's
> largely identical range of moves with a good dose of really strong coffee
> thrown into it, Hulk's got his gamma wave... insert non-pixie here and you've
> got at least a few moves that have better reach than a pixie's pokes. Deny
> the pixie the close range on the ground and they're at a disadvantage if you
> play it right.

I think you're forgetting the Strider sword range again. You may have
also forgotten the Wolverine s. Fierce or the c. RH with suprisingly
little lag in MvC. Spidey doesn't have long-reaching normals, but
that's okay, since he can chuck web-balls freely from any range he can't
poke.

> This forces them to take to the air. Or maybe it lets you take to the air.
> Hulk beats Strider if he's got altitude advantage, because Strider's air
> defense on the ground just plain sucks. SUCKS. Spidey's isn't that much
> better. Taking to the air sort of works, but there's numerous characters
> who can match them there when the altitude is the same, too. Wolvie's actually
> got the best air defense of the three, which is somewhat of a balance for
> the fact that he's the weakest of the three in pixie tactics these days.

Eh? Wolvie's pixie tactics are weak? Were you around for Onaje's
comment that with c. forward no longer a knockdown and c. RH losing more
end lag every day, Wolvie, can dial his low kicks repeatedly, waiting
for an opening to easily tack on a 40% Fatal Claw? If that isn't pixie
tactics, I don't know what is. Also, Spidey has a DP, the s. strong,
and the s. RH. How is that not air-defense?

> Deny a pixie the ground chains and pick your air counter right and it's a game,
> no matter who or how good the pixie is.

A game of what, exchanging safe pokes and safe blocked specials?
I haven't seen a MvC ground game yet that didn't amount to this.

> > Secondly what the hell do you mean pixie's arn't the best
> >characters in the vs games? who is then. Although i do agree spiderman is
> >the most deadly of the pixie's in MvC.
>
> Let's see. In XSF, my personal "top tier" list reads Rogue, Charlie, Bison,
> maybe Ryu and Dhalsim. Wolvie and Chunster were probably the two main pixies
> to concern yourself with, and neither one of them was particularly powerful
> in XSF.

Wolvie and Chun not powerful? Against who?

> In MSF? Cyclops got a lot stronger because his optic blasts got a lot safer.
> Cyclops MAULED pixies with the turtle game. Ryu was still up there pretty
> high. Spidey was pretty good, breaking a pixie into the top tier but not a
> match for Cyclops.

Gotta agree with BBH on this one...SAFER? The Optic Blasts had _more_
lag, including the super.

<snip>

<re: more Venom/Strider stuff>

> Jab venom fangs and long-range pokes on the ground. The ground game goes to
> Venom in the stand-off, forcing Strider to take to the air, where Venom has
> him at an even force disadvantage. If Strider blinks, it's worth 10% of his
> life each time. Venom doesn't need to worry about blinking, because his reach
> is better and Strider can't get closer than that either on the ground or in
> the air. Whittling with the Legion is about Strider's only halfway effective
> move if Venom doesn't budge.

I still honestly don't believe that Strider has no normals longer than
Venom's c. strong, but maybe that's just me, I don't play Strider.
Still...10% damage? Off what, that invincible c. strong?

--Justin

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

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Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

In article <6i6gdr$i34$1...@user1.teleport.com>,

Stilt Man <stil...@user1.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <Pine.SOL.3.96.980428...@ux5.cso.uiuc.edu>,
>nicholas louis rogal <ro...@students.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>>On Wed, 29 Apr 1998, Stilt Man wrote:
>>> Milo Cooper wrote:
>can shred you for 40-50% from one poke, while Strider... can't.

He can and does, thank you.

>> You didn't answer his point, which is how can venom make an
>>offense against strider?
>Jab venom fangs and long-range pokes on the ground. The ground game goes to

You can block and retaliate against a venom fang. Not hard.

>Venom in the stand-off, forcing Strider to take to the air, where Venom has
>him at an even force disadvantage. If Strider blinks, it's worth 10% of his
>life each time. Venom doesn't need to worry about blinking, because his reach
>is better and Strider can't get closer than that either on the ground or in
>the air. Whittling with the Legion is about Strider's only halfway effective
>move if Venom doesn't budge.

tigeraid

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Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

Yeah, I'll just add my two cents. The Vs. games, at a glance, are flashy and
fun, but when it really gets down to it, they're EXTREMELY unbalanced. As
Choc said, they are extremely easy to play and, with the realization of
infinite combos, turned it into a fight for one thing--to land an infinite.
On top of the infinites, some characters are just plain ABSURDLY
overpowered. In MvSF for example, Wolverine and Spidey are obvious choices.
The idea with them that makes it a bad game is that a scrub who's only
played the game once or twice, can join in and play a veteran like one of
us, and actually put a up a FIGHT. JUST BY MASHING the buttons, because of
Wolverine and Spidey's surpreme priority and speed. On top of this, in order
to pull off MANY of the combos in the game, you need very little skill (eg.
infinites, obviously). That's why ppl like James (Chen) spend there time
finding interesting combos in the game, just to give us SOME reason to play
it ;), using combos that take at least a LITTLE skill. I mean, Fierce
Throw -> Mega Optic Blast with Cyke is just a joke--WAYYY to easy for just
anyone to do, for that kinda damage.
So in the end, they're fun for a little bit of experimenting and getting
your jollies in, but after a little while of playing, most ppl realise that
the games are just plain UNBALANCED. Doesn't stop me from writing stuff on
them though, in the hopes of spreading SOME semblance of quiality gameplay
in them ;).

----
Thanks,
John Culbert
tige...@geocities.com
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Heights/1910
http://www.riffraffracing.home.ml.org

nick: tigeraid on IRC channels #capcom, #fighters-net, #vfhome, #musclecars
and #hotrods

SF3 EX Alpha Code v5.0

{ A+(++vs.ARK)Al+CJ+Cr+G+(++SSF2)S++Se[I]Z++ }
[ac-- ch@ cn c+ cc@ 2- g+ m+ n+:++ o@ os@ p r s+ sp-- st+ ta t+ tm-:+ th-
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"I've said it before and I'll say it again--democracy simply doesn't work!"

-Kent Brockman, The Simpsons

Chocobo wrote in message <35458AF7...@mindspring.com>...

>Phillip McCoy wrote:
>
>> Why does everyone hate the VS games? The concept behind them is good, and
>> when the first one came out, you know damn well that EVERY one of you
went
>> running to see what it was all about. Even though they may be a little
>> confusing, they're still fun to play. I don't see what the big deal is
about
>> hating VS.
>
>The main reason would be that the games suck. It's true that most everyone
went
>running to see what they were all about, but not long afterwards, a lot of

>people were running away. I don't know what you're talking about that's

>"confusing"... basically the reason that people hate them is because
there's no

>skilled gameplay at all. In XSF, the whole point of the game was to set up

your
>opponent and go into an infinite combo. The strongest characters were the
ones

>with the easiest infinites. The whole air combo idea is stupid, anyone can
do an
>air combo and there's no originality involved or skill needed... certain

>characters can just stick out whatever they want and be completely safe

>(Wolverine, Strider)... the game just attracts scrubs, they can sit there

and
>mash and get a 20 hit combo, and think that they've mastered the game.

There are
>just too many things to mention...
>

Angel

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Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

After observing this thread for several days I feel that I am inclined to
respond to this somewhat controversial debate. First off let me address this
comment to you STILTMAN, while I don't know you personally and therefore
cannot make any direct assumption based upon your level of gaming expertise I
have to say that your stance on the Vs. series is slowly but surly diminishing
the credibility that you so covet in this very news group. While I respect your
opinion as a gamer I have to question your sensibility as an objective
participant in this discussion because it is quite obvious to me that the inept
game play of the dreaded Vs. series has unfortunately rotted your brain and as
a result clouded your judgment.
Now I have no problem with the fact that you enjoy playing these games in a
casual sense. Yes they are fun, yes they are flashy, and I will admit that
there is some element of gaming strategy that exists in the majority of the
match ups that take place. However, as Bob has managed to point out in his last
post, for you to even insinuate that the Vs. series in any way, shape , or form
is remotely parallel in strategy, depth, skill level, or certain situations
which indicate a lack there of, is by far one of the most ludicrous and
"unthought out" claims that I have ever come across in my years of reading
alt.games.sf2.
Let me give my reasons as to why the Vs. games are not well respected amongst
the MAJORITY of players that exist today, generations aside.

#1) excessive chaining- For you, STLITMAN, to even dispute the obvious is IMO a
blow to your credibility right here. Your repeated stances claiming that
chains, at the highest level of play, do not deter the overall game play of
this particular engine is a dumbfounded observation to say the least. It has
been widely know since the very first Xmen game that the potential for landing
a 40% + damage combo (which requires at the most above average skill) by way of
one successfully landed weak attack is in no way a justifiable consequence for
one simple mistake. Keep in mind that most of the mistakes that I am referring
to, in regards to the Vs. engine for the most part involve no more than a mere
misjudging or poor reaction to that of a dash attempt followed closely by that
of a weak attack. The sheer principle of the situation is one of the main
reasons why I avoid this trash, I mean what is being accomplished here? Is the
one who has fallen victim to the combo open for ridicule and should therefore
be labeled an "Idiot" as you so claim? Is the one executing the combo showing
any originality or displaying any level of play worthy of praise or is he or
she just the beneficiary of a highly effective memory?
AND FOR YOU STILTMAN, to even think of claiming that the guile 4 hit TOD or
the ken TOD is at all similar to that of the immensely unskilled infinites or
TOD's found in the Vs. series is just......just.............just plain
STUPID!!!!! Why on earth would you even make a comment such as this while
claiming to be so informed in the ways of SF play? Everyone with half a brain
knows that if you lineup 5 guys with little to no experience with fighting
games and ask them to execute both any wolvy chain into a super combo and a SF
Guile 4 hit TOD there is a good chance that most if not all of them will be
highly successful with the previous and not the latter due to knowledge of
joystick positioning and timing. We are talking about a link/buffering
technique vs. a chain combo here, ARE YOU MAD!!!! Have you forgotten that we've
had at least 8 years to perfect these particular techniques!!!! And how often
are you going to witness these SF TOD's in high level comp? I'd say it would be
very rare, while the same cannot be said for the Vs. series because high damage
TOD's are quite frequent and highly rewarding while lacking any sort of a
real sense of effort and accomplishment.

#2) Positioning and strategy or lack there of- again I will agree with you that
there is some element of positioning and strategy that exist in the vs series.
However the amount of which that you speak of does not exist. Have you taken
into account the possibility of a certain character's throw range? Who's to say
that a pixie will just dash in with a dial a combo at any given time. Push
blocking may help but what happens if the opponent decided not to attack and
walk up and throw you which is very possible in this situation. This is why the
pixies are so feared by many because of the fact that the art of positioning is
in many cases is an endangered art to them. sure other complex characters can
play a nice wittle keep away game to thwart some offensive onslaughts. Sure you
MAY have time to tech hit or even reverse a throw attempt. But it is almost a
guarantee that a pixie will find a way to dash in safely and find an opening
whether their opponent is blocking or not then it's back to REASON #1.
Strategy is for the most part a bubble gum tactic at best in the Vs. games.
Ground game or not the amount of thinking, setting up of an opponent, and
risk/reward factor are almost nil in comparison to that of SF. Super jumping
out of tight spots, push blocking, dashing whenever possible (depending on the
character), charging up the super meter, using one particular move or technique
that out prioritizes or highly rewards a player with minimal effort involved is
all a part of the vs. winning strategy and it is very shallow.

#3) Poor Balance- Pixies dominate. Whether you may agree or not, at high levels
of play in any marvel/vs. game pixies have ruled for the most part and that is
pure fact. In Xmen it was wolvy and then sentinel. In marvel it was spider man
and wolvy hands down. While I agree that the balance was improved in MSH the
best characters were still pixies. Rogue the best in XSF? Aside from cyke who
you grossly failed to mention as THEE best character in XSF (obvious choice by
many) what about wolvy? or chun? who are highly rewarded for minimal tactics.
Cyke improved in MSF? Again ARE YOU MAD? "optic blast was safer in this
version" LOL, I ask, what game were you playing?? While Omega red was a
refreshing change to the pixie genre, when it was all said and done the clear
cut winners were still spidy and wolvy (PIXIES) and to dispute that would be
foolish on your part.
Now let's get into MvC. I and many have said it then and I'll say it now
the best characters in this game, by far, are strider, wolverine, spider man,
and chun li, followed closely by that of other characters such as morrigan and
capcom and gambit and megawimp. There is no debate here, no discussion, for it
has been proven post wise, discussion wise, and with the highest levels of play
that strider is one unbelievably overpowered son of a gun who owns this game.
Again I reiterate to you the dash aspect, the throw range (which strider
possesses), and the potential to punish a missed block attempt or ill timed
move of any sort. He has massive range, priority, easy to do high damage
combos, and most importantly, (one main aspect of this game which you have
failed to mention) the most lethal character in a team beat down situation
making the Oh-you-bore-us a lot more useful and deadly than you may perceive it
to be. Please refrain from further embarrassing yourself by disputing the
obvious because this is one argument that you cannot win.

These are just some of the many faults that the vs. series are guilty of. And
if I have time in the near future I shall point them out to you, such as lack
of play testing, recycled animation, and the flailing scratch sooper aspect.
And keep in mind this is not just an old schooler talking, just someone who is
experienced enough to know the difference between serious game play and
scrubbalishis fun for all. And one word of advice to you Stilt, in your effort
to support your stance on the Vs. series please stop using past SF's as a
comparison because it really makes you look bad.

Master John

Stilt Man

unread,

Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

In article <199804290933...@ladder03.news.aol.com>,

Lord BBH <lor...@aol.com> wrote:
>In article <6i6gdr$i34$1...@user1.teleport.com>, stil...@user1.teleport.com
>(Stilt Man) writes:
><snip>

>>Let's see. In XSF, my personal "top tier" list reads Rogue, Charlie, Bison,
>>maybe Ryu and Dhalsim. Wolvie and Chunster were probably the two main pixies
>>to concern yourself with, and neither one of them was particularly powerful
>>in XSF.

>Wha...? Charlie I can understand, but Rogue and Bison? Where are Cyclops and

>Sabretooth. Cyclops was hands-down the strongest character barring infinites,
>and WITH infinites he's still god since he can start one off his rushing grab
>(or just about any of his throws except the Strong one)

I don't have Sabretooth in there because he dies against turtles. He has
no safe way to whittle at all. Pick your character intelligently against
him (read: one with air defense) and Sabretooth is meat for the eating.
He's low rent but comparatively weak once the opponent knows what they're
doing.

And Cyclops, IMO, is GROSSLY overrated in XSF. Why? Because that vaunted
optic blast game of his is downright suicidal against half the people in
the game. I'm serious. Sure, he's a nightmare for pixies and shotos (which
is why, IMO, he's so highly regarded, because that's the common fare at most
arcades), but his fate is most miserable indeed against Rogue, Bison, Cammy,
Juggernaut, Dhalsim, Magneto, and (if they've got meters) Chun Li, Akuma,
and Ken, because all of these people can punish a blocked optic blast pretty
much at will from as much as half the screen away or more, most of them worse
than that if they've got a meter full.

>I was a huge Rogue fan, and got a lot of winning streaks with her, but she's
>definitely not top-tier.

Rogue is top tier in XSF, IMO, because of (a) power, (b) fairly good speed,
(c) air defense that friggin' NO ONE can get in on (not pixies, not Sabretooth,
NO ONE), (d) some of the best counterattacking in the game (rushing punches
at close range, Good Night Sugah at not-so-close range). She DESTROYS Cyclops,
Dhalsim, Charlie, Juggernaut, Zangief, Ken, Akuma, and Storm, and has matchups
ranging from even to significant advantage on the entire rest of the field.
There is no one that can count on character advantage to beat Rogue.

>>In MSF? Cyclops got a lot stronger because his optic blasts got a lot safer.
>>Cyclops MAULED pixies with the turtle game. Ryu was still up there pretty
>>high. Spidey was pretty good, breaking a pixie into the top tier but not a
>>match for Cyclops.

>How did Cyclops get BETTER?!?! His Optic Blast lag is far longer and comes out

>slower than it did in XSF (he mauled pixies much better in the first one), his
>dashing grab is SLOW AS HELL and a frickin CHARGE move... not to mention a
>slower Mega Optic Blast that won't even combo and is punishable. How did he get
>better again? Pass the pipe.

Sure, his optic blast got a bit slower, but it got stronger overall
because block stun got longer and very few people in MSF have moves that
move fast enough on the ground that they can punish him for a blocked
one. His lag in XSF was grossly longer than block stun lag was, which
meant that anyone with a fast ground move (see the above list) could punish
him for it; in MSF the gap between OB recovery and block stun recovery times
was miniscule, which meant that as long as you make them block it,
you're safe. On XSF people could just get within a certain distance of your
Cyclops and dare you to optic blast them and then make you look like an idiot
when you did. That can't be done on MSF, or if it can, it can't by
anywhere near as many characters as could on XSF.

>>In MvC? Haven't really formulated a concrete tier structure in my mind yet.
>>Morrigan is in the top tier. That much I'm fairly convinced of. Too much
>>power to control the pace in intelligent hands not to be up there. There's
>>no situation she can't handle in some way or another. Spidey is probably
>>up there too, but NOT simply because he's a pixie. Yes, he can pixie with
>>the best of them, but the reason I'd put him up there is because he also can
>>play a distance game against enemies that it's ill-advised for him to attack
>>head-on, because most of those people don't have a way to get close to him if
>>he plays keepaway. Strider I'd put at second tier. He can sort of play the
>>distance game, but not as well as Spidey can; his projectiles are weaker and
>>more vulnerable to counter-attack than incessant air web balls. Wolvie I'd
>>put at second tier as well because he just plain lacks that flexibility, but
>>I wouldn't put him below Strider overall because he DOES have a much more
>>fearsome offense due to the fact that he still retains his ability to chain
>>pokes into supers. Strider crushes Wolvie head-on, but there are a number
>>of situations where I'd rather have Wolvie than Strider just because Wolvie
>>can shred you for 40-50% from one poke, while Strider... can't.

>Strider does 1/3 off a low Short WITHOUT a super. As for Morrigan, I think

>she's pretty good but she's definitely not top-tier either.

That's true about Strider, but it's not enough that I'd put him top tier just
off of that any more than I'd put Wolvie there. With Morrigan, I'll agree
she probably has fewer blow-out matchups than some of the pixies, but she also
doesn't have any significant weaknesses, either. Play her well enough and
you can tackle basically anyone. That's more important to me than a few
blow-outs traded for significant weaknesses.

Milo D. Cooper

unread,

Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

> Stilt Man wrote:

>> nicholas louis rogal wrote:
>>
>> ok stilt i don't believe you at all here, push blocking is
>> worthless against a good pixie, so you push block, what does that get
>> you?
>
> It gets you distance on the ground, which against a pixie is element numero
> uno to beating them. Sure, pixies have speed, but they don't have reach.
> Projectiles have reach. Some of the characters without projectiles have
> reach. Morrigan's got a soul fist. Venom's got a whole range of quick,
> safe moves. CapCom's got his blasts, Ryu's got his FBs, MegaMan has his
> MegaBusters, Zangief has his roundhouse/SPD ticks, Carnage has Venom's
> largely identical range of moves with a good dose of really strong coffee
> thrown into it, Hulk's got his gamma wave... insert non-pixie here and you've
> got at least a few moves that have better reach than a pixie's pokes. Deny
> the pixie the close range on the ground and they're at a disadvantage if you
> play it right.

This doesn't wash. If a pixie anticipates your projectile, he
can dash jump in from almost an entire screen away, or super, in
some cases, and hit you before you have a chance to recover. Most
of the time, a pixie is going to be a lot closer than a full
screen back, even if he happens to be within your "optimum range."
That's one of our major points: the pixies are *fast*. They can
punish you *from long distance* if you rely too heavily on projec-
tiles. It's not like SF, where you could play keepaway without
having to worry about someone twice as fast as you dashing in.
The only equivalent to this in SF was something like Vega's hori-
zontal claw strike (hella fast), or a Bison head stomp, or a
T.Hawk dive (which, still, required a jump first). And heck,
Wolverine's DF slide goes completely under most projectiles.

> [...]

> In MSF? Cyclops got a lot stronger because his optic blasts got a lot safer.
> Cyclops MAULED pixies with the turtle game. Ryu was still up there pretty
> high. Spidey was pretty good, breaking a pixie into the top tier but not a
> match for Cyclops.

Dead wrong. Cyke was *worse* in MSF. He lost major combo-
ability on his best anti-air, the standing roundhouse flash kick,
and he had to charge his dashing grab, which was a huge deterrent
against ambiguous pixie jump-ins.

Milo D. Cooper

unread,

Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

> Terence Byron Cox wrote:
>
> Milo,
>
> Why do you bother responding?

Masochist.

> I have fallen victim to the idea often
> enough that if I just take the time to explain the aspects of the 'vs'
> engine that lend it more to a adrenaline game and less of a complex
> strategy game, that I will somehow be accomplishing something. Wrong.
> Unless the poster is listed as 'Mr. Capcom', don't bother. Or better
> yet, just write it once, and then copy it as your default reply.

Actually, the main reason I'm responding is to keep "Stilt"
polemic enough to continue to dig a progressively deeper hole
for himself. It's sort of a tragic thrill for me to watch a man
ruin himself in his knee-jerk defiance of an adversary. At so
high a cost, he still fights on. It's like watching that fat
coachman in _Dances with Wolves_ struggle to escape from the
Pawnees after they've shot him full of arrows.

Wenchi Liao

unread,

Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

In article <6i81s6$h23$1...@user2.teleport.com>,

Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <199804290933...@ladder03.news.aol.com>,
>Lord BBH <lor...@aol.com> wrote:
>>In article <6i6gdr$i34$1...@user1.teleport.com>, stil...@user1.teleport.com
>>(Stilt Man) writes:
>><snip>
>>>Let's see. In XSF, my personal "top tier" list reads Rogue, Charlie, Bison,
>>>maybe Ryu and Dhalsim. Wolvie and Chunster were probably the two main pixies
>>>to concern yourself with, and neither one of them was particularly powerful
>>>in XSF.
>
>>Wha...? Charlie I can understand, but Rogue and Bison? Where are Cyclops and
>>Sabretooth. Cyclops was hands-down the strongest character barring infinites,
>>and WITH infinites he's still god since he can start one off his rushing grab
>>(or just about any of his throws except the Strong one)
>
>I don't have Sabretooth in there because he dies against turtles. He has
>no safe way to whittle at all. Pick your character intelligently against
>him (read: one with air defense) and Sabretooth is meat for the eating.
>He's low rent but comparatively weak once the opponent knows what they're
>doing.

Ok..if you say so.

>
>And Cyclops, IMO, is GROSSLY overrated in XSF. Why? Because that vaunted
>optic blast game of his is downright suicidal against half the people in
>the game. I'm serious. Sure, he's a nightmare for pixies and shotos (which
>is why, IMO, he's so highly regarded, because that's the common fare at most
>arcades), but his fate is most miserable indeed against Rogue, Bison, Cammy,
>Juggernaut, Dhalsim, Magneto, and (if they've got meters) Chun Li, Akuma,
>and Ken, because all of these people can punish a blocked optic blast pretty
>much at will from as much as half the screen away or more, most of them worse
>than that if they've got a meter full.

What optic blast game? I think most people consider cyclops tops
because of is numerous infinite/pseudo-infinites. Besides, I doubt
any of Akuma's or Ken's supers are fast/far reaching enough to tag
psyclops at half-screen or more. Sure, if a person is close in on
cyclops, the optic blasts aren't going to cut it. But that's why he
also has his infinites.

guyver3

unread,

Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

>Master John

Is this who I think it is?(John CHOI?)

Angel

unread,

Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

to berkele...@geocities.com

guyver3 wrote:

> >Master John
>
> Is this who I think it is?(John CHOI?)

Nah, wrong coast and wrong nationality ; )

Milo D. Cooper

unread,

Apr 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/29/98

> Stilt Man wrote:
>> Lord BBH wrote:

>>> Stilt Man writes:
>>>
>>> Let's see. In XSF, my personal "top tier" list reads Rogue, Charlie, Bison,
>>> maybe Ryu and Dhalsim. Wolvie and Chunster were probably the two main pixies
>>> to concern yourself with, and neither one of them was particularly powerful
>>> in XSF.
>>
>> Wha...? Charlie I can understand, but Rogue and Bison? Where are Cyclops and
>> Sabretooth. Cyclops was hands-down the strongest character barring infinites,
>> and WITH infinites he's still god since he can start one off his rushing grab
>> (or just about any of his throws except the Strong one)
>
> I don't have Sabretooth in there because he dies against turtles. He has
> no safe way to whittle at all. Pick your character intelligently against
> him (read: one with air defense) and Sabretooth is meat for the eating.
> He's low rent but comparatively weak once the opponent knows what they're
> doing.
>
> And Cyclops, IMO, is GROSSLY overrated in XSF. Why? Because that vaunted
> optic blast game of his is downright suicidal against half the people in
> the game. I'm serious. Sure, he's a nightmare for pixies and shotos (which
> is why, IMO, he's so highly regarded, because that's the common fare at most
> arcades), but his fate is most miserable indeed against Rogue, Bison, Cammy,
> Juggernaut, Dhalsim, Magneto, and (if they've got meters) Chun Li, Akuma,
> and Ken, because all of these people can punish a blocked optic blast pretty
> much at will from as much as half the screen away or more, most of them worse
> than that if they've got a meter full.

With the exception of Dhalsim, Cyke beats everyone you name. His
dashing grab is massive; that's why Capcom castrated it in MvSF. Jug-
gernaut, in particular, stands no chance at all; he can virtually never
jump, because as he comes down, Cyke can shoot off a fierce pulse, which
Juggy has to block, then cancel into the grab. It is difficult enough
for *any* character to get out of this, but Juggernaut has the *most*
trouble, because his attacks are too slow. Cyke turtles vs. Juggernaut
and it is very, very over. All Cyke has to do is press fierce from over
half-screen distance, and wait to see what Juggy will do. Juggy is zero
threat at that range; his dash is a joke, his splash will either get up-
percutted or miss clear, his 'Naut punch will get blocked, and if he
jumps, Cyke either dashes under him or fires off another pulse and can-
cels into the grab. Juggy is probably the single worst character you
can play vs. the CykeMeister.
Magneto dies. Cyke's optic rebound goes right under the EM
disruptor,
and flying is worthless, thanks to angled blasts, gene splice pulses,
and
the searchlight super. Maggie can't get in for sh*t, and with the
possi-
ble exception of Dhalsim, there is simply no character with a better
long
range game than Cyclops.
Chun-Li and especially Cammy are threats, but only because -- that's
right -- they have quick dash-ins. Cyclops has trouble with the
in-your-
face game, and just sitting there blocking everything (your panacea vs.
any character with good normals) won't cut it of your opponent throws,
or
knows how to exploit the air-blocking and chaining ambiguity system.
Heck, you'll have us all believe that there is no such thing as a close-
range fight in any Vs. game (cuz all you hafta do is "know how to
block"),
and if that's so, then why isn't Cyke, who is probably the best
long-range
turtle in XMvSF, at the top of your rankings for this game? Why does he
get beat out by *Rogue*, who relies on a *grab*, of all things, to get
anywhere? Surely, I can "know how to push block" if she tries to tick
in-
to the kiss. That leaves her f*cked, by your assessments.

>> I was a huge Rogue fan, and got a lot of winning streaks with her, but she's
>> definitely not top-tier.
>
> Rogue is top tier in XSF, IMO, because of (a) power, (b) fairly good speed,
> (c) air defense that friggin' NO ONE can get in on (not pixies, not Sabretooth,
> NO ONE),

All of the dive kicks (Wolverine, Cammy, Akuma) beat Rogue's air de-
fense. That st.RH (or is it forward) of hers ain't nearly as good as
Cyke's RH flash kick. Storm's aerial fierce beats it as well (Rogue's
foot doesn't even touch Storm, since Storm's fierce has the superior
range). So does Juggy's splash.

> (d) some of the best counterattacking in the game (rushing punches
> at close range,

Suicide. Unless they're performed in combos, or when the opponent is
wide open after a special/super, they're useless.

> Good Night Sugah at not-so-close range). She DESTROYS Cyclops,
> Dhalsim, Charlie, Juggernaut, Zangief, Ken, Akuma, and Storm, and has matchups
> ranging from even to significant advantage on the entire rest of the field.
> There is no one that can count on character advantage to beat Rogue.

Must be nice, to characteristically make absolutist claims without
supporting them.

>>> In MSF? Cyclops got a lot stronger because his optic blasts got a lot safer.
>>> Cyclops MAULED pixies with the turtle game. Ryu was still up there pretty
>>> high. Spidey was pretty good, breaking a pixie into the top tier but not a
>>> match for Cyclops.
>>
>> How did Cyclops get BETTER?!?! His Optic Blast lag is far longer and comes out
>> slower than it did in XSF (he mauled pixies much better in the first one), his
>> dashing grab is SLOW AS HELL and a frickin CHARGE move... not to mention a
>> slower Mega Optic Blast that won't even combo and is punishable. How did he get
>> better again? Pass the pipe.
>
> Sure, his optic blast got a bit slower, but it got stronger overall
> because block stun got longer and very few people in MSF have moves that
> move fast enough on the ground that they can punish him for a blocked
> one. His lag in XSF was grossly longer than block stun lag was, which
> meant that anyone with a fast ground move (see the above list) could punish
> him for it;

You mean, like a pixie, who, contrarily, you say Cyclops domi-
nates? Hmm, guess Cyke doesn't beat pixies with the OB, then. I
think you need to explain how the OB is not a factor in his matches
vs. Wolverine -- or Cammy or Chun, while you're at it.

> in MSF the gap between OB recovery and block stun recovery times
> was miniscule, which meant that as long as you make them block it,
> you're safe. On XSF people could just get within a certain distance of your
> Cyclops and dare you to optic blast them and then make you look like an idiot
> when you did. That can't be done on MSF, or if it can, it can't by
> anywhere near as many characters as could on XSF.

In XMvSF, it didn't matter if someone got in on his optimum OB
range; he still had the instant, no charge grab, or cancel anything
into super (in MvSF, the comboability on the Mega OB was nigh elim-
inated).

Stilt Man

unread,

Apr 30, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/30/98

In article <354780AE...@idt.net>, Angel <ami...@idt.net> wrote:
> After observing this thread for several days I feel that I am inclined to
>respond to this somewhat controversial debate. First off let me address this
>comment to you STILTMAN, while I don't know you personally and therefore
>cannot make any direct assumption based upon your level of gaming expertise I
>have to say that your stance on the Vs. series is slowly but surly diminishing
>the credibility that you so covet in this very news group.

To be honest, I don't much care about what you or anyone else thinks of my
credibiility. (Ask one Seth Killian... he'll tell you all about how little
I care of most anyone's opinion on this group.) I'm not likely to meet too
many folks who are on here, so I just comment and let it go.

Yes, I like the versus games. I object mainly to the apparent attitude that
this makes me some kind of degenerate. As witness...

>While I respect your
>opinion as a gamer I have to question your sensibility as an objective
>participant in this discussion because it is quite obvious to me that the inept
>game play of the dreaded Vs. series has unfortunately rotted your brain and as
>a result clouded your judgment.

Do I really need to back up that statement any further?

> Now I have no problem with the fact that you enjoy playing these games in a
>casual sense. Yes they are fun, yes they are flashy, and I will admit that
>there is some element of gaming strategy that exists in the majority of the
>match ups that take place. However, as Bob has managed to point out in his last
>post, for you to even insinuate that the Vs. series in any way, shape , or form
>is remotely parallel in strategy, depth, skill level, or certain situations
>which indicate a lack there of, is by far one of the most ludicrous and
>"unthought out" claims that I have ever come across in my years of reading
>alt.games.sf2.

Frankly, I don't care. I'll give a simple reason for why I think there's
still some strategy involved and leave it at that. I don't feel like arguing
with every anal old-schooler out there who feels like taking exception to my
remarks, so I'm going to just say it once and be done with it.

IMNSHO, whether or not you consider this game to involve "strategy" depends
greatly on your definition of "strategy". In my case, I'll make a couple of
observations:

1. In SF2, most of the strategy involved positioning. You didn't
really need to know combos, although it didn't hurt, as long as you
knew, for any given matchup, where you want to be and where you want
your opponent to be and how to get there. If you know that and which
counter to use against a given tactic, you can largely fall asleep
from there if you want. Okay, you have to be careful that your
opponent doesn't break out of the position you want him in. But
that's about it. Do that much and in a good many of the matchups,
the game's over right there.

2. In the vs. games, a fair amount of the strategy involves
positioning but a lot more involves constant caution and safety.
Get into one position and you've got no guarantee that you'll win,
because positions aren't permanent any more. Against pixies, you've
got to ALWAYS be on your guard. Heck, against most characters,
you've got to ALWAYS be on your guard. You can't just open up with
one-position-fits-all and then forget about it. At any given moment,
your opponent can hurt you, any one little screw-up for just the
smallest little move can get you badly hurt. I don't know about you,
but I don't mind that a bit. I *prefer* being forced to stay on
my toes. It's to a point that I laugh when someone at the arcade
jokingly comments "You cheat, you always are ready to block low."
If you can't do that, well, you deserve to lose, IMO.

That's my take on it right there. I liked SF2 a good deal, but I also
happen to like the vs. games as well. They've got very different strategy
involved, but there's still some involved in both. Yes, making a momentary
screwup can get you killed.

> AND FOR YOU STILTMAN, to even think of claiming that the guile 4 hit TOD or
>the ken TOD is at all similar to that of the immensely unskilled infinites or
>TOD's found in the Vs. series is just......just.............just plain
>STUPID!!!!!

Why? With Guile, you didn't need any positioning, you didn't necessarily
need any real skill. If you know roundhouse/low strong/SB/low forward, which
can be done anywhere on the board, you have the game the instant you dizzy
them once. Because somewhere in that collection, you will ALWAYS re-dizzy.
Just hold the line long enough to dizzy them once, and it's over. Anticipate
a FB, and it's over. Hit them a few times close together, and it's over.
Heck, get a single jab hit at close range and repeat until they dizzy, and
it's over.

If you consider it stupid to observe that people decry one and not the other,
fine with me. I consider it a double standard.

>#2) Positioning and strategy or lack there of- again I will agree with you that
>there is some element of positioning and strategy that exist in the vs series.
>However the amount of which that you speak of does not exist. Have you taken
>into account the possibility of a certain character's throw range? Who's to say
>that a pixie will just dash in with a dial a combo at any given time.

Quite true. But not unstoppable, either. If you're Morrigan, stick out a
low roundhouse/soul fist two-hitter when you see them come forward. They're
either on the ground or they're blocking a safe distance away. Problem
largely solved.

>Push
>blocking may help but what happens if the opponent decided not to attack and
>walk up and throw you which is very possible in this situation.

I know. I do it with Morrigan's vector drain all the time.

>#3) Poor Balance- Pixies dominate. Whether you may agree or not, at high levels
>of play in any marvel/vs. game pixies have ruled for the most part and that is
>pure fact. In Xmen it was wolvy and then sentinel.

Okay. I'll bite. Just how the f*cking hell do you consider SENTINEL to be
a pixie?

>Rogue the best in XSF? Aside from cyke who
>you grossly failed to mention as THEE best character in XSF (obvious choice by
>many) what about wolvy? or chun? who are highly rewarded for minimal tactics.

You know how to block and throw, you can beat Wolvie. More or less the same
for Chun. And I've said it a bazillion times: Cyclops' optic blast was
suicidal against half the characters in the game, and without it, he was
crippled. (Okay, Milo, tell me about fierce/toss. Now I'll tell you again
about push-blocking. Block the fierce, 3-button push, the running toss no
longer can follow up so closely.)

>Cyke improved in MSF? Again ARE YOU MAD? "optic blast was safer in this
>version" LOL, I ask, what game were you playing??

I was playing XSF, in which Rogue, Dhalsim, Juggernaut, Magneto, Bison, and
Cammy all had normal moves that could punish an optic blast from as much as
half the screen's distance away, and MSF, when the block stun from the optic
blast and the lower number of characters that had quick ground moves caused
the slower optic blast to be nonetheless safer as long as you could force
someone to block it.

> Now let's get into MvC. I and many have said it then and I'll say it now
>the best characters in this game, by far, are strider, wolverine, spider man,
>and chun li, followed closely by that of other characters such as morrigan and
>capcom and gambit and megawimp. There is no debate here, no discussion, for it
>has been proven post wise, discussion wise, and with the highest levels of play
>that strider is one unbelievably overpowered son of a gun who owns this game.

Now you're spouting drivel. That has not been proven. That's a matter of
opinion that I happen to disagree with.

>Again I reiterate to you the dash aspect,

Not impressed; other folks have dashes as fast as his.

>the throw range (which strider possesses),

Still not impressed. It's not that much better than anyone else's.

>and the potential to punish a missed block attempt or ill timed
>move of any sort.

Nothing that every other character in the game doesn't also have.

>He has massive range, priority, easy to do high damage
>combos, and most importantly, (one main aspect of this game which you have
>failed to mention) the most lethal character in a team beat down situation
>making the Oh-you-bore-us a lot more useful and deadly than you may perceive it
>to be.

Been there. Dealt with that. Never heard of watching the character that
doesn't have the "COM" label on him, you say? Watch him, the Ouroboros is
just as useless in team beatings as it is usually.

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

unread,

Apr 30, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/30/98

In article <3547C41C...@milos-chalkboard.net>,

Milo D. Cooper <mi...@milos-chalkboard.net> wrote:

Don't forget Cyke's humongous strong throw, and in the corner,
throw into infinite, throw into chain->super, etc..

>/|_Milo D. Cooper____EverQuest character modeler_|\
>\| www.milos-chalkboard.net www.everquest.com |/

Angel

unread,

Apr 30, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/30/98

> To be honest, I don't much care about what you or anyone else thinks of my
> credibiility.

That seems to be quite obvious. Then again.

> (Ask one Seth Killian... he'll tell you all about how little
> I care of most anyone's opinion on this group.) I'm not likely to meet too
> many folks who are on here, so I just comment and let it go.

This is far from true as I have come across many a post in which you are very much
in the defensive when someone who is knowledgeable of the presented subject matter
has managed to criticize you, flame or not. (ex: THIS HERE THREAD)

> Yes, I like the versus games. I object mainly to the apparent attitude that
> this makes me some kind of degenerate.

What makes you less credible as a poster is not for the fact that so enjoy playing
the vs. series, that's your own business and your own money. However ill
conceived notions and vague points that you have made in an effort to justify your
own stance on this subject has led to the responses that you have come across not
just in the past few days but for the past few months as well (That foot must be on
it's way past your esophagus by now). I don't dislike you for playing MvC on a
daily basis but I do criticize you for your misconstrued notions in regards to the
apparent lack of skill involved with past SF's while at the same time praising the
supposed depth of the vs. game engine.

>
>
> >While I respect your
> >opinion as a gamer I have to question your sensibility as an objective
> >participant in this discussion because it is quite obvious to me that the inept
> >game play of the dreaded Vs. series has unfortunately rotted your brain and as
> >a result clouded your judgment.
>
> Do I really need to back up that statement any further?

see above

> Frankly, I don't care. I'll give a simple reason for why I think there's
> still some strategy involved and leave it at that. I don't feel like arguing
> with every anal old-schooler out there who feels like taking exception to my
> remarks, so I'm going to just say it once and be done with it.

I'm not an "anal" old schooler as you so put it. I am merely an experienced gamer
who is knowledgeable of the difference between what game's are worth taking
seriously and what games are just for sheer fun and casual enjoyment. But quite
frankly these days I chose to not even waste my recreation time with such a
declining series.

IMNSHO, whether or not you consider this game to involve "strategy" depends
greatly on your definition of "strategy". In my case, I'll make a couple of
observations:

> 1. In SF2, most of the strategy involved positioning. You didn't
> really need to know combos, although it didn't hurt, as long as you
> knew, for any given matchup, where you want to be and where you want
> your opponent to be and how to get there. If you know that and which
> counter to use against a given tactic, you can largely fall asleep
> from there if you want. Okay, you have to be careful that your
> opponent doesn't break out of the position you want him in. But
> that's about it. Do that much and in a good many of the matchups,
> the game's over right there.

Your definition in this case is greatly vague at best. Positioning is a main
element indeed but there is more too it then just positioning, the degree of which
depending on the episode of the series we are referring to. Let's take the best of
the bunch as our prime example here, ST. Sure matches involved positioning to a
certain degree such as the shotos , however the level of effectiveness for each
character varied in many ways. Was vega's game mainly set on positioning? not
entirely, he made use of his high priority pokes and specials to apply pressure on
his opposition and go for the kill. Is balrog one who solely relies on positioning?
To a certain degree yes but many will say that a highly aggressive balrog is much
more of a force to be reckoned with. And is honda someone who is very reliant on
positioning to win matches? Not necessarily, this is only a reasonable part of his
game for the positioning aspect is only a temporary strategy used in an effort to
set up his many power based, mid-close ranged attacks. And let me also point out
that just because one has obtained the proper positioning on their opposition does
not mean that the match is over, not by a long shot. Expert players will relish the
challenge of not only avoiding these situations but also devising a counter
strategy in order to escape the so called traps. That is the beauty of a game with
such depth. Execution in tense situations is also a main element when sorting
out the men from the boys. In a clutch situation one had to be aware of the
potential for a successfully landed combo or technique as well as having the
ability to execute that combo at will(This element of game play is very much
lacking in the vs. series). So in essence your above claim, while not being
entirely false, is not in any way the absolute truth either.

>
>
> 2. In the vs. games, a fair amount of the strategy involves
> positioning but a lot more involves constant caution and safety.
> Get into one position and you've got no guarantee that you'll win,

Same with SF

> because positions aren't permanent any more.

Neither was that the case with SF

> Against pixies, you've
> got to ALWAYS be on your guard.

Ah but yet they are not so much of threat according to your logic. In your
responses I seem to notice that you so casually seem to disregard the high
awareness factor of the pixie. Of course there are ways to counter their
strategies. That goes for almost every game in every situation. But what you fail
to realize or choose not to address is the overwhelming low risk/high reward factor
that applies to almost every pixie in the game while at the same time it is almost
the opposite with every other character, even venom.

> Heck, against most characters,
> you've got to ALWAYS be on your guard. You can't just open up with
> one-position-fits-all and then forget about it.

see above

> At any given moment,
> your opponent can hurt you, any one little screw-up for just the
> smallest little move can get you badly hurt.

The frequency of which this takes place and the ease to which this takes place is
greatly varied in two classifications, The pixies/and everyone else. At any given
moment a dash happy wolvy, or spidy, or chun, or strider, or morrigan for that
matter can and will hurt you with any one little screw up. Again let me stress to
you that the potential for punishment involved after a "little" miscue does not, I
repeat, DOES NOT , justify the mistake that is made. In other words one should not
loose half there life because of a blocked projectile from a certain distance, or
not blocking a low short at any one point during a match. However a character
lacking of pixie stature is of little to no threat to their opposition (especially
an opposing pixie) at many varied ranges such as Zangief, or the Hulk, or mega man,
or even venom. Thus, as a result, my "poor balance" theory manages to rear its
ugly head.

> I don't know about you,
> but I don't mind that a bit. I *prefer* being forced to stay on
> my toes.

Who says that's not the case with every game? the meat of this debate involves the
amount of reward involved for certain characters in certain situations that greatly
out weigh those of the rest as far as the vs. series goes. Staying on your toes is
one thing, surrendering a match for a single mistake made depending on the
opposition is another. And that is where the vs. series is at fault.

> It's to a point that I laugh when someone at the arcade
> jokingly comments "You cheat, you always are ready to block low."
> If you can't do that, well, you deserve to lose, IMO.

If you fail to block low once in a match resulting in a highly damaging combo that
eventually leads to a loss does one really deserve that loss? IMO a resounding
NO!!!! And please do not try and compare this aspect of game play with that of SF
because they are two entirely different situations. It was very rare that a
mistake was ever so costly and if it did happen to occur then that player did truly
deserve to lose

>
>
> That's my take on it right there. I liked SF2 a good deal, but I also
> happen to like the vs. games as well. They've got very different strategy
> involved, but there's still some involved in both. Yes, making a momentary
> screwup can get you killed.

That last sentence more than supports my position on this matter.

>
>
> > AND FOR YOU STILTMAN, to even think of claiming that the guile 4 hit TOD or
> >the ken TOD is at all similar to that of the immensely unskilled infinites or
> >TOD's found in the Vs. series is just......just.............just plain
> >STUPID!!!!!
>
> Why? With Guile, you didn't need any positioning, you didn't necessarily
> need any real skill.

Oh really. Was that the case when you first played SF? Were you pulling off TOD's
in your sleep after plucking in your very first quarter or two? No. There was a
great deal of practice involved in one's mastering of these techniques that indeed
separated the skilled from the unskilled. Mind you also that the level of skill
was not solely determined on whether or not one was actually able to execute said
combo, but how they would go about setting up their opponent for such a thrashing,
which was very difficult then and very difficult now (maybe even more so). And
what about that band of novice players that I mentioned in my previous post? How
would YOU justify the fact that the possibility of one with little to no experience
with games in general being able to pull off a wolvy 40% combo with a super finish
is vastly greater than their ability to execute any SF TOD? Please explain this to
me and the rest of the gaming world.

> If you know roundhouse/low strong/SB/low forward, which
> can be done anywhere on the board, you have the game the instant you dizzy
> them once. Because somewhere in that collection, you will ALWAYS re-dizzy.
> Just hold the line long enough to dizzy them once, and it's over. Anticipate
> a FB, and it's over. Hit them a few times close together, and it's over.
> Heck, get a single jab hit at close range and repeat until they dizzy, and
> it's over.

But again how frequent does this occur in a highly competitive matchup? Not very
frequent at all. And in a game such as ST the above combo even if landed did not
guarantee a victory by any stretch. The potential for successfully executing any SF
combo in a highly competitive situation in any match up does not measure up to the
ineptness and moronic nature of that which is the dashing low short of doom. I'm
sorry but your points are not cutting it at all.

>
>
> If you consider it stupid to observe that people decry one and not the other,
> fine with me. I consider it a double standard.

Your methods of justification and ridiculous points based on vague interpretations
is what makes you look, no offense , STUPID!

>
>
> >#2) Positioning and strategy or lack there of- again I will agree with you that
> >there is some element of positioning and strategy that exist in the vs series.
> >However the amount of which that you speak of does not exist. Have you taken
> >into account the possibility of a certain character's throw range? Who's to say
> >that a pixie will just dash in with a dial a combo at any given time.
>
> Quite true. But not unstoppable, either. If you're Morrigan, stick out a
> low roundhouse/soul fist two-hitter when you see them come forward. They're
> either on the ground or they're blocking a safe distance away. Problem
> largely solved.

You're telling me that you, STILTMAN, possess the uncanny reflexes and pin point
timing which makes you capable of unleashing a move such as morrigan's low RH, or
soul fist in time to thwart a pixie dash in at any given time? Why I commend you on
your seemingly unmatched capabilties(sarcasm ended). Keep in mind that I am
referring to a safe and properly timed dash in at the proper range which in this
case does not give morrigan ample time to retaliate in this nature. Again if they
dash in safely there is a very good chance that they either wait and throw, manage
to nail you with that dreaded low short or utilize a highly effective pressuring
tactic that is both safe and easily repeatable due to the nature of ,yes, the
pixie.

> >#3) Poor Balance- Pixies dominate. Whether you may agree or not, at high levels
>
> >of play in any marvel/vs. game pixies have ruled for the most part and that is
> >pure fact. In Xmen it was wolvy and then sentinel.
>
> Okay. I'll bite. Just how the f*cking hell do you consider SENTINEL to be
> a pixie?

I didn't. I mentioned him obviously because of the fact that he would be the
strongest character in the game if it weren't for the presence of wolvy ( A PIXIE).
Please take the time to think about and comprehend the obvious before making such a
response.

>
>
> >Rogue the best in XSF? Aside from cyke who
> >you grossly failed to mention as THEE best character in XSF (obvious choice by
> >many) what about wolvy? or chun? who are highly rewarded for minimal tactics.
>
> You know how to block and throw, you can beat Wolvie.

Oh gee, is that all? Man I could have saved myself a heck of a lot of quarters with
this breakthrough info(sarcasm ended).You must block and block and block again then
move cautiously then block again and hope when attempting a throw that wolvy does
not utilize his superior throw range and toss you instead.

> More or less the same
> for Chun.

With chun. One low short or low fwd + super + button mashing= major damage for one
minute screw up. Makes no sense to me at all.

> And I've said it a bazillion times: Cyclops' optic blast was
> suicidal against half the characters in the game, and without it, he was
> crippled.

at less than mid range one would be a fool to attempt an optic blast which is why
they would utilize cyke's high priority normals, or air superiority and either set
up for an infinite or escape and get in proper range for yet another OB barrage
from a safe distance. Oh and don't forget the massive throw range of cyke which
aided in his close range game and was always a major threat due to his ability to
tack on a super or something of an even greater scale.

> >Cyke improved in MSF? Again ARE YOU MAD? "optic blast was safer in this
> >version" LOL, I ask, what game were you playing??
>
> I was playing XSF, in which Rogue, Dhalsim, Juggernaut, Magneto, Bison, and
> Cammy all had normal moves that could punish an optic blast from as much as
> half the screen's distance away,

see above

> and MSF, when the block stun from the optic
> blast and the lower number of characters that had quick ground moves caused
> the slower optic blast to be nonetheless safer as long as you could force
> someone to block it.

ah but the OB was slower at the start up point in MSF which in turn enabled the
opposition to anticipate any OB attempt and as a result rendering cyke helpless as
his enemy leaps over it in succession enabling them to gain ground at will.
Something that was very hard to do in XSF, and almost impossible in many match
ups.

>
>
> > Now let's get into MvC. I and many have said it then and I'll say it now
> >the best characters in this game, by far, are strider, wolverine, spider man,
> >and chun li, followed closely by that of other characters such as morrigan and
> >capcom and gambit and megawimp. There is no debate here, no discussion, for it
> >has been proven post wise, discussion wise, and with the highest levels of play
> >that strider is one unbelievably overpowered son of a gun who owns this game.
>
> Now you're spouting drivel. That has not been proven. That's a matter of
> opinion that I happen to disagree with.

You will realize this eventually.

>
>
> >Again I reiterate to you the dash aspect,
>
> Not impressed; other folks have dashes as fast as his.

such as?? Maybe wolvy comes to mind but if you observe very closely strider's dash
is even faster than his, giving the cypher nightmare the edge. Neither morrigan's
nor chun's dashes, while fast in their own right, match the blazing speed the
strider dash from hell.

>
>
> >the throw range (which strider possesses),
>
> Still not impressed. It's not that much better than anyone else's.

true. But the possibility or threat of such a quick grab is twice as much with the
speed in which strider can dash in and get up in anyone's face at almost any given
time.

>
>
> >and the potential to punish a missed block attempt or ill timed
> >move of any sort.
>
> Nothing that every other character in the game doesn't also have.

You are correct if every other character is a pixie. Again see above as to why
strider is even more of a threat in this case. the other NON-PIXIE characters for
the most part do not have these capabilities. PIXIE DOMINANCE AT ITS WORST : (

>
>
> >He has massive range, priority, easy to do high damage
> >combos, and most importantly, (one main aspect of this game which you have
> >failed to mention) the most lethal character in a team beat down situation
> >making the Oh-you-bore-us a lot more useful and deadly than you may perceive it
> >to be.
>
> Been there. Dealt with that. Never heard of watching the character that
> doesn't have the "COM" label on him, you say? Watch him, the Ouroboros is
> just as useless in team beatings as it is usually.

Oh really? The fact that while one character is nailing you with a super while
strider roams free with satellites at the ready is not an indication of this
particular super's useful nature? Come on now!!! Be reasonable here and think for a
second. call out helper into hyper megaman, oh-you-bore-us strider ready and
waiting, hyper mega ends, strider begins with satellites, combo into any super of
choice or a double for that matter. OR even if first super is blocked strider
attacks at will looking for an opening without any worry of push blocking attempts
chipping off even more block damage. And it goes on and on and on...........
Apparently you have not "Been there. Dealt with that." if you consider this
situation anything less than highly threatening and potentially deadly.

Master John

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

unread,

Apr 30, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/30/98

In article <6i8nce$t8i$1...@user2.teleport.com>,

Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <354780AE...@idt.net>, Angel <ami...@idt.net> wrote:
>
>>Rogue the best in XSF? Aside from cyke who
>>you grossly failed to mention as THEE best character in XSF (obvious choice by
>>many) what about wolvy? or chun? who are highly rewarded for minimal tactics.
>
>You know how to block and throw, you can beat Wolvie. More or less the same

Except for the fact that Wolf has BIG throw range, and might not
be an idiot about it.

>>Cyke improved in MSF? Again ARE YOU MAD? "optic blast was safer in this
>>version" LOL, I ask, what game were you playing??

>I was playing XSF, in which Rogue, Dhalsim, Juggernaut, Magneto, Bison, and
>Cammy all had normal moves that could punish an optic blast from as much as
>half the screen's distance away, and MSF, when the block stun from the optic

They did not. Dhalsim did, Juggernaut did, anyone else blocking a
OB had to special or super, and some of them couldn't even do that!

Lord BBH

unread,

Apr 30, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/30/98

In article <6i81s6$h23$1...@user2.teleport.com>, stil...@user2.teleport.com
(Stilt Man) writes:

>>Wha...? Charlie I can understand, but Rogue and Bison? Where are Cyclops and
>>Sabretooth. Cyclops was hands-down the strongest character barring
>infinites,
>>and WITH infinites he's still god since he can start one off his rushing
>grab
>>(or just about any of his throws except the Strong one)
>
>I don't have Sabretooth in there because he dies against turtles. He has
>no safe way to whittle at all. Pick your character intelligently against
>him (read: one with air defense) and Sabretooth is meat for the eating.
>He's low rent but comparatively weak once the opponent knows what they're
>doing.

I see. So to beat Sabretooth, you just sit in the corner and stick out
air-defense moves when he jumps in? If you do that, any Sabretooth player with
half a brain will either stop attacking in the air and just airblock in, or
dash in and throw you. Or even better, a super-jump instead of a regular jump
to throw you off. It can happen. And when you screw up, you pay... big time.

>And Cyclops, IMO, is GROSSLY overrated in XSF. Why? Because that vaunted
>optic blast game of his is downright suicidal against half the people in
>the game. I'm serious. Sure, he's a nightmare for pixies and shotos (which
>is why, IMO, he's so highly regarded, because that's the common fare at most
>arcades), but his fate is most miserable indeed against Rogue, Bison, Cammy,
>Juggernaut, Dhalsim, Magneto, and (if they've got meters) Chun Li, Akuma,
>and Ken, because all of these people can punish a blocked optic blast pretty
>much at will from as much as half the screen away or more, most of them worse
>than that if they've got a meter full.

So Cyclops sucks because characters can punish a blocked Optic Blast from
half-screen? ANYONE can beat Cyclops if the only move he knows how to do is
Optic Blast. WHY would you want to do an Optic Blast if you were that close to
an opponent? At that range, Cyclops can make use of his high-priority normals,
his throws/running grab, or a Mega/Searchlight Optic Blast, among others. Mega
Optic Blast is TOTALLY SAFE when blocked no matter where he is on the screen.

As Milo said, Cyclops beats all those characters except for Dhalsim... although
I think Chun-Li might go even with him.

>>I was a huge Rogue fan, and got a lot of winning streaks with her, but she's
>>definitely not top-tier.
>
>Rogue is top tier in XSF, IMO, because of (a) power, (b) fairly good speed,
>(c) air defense that friggin' NO ONE can get in on (not pixies, not
Sabretooth,
>NO ONE),

Power? Maybe her super.... Speed I'll agree with. What's this mystical
air-defense move you talk about? Against Sabretooth, crouching Fierce trades
when he jumps close.... Standing Roundhouse might be good if they jump in from
far-away, but why would they want to do THAT? And Crouching Forward trades a
lot of the time too.

>(d) some of the best counterattacking in the game (rushing punches
>at close range, Good Night Sugah at not-so-close range).

Rushing punches aren't so great, and you're totally screwed if they block.

>She DESTROYS Cyclops,
>Dhalsim, Charlie, Juggernaut, Zangief, Ken, Akuma, and Storm, and has
>matchups
>ranging from even to significant advantage on the entire rest of the field.
>There is no one that can count on character advantage to beat Rogue.

Umm... Cyclops beats Rogue, and he doesn't win by doing Optic Blasts all day
long. She's pretty even against Dhalsim although she does benefit from having a
better Yoga Flame than him, and I suppose she beats Charlie thanks to the
terror she can be with a Stolen Sonic Boom. Juggernaut and Zangief are
definitely a big advantage, but I don't see why she'd have an advantage against
Ken and Akuma. And Storm... you HAVE figured out what her off-screen BS is by
now, haven't you?

>>How did Cyclops get BETTER?!?! His Optic Blast lag is far longer and comes
>out
>>slower than it did in XSF (he mauled pixies much better in the first one),
>his
>>dashing grab is SLOW AS HELL and a frickin CHARGE move... not to mention a
>>slower Mega Optic Blast that won't even combo and is punishable. How did he
>get
>>better again? Pass the pipe.
>
>Sure, his optic blast got a bit slower, but it got stronger overall
>because block stun got longer and very few people in MSF have moves that
>move fast enough on the ground that they can punish him for a blocked
>one. His lag in XSF was grossly longer than block stun lag was, which
>meant that anyone with a fast ground move (see the above list) could punish
>him for it; in MSF the gap between OB recovery and block stun recovery times
>was miniscule, which meant that as long as you make them block it,
>you're safe. On XSF people could just get within a certain distance of your
>Cyclops and dare you to optic blast them and then make you look like an idiot
>when you did. That can't be done on MSF, or if it can, it can't by
>anywhere near as many characters as could on XSF.

I find it amusing that the reason you rate Cyclops so low in XSF and so high in
MSF all relies upon one move.... the Optic Blast. It is a great move (in XSF),
but as I said before... why in the hell would you want to use it when they're
close?

The thing that REALLY separates the Optic Blasts is how fast they come out. XSF
one is near-instant, MSF one has a bit of a lag before it comes out, giving
people more time to super-jump over it or block or whatever.

But it wasn't just a slowed-down Optic Blast that made Cyclops so much weaker
in MSF. He DOES have other moves.

>>Strider does 1/3 off a low Short WITHOUT a super. As for Morrigan, I think
>>she's pretty good but she's definitely not top-tier either.
>
>That's true about Strider, but it's not enough that I'd put him top tier just
>off of that any more than I'd put Wolvie there. With Morrigan, I'll agree
>she probably has fewer blow-out matchups than some of the pixies, but she
>also
>doesn't have any significant weaknesses, either. Play her well enough and
>you can tackle basically anyone. That's more important to me than a few
>blow-outs traded for significant weaknesses.

Not only can Strider chain for big damage off a low Short, he has massive
priority and reach on his normal moves (which has already been mentioned before
in this thread). While none of his supers are comboable, he can tick block
damage safely very easily. In comparison, Morrigan has way less priority and
reach and can't do ridiculous chains from hell, but she does have one comboable
super (which doesn't do much damage anyway). Not to mention most characters
have air defense that can deal with her jump-ins, when Strider's Jumping
Roundhouse slaughters all but a few.

Stilt Man

unread,

Apr 30, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/30/98

In article <Es8Gr...@midway.uchicago.edu>,

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac <spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>In article <6i8nce$t8i$1...@user2.teleport.com>,
>Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:

>>In article <354780AE...@idt.net>, Angel <ami...@idt.net> wrote:
>>>Cyke improved in MSF? Again ARE YOU MAD? "optic blast was safer in this
>>>version" LOL, I ask, what game were you playing??

>>I was playing XSF, in which Rogue, Dhalsim, Juggernaut, Magneto, Bison, and
>>Cammy all had normal moves that could punish an optic blast from as much as
>>half the screen's distance away, and MSF, when the block stun from the optic

> They did not. Dhalsim did, Juggernaut did, anyone else blocking a

>OB had to special or super, and some of them couldn't even do that!

Rogue has her super and her rushing punches (a little over half and about a
third of the screen's range to punish, respectively).

Dhalsim has his limbs.

Juggernaut has the low forward (half screen) and the head crush (anywhere,
and I mean f*cking ANYWHERE... yes, that means you can have your back against
one side of the screen and me the other and I block an OB and smear you all
over the wall before you recover).

Bison has his scissors and his psycho crusher, either of which works from
half the screen or a little more.

Magneto has a jab mag disruptor, which works anywhere. (This doesn't mean
Mags beats Cyke; both of them lose most of their main moves because the other
can block and counter, making this largely a stalemate.)

Cammy has a cannon drill or a super, making her punishing range about the
same as Rogue's.

Ken has Shoryureppa, half the screen.

Chun Li has thousand burst kick, half the screen.

Charlie has super somersault, a little under half the screen.

Akuma, same as Ken.

Cyclops can just optic blast you back, anywhere.

That's eleven of the seventeen characters that can shut down an optic
blast without a whole lot of effort, just by blocking and countering.
No need to anticipate. No need to do a whole lot of work to guess when
he'll do it. You get within reach, you block, you destroy him. That simple.
Getting within the reaches I describe isn't that hard to accomplish.

Without the optic blast, Cyclops is not in particularly good shape, because
he doesn't have any other decent weapon that doesn't either leave the
opponent with room to attack him (his priorities are good, yes, but
not good enough) or plenty of room to ignore/counterattack him. The
rushing grab is his only other decent move, but that's a gamble, because
if you don't hit with it, Cyclops has his pants down around his ankles
even worse than with a blocked optic blast -- he gives people several
seconds to hit him instead of a brief moment. I'm not saying that all of
the above characters just eat him up merely because they can shut down an
optic blast, but some of them do just that. That's not my view of a
dominant character.

And I'm not the only one I've seen make that comment. I think the guy's
name was Alex... lives in LA... :)

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

unread,

Apr 30, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/30/98

In article <6iae03$iq1$1...@user2.teleport.com>,

Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <Es8Gr...@midway.uchicago.edu>,
>Shaun Patrick Mcisaac <spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>>In article <6i8nce$t8i$1...@user2.teleport.com>,
>>Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:

>>>In article <354780AE...@idt.net>, Angel <ami...@idt.net> wrote:
>

>> They did not. Dhalsim did, Juggernaut did, anyone else blocking a
>>OB had to special or super, and some of them couldn't even do that!
>Rogue has her super and her rushing punches (a little over half and about a
>third of the screen's range to punish, respectively).

Which are specials and supers, not normals.

>Bison has his scissors and his psycho crusher, either of which works from
>half the screen or a little more.

Not normals.

>Magneto has a jab mag disruptor, which works anywhere. (This doesn't mean
>Mags beats Cyke; both of them lose most of their main moves because the other
>can block and counter, making this largely a stalemate.)

This doesn't work because Cyke reflection OB goes under it.

>Cammy has a cannon drill or a super, making her punishing range about the
>same as Rogue's.

Not a normal.

>Ken has Shoryureppa, half the screen.

Gets almost no damage, and it's a super.

>Chun Li has thousand burst kick, half the screen.
>Charlie has super somersault, a little under half the screen.
>Akuma, same as Ken.

Shit damage, and they're supers.

>Cyclops can just optic blast you back, anywhere.

Not a normal.

>That's eleven of the seventeen characters that can shut down an optic
>blast without a whole lot of effort, just by blocking and countering.
>No need to anticipate. No need to do a whole lot of work to guess when
>he'll do it. You get within reach, you block, you destroy him. That simple.
>Getting within the reaches I describe isn't that hard to accomplish.

Eight of those characters you listed do super responses. Well, is
Birdie top tier in A2 because he can jump chain? Hell no. You also can
fire off a pulse before the OB, making some of those countes fail, btw.
You get within reach of Cyke, and he has a DEVASTATING close game
where his priority and infinite combo capabilities com into play.

>Without the optic blast, Cyclops is not in particularly good shape, because
>he doesn't have any other decent weapon that doesn't either leave the
>opponent with room to attack him (his priorities are good, yes, but
>not good enough) or plenty of room to ignore/counterattack him. The
>rushing grab is his only other decent move, but that's a gamble, because
>if you don't hit with it, Cyclops has his pants down around his ankles
>even worse than with a blocked optic blast -- he gives people several
>seconds to hit him instead of a brief moment. I'm not saying that all of
>the above characters just eat him up merely because they can shut down an
>optic blast, but some of them do just that. That's not my view of a
>dominant character.

LOL. His one special move isn't a die button, he must suck. Of
course it IS a die button, given his close game. A2 Ken can't fireball
all day, someone can CC through it. Ken must be low tier in A2. Oh, his
CCs kill you for standing up? (Cyke's jab infinite kills you for doing
the same if proceeded by a low short, right? Or simply not blocking a
JAB, in any case.) He's got some darned fine supers? (Cyke's MOB
insanity?) He's got a killer AC? (Jab OB after they stick out anything?)

>And I'm not the only one I've seen make that comment. I think the guy's
>name was Alex... lives in LA... :)

You ARE Bison.

Stilt Man

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

In article <6ibbrs$m...@newsstand.cit.cornell.edu>,
James Margaris <js...@cornell.edu> wrote:

>In article <6i8nce$t8i$1...@user2.teleport.com>, stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) wrote:
>>Why? With Guile, you didn't need any positioning, you didn't necessarily
>>need any real skill. If you know roundhouse/low strong/SB/low forward, which
>>can be done anywhere on the board, you have the game the instant you dizzy
>>them once. Because somewhere in that collection, you will ALWAYS re-dizzy.
>>Just hold the line long enough to dizzy them once, and it's over. Anticipate
>>a FB, and it's over. Hit them a few times close together, and it's over.
>>Heck, get a single jab hit at close range and repeat until they dizzy, and
>>it's over.

> What the hell are you talking about? Hmm..where to begin

I'm talking about Guile's indefinite redizzies in SF2:WW. Any other
questions? Oh, wait, you're getting to that...

> a) "can be done anywhere on the board" No, it can't. From too close
>you jump over their head, from too far even if the roundhouse hits you land
>out of low strong range.

My comment was along the lines of if you connect a deep roundhouse or deep
forward out of the air, the game is over right there. Your only task is to
keep at the distance where you can jump in and land one. Sonic booms can
keep them far enough, following sonic booms when they try to back away keeps
them close enough.

> b) how often are you going to hit with a close jumping roundhouse? It
>has basically zero downward vertical range. Hitting with a deep jump
>roundhouse is nearly impossoble against an opponent that isn't braindead.

Substitute forward instead of roundhouse. Same difference: you dizzy them
once somewhere in the next four hits out of air kick (whether forward or
roundhouse)/low strong/sonic boom/low forward. In the original SF2, the game
is over right there, because repeated jumping in with fierce/fierce/SB/forward
can be done anywhere on the board and will be guaranteed to redizzy them as
many times as it takes.

> c) If this *were* a problem (which it isn't) Ken/Ryu could simply
>choose to not throw fireballs from that very special range.

Which leaves them open to Guile just chucking sonic booms at will. They
*have* to throw fireballs to keep him from owning them. OTOH, Guile owns
them anyway in WW, so why should that make a difference?

> d) Repeated close jabs have not dizzied since classic. WTF, why not
>complain about the magic throw instead?

Because magic throw is a clear bug in the game. Infinite redizzies are a
natural progression of the engine.

> e) "Hit them a few times in a row and it's over." A deceptive
>statement.

Not really. Two fierce hits from Guile would dizzy most folks. Cancelled
fireball into backfist means you watch yourself really, really carefully for
the next several seconds or it could be over. Failing to jump straight over
a sonic boom and landing on it, followed by a Guile low forward could end
the round right there. Jumping into too many flash kicks could end it.
Jumping over sonic booms and getting either low forwarded or standing
roundhoused when you come down could do it. Basically any two good hits
chronologically close together could potentially be the end; WW was a bit
flakey and inconsistent about that. But once you come up with stars or ducks
once... say bye-bye. "I'm dizzy, hit me 'til I'm croaked, Guile!"

> Have you *ever* actually *played* SF? This Guile stuff is crap and you
>should know it.

Yes, I played SF2 for quite some time. Which was why I found it somewhat
surprising when I discovered that the various sonic boom combos I used in
the later versions suddenly were repeatable dizzies in WW. And that's what
I'm talking about, WW Guile. And there, it's 100% true and *you* should
know it. The only stick motion you need to know is jumping, charging for
the sonic boom in the air, and throwing it after two hits. That's actually
a bit easier than repeated button hits in careful repeated order and
positioning yourself carefully. Sure, some infinites (Rogue's sonic booms
or earthquakes or air dashing chains) are similarly easy, but one accidental
slip of your hand in the chaos and you lose your infinite. With Guile, you
hit a button twice, move the stick, and hit it once more and move to a second
button, unless you're in the corner, in which case you don't even have to do
that. (i.e. fierce/fierce/SB/forward) On the other hand, most of the time
that last hit is moot anyway, because the majority of Guile redizzies will
happen somewhere on the first two or three hits of that combo. It's nice,
slow, and easy, requiring minimal hand dexterity. I can't do air combos
beyond about 9 or 10 hits. I *can* do Guile's infinite redizzy in WW. You
tell me what that says about relative skill in executing the things. Sure,
Jin's taunt infinite it ain't... but it's still ridiculously easy and a
magnificent counterexample to the claim that the vs. games make it too much
easier than SF2 did to kill someone on one mistake.

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

In article <6ibbrs$m...@newsstand.cit.cornell.edu>,
James Margaris <js...@cornell.edu> wrote:

James, just stop. Stilt man is obviously an idiot, as Seth, Milo,
and everyone else on this thread has noted before. He still doesn't
unstand why jumping around like a madman in SF2 got you killed, how the
hell can you expect real discussion here?

Stilt Man

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

In article <Es8w2...@midway.uchicago.edu>,

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac <spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>In article <6iae03$iq1$1...@user2.teleport.com>,
>Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>>In article <Es8Gr...@midway.uchicago.edu>,
>>Shaun Patrick Mcisaac <spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>>> They did not. Dhalsim did, Juggernaut did, anyone else blocking a
>>>OB had to special or super, and some of them couldn't even do that!

>>Rogue has her super and her rushing punches (a little over half and about a
>>third of the screen's range to punish, respectively).

> Which are specials and supers, not normals.

Hold on here. Does Cyclops care whether it's a normal move or a special
move that drops him after a blocked optic blast? If I'm Cyclops, I sure
as hell don't care. I'm on the ground having given away fifteen times
or more of the damage I just dealt with a blocked optic blast. Who the
hell cares whether Rogue hit me with a normal move or a super or her
rushing punches? Pain is pain!

>>Magneto has a jab mag disruptor, which works anywhere. (This doesn't mean
>>Mags beats Cyke; both of them lose most of their main moves because the other
>>can block and counter, making this largely a stalemate.)

> This doesn't work because Cyke reflection OB goes under it.

That's true. All right, scratch Mags from the list for that reason. I
stand corrected on this point.

>>That's eleven of the seventeen characters that can shut down an optic
>>blast without a whole lot of effort, just by blocking and countering.
>>No need to anticipate. No need to do a whole lot of work to guess when
>>he'll do it. You get within reach, you block, you destroy him. That simple.
>>Getting within the reaches I describe isn't that hard to accomplish.

> Eight of those characters you listed do super responses. Well, is
>Birdie top tier in A2 because he can jump chain? Hell no. You also can
>fire off a pulse before the OB, making some of those countes fail, btw.

Not from the kind of range they'll hit from. Juggernaut's head crush, if the
pulse hasn't gone away yet, will just sail through it. Rogue's super or
rushing punches are done from close enough that the pulse will have gotten
there, and ditto for the vast majority of the others I listed.

> You get within reach of Cyke, and he has a DEVASTATING close game
>where his priority and infinite combo capabilities com into play.

First off, Cyke needs you to be backed into a corner to do that. No one's
going to get caught by Cyclops in a corner. If they've got a decent anti-Cyke
character (i.e. someone who can punish a blocked optic blast easily) he's
going to be backing away from them most of the time, which means that infinites
go right out the window.

So now that the infinite is aside, we've got plain ol' Cyclops, who can't get
any particularly gross infinites in because it's his own back that's going to
be to the corner most of the time, and who has only his normal moves and an
array of specials, the latter of which all are a "spray and pray" situation
because any of them that fail are going to be worth half his life or more
against the likes of, say, Rogue, whereas her attack options are nowhere near
that unsafe.

>>Without the optic blast, Cyclops is not in particularly good shape, because
>>he doesn't have any other decent weapon that doesn't either leave the
>>opponent with room to attack him (his priorities are good, yes, but
>>not good enough) or plenty of room to ignore/counterattack him. The
>>rushing grab is his only other decent move, but that's a gamble, because
>>if you don't hit with it, Cyclops has his pants down around his ankles
>>even worse than with a blocked optic blast -- he gives people several
>>seconds to hit him instead of a brief moment. I'm not saying that all of
>>the above characters just eat him up merely because they can shut down an
>>optic blast, but some of them do just that. That's not my view of a
>>dominant character.

> LOL. His one special move isn't a die button, he must suck. Of
>course it IS a die button, given his close game. A2 Ken can't fireball
>all day, someone can CC through it. Ken must be low tier in A2. Oh, his
>CCs kill you for standing up? (Cyke's jab infinite kills you for doing
>the same if proceeded by a low short, right? Or simply not blocking a
>JAB, in any case.)

Oh, c'mon. How many jabs is Cyclops going to land on, say, Rogue? (Since
she seems to be the main dispute people have with my tier evaluation...)
Jump-in? He gets punted into orbit, completely safe. Walk in? Do not make
me laugh. Rogue needs two hits on most machines to kill Cyclops, infinites
completely aside. Two optic blasts blocked from a bit too close, and it's
over. Two rushing grabs that whiff, and it's over. Two jump-ins that get
punted into orbit and he sensibly tries to block low when he comes down and
takes the dive kick instantaneously, which goes into low strong/low forward/
Good Night without a whole lot of effort. Two kiss ticks into the corner
into supers. Those are considerably easier to land from Rogue on Cyclops
than a jab.

>He's got some darned fine supers? (Cyke's MOB
>insanity?)

Block damage against Rogue, and nothing more. He has no effective way to
set it up to actually hit.

>He's got a killer AC? (Jab OB after they stick out anything?)

Oh, so if I'm Rogue and I dash up and stick out a jab half the screen away and
then block, you'll be nice enough to try a jab OB on me? Thank you, I'll just
kiss you good night as a reward for that. Please feel free to do it again any
time, half your life tastes good on skunk's lips.

Oh, wait, you meant I was supposed to stick out something more substantial
than that? Okay, let's pretend here. Let's pretend I actually know how to
play this game, and my Rogue won't stick out anything bigger than a jab for
OB bait unless I know it's going to at least force you to block. I'm
completely safe, because I've got an option select of sorts: I can poke in
either with a dive kick or a crouching strong on the ground, and if I hit,
I finish with rushing punches or super. If you block, I power drain you.
Optic blast, believe it or not, does *not* come out fast enough to keep you
from getting kissed after you block the elbow on the ground. If you're wired
enough to optic blast *anything*, you die from either my rushing punches or
my supers. If you're not, I'm going to get some of those in.

Now let's say that I even let you back me up a little. Doesn't have to be
too close into the corner, it can be most of a screen width away. Now I
do this little option select again. You know what? You eat super whether
you block or not. If I connect, I chain it. If I don't, you get kissed
and hurled into the corner and then supered. Or you can try various desperate
moves to keep me at a distance which probably will get you supered anyway.
Or you can just back into the corner and turtle, which is REALLY not a good
idea against Rogue.

Rogue destroys Cyclops. And that's just one example.

>>And I'm not the only one I've seen make that comment. I think the guy's
>>name was Alex... lives in LA... :)
>
> You ARE Bison.

>--
>Tired of Student Government Insiders?
>Tired of Student Government?
>Tired of Students?
>Tired?

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Stilt Man

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

In article <199804301608...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,

Lord BBH <lor...@aol.com> wrote:
>In article <6i81s6$h23$1...@user2.teleport.com>, stil...@user2.teleport.com
>(Stilt Man) writes:
>>>Wha...? Charlie I can understand, but Rogue and Bison? Where are Cyclops and
>>>Sabretooth. Cyclops was hands-down the strongest character barring infinites,
>>>and WITH infinites he's still god since he can start one off his rushing grab
>>>(or just about any of his throws except the Strong one)

>>I don't have Sabretooth in there because he dies against turtles. He has
>>no safe way to whittle at all. Pick your character intelligently against
>>him (read: one with air defense) and Sabretooth is meat for the eating.
>>He's low rent but comparatively weak once the opponent knows what they're
>>doing.

>I see. So to beat Sabretooth, you just sit in the corner and stick out
>air-defense moves when he jumps in?

No, actually you don't need to be in the corner. It depends on who he's
up against.

>If you do that, any Sabretooth player with
>half a brain will either stop attacking in the air and just airblock in,

Gets tossed.

>or dash in and throw you.

Gets poked/tossed/hurt in some way.

>Or even better, a super-jump instead of a regular jump
>to throw you off.

How?

>>And Cyclops, IMO, is GROSSLY overrated in XSF. Why? Because that vaunted
>>optic blast game of his is downright suicidal against half the people in
>>the game. I'm serious. Sure, he's a nightmare for pixies and shotos (which
>>is why, IMO, he's so highly regarded, because that's the common fare at most
>>arcades), but his fate is most miserable indeed against Rogue, Bison, Cammy,
>>Juggernaut, Dhalsim, Magneto, and (if they've got meters) Chun Li, Akuma,
>>and Ken, because all of these people can punish a blocked optic blast pretty
>>much at will from as much as half the screen away or more, most of them worse
>>than that if they've got a meter full.

>So Cyclops sucks because characters can punish a blocked Optic Blast from
>half-screen? ANYONE can beat Cyclops if the only move he knows how to do is
>Optic Blast. WHY would you want to do an Optic Blast if you were that close to
>an opponent? At that range, Cyclops can make use of his high-priority normals,
>his throws/running grab, or a Mega/Searchlight Optic Blast, among others. Mega
>Optic Blast is TOTALLY SAFE when blocked no matter where he is on the screen.

Mega Optic Blast is only useful for block damage, which it doesn't do enough of
to be worth the super meter. His throws will help against characters that go
for a fast poking game within kissing distance, but against Rogue? Bison?
Dhalsim? All just fine from outside of throw range, thank you.

Running grab is asking for trouble. There is absolutely no way to use that
that an opponent that sees it coming can't super him out of. If he ticks
with it, he's asking for block push into super. If he doesn't, they can jump
out of the way and super him. If he tries a rush-grab on someone who's jumping
into medium range, he risks them chaining out of the air into a super. Get
the idea?

High priority normals? Without his specials, that doesn't do him much good,
because he can't do any block damage with them. Which puts him in very,
very bad shape against anyone who has either the speed or priority or power
or some combination of all three to match him, *plus* has safe ways to
inflict block damage without burning a super meter.

>As Milo said, Cyclops beats all those characters except for Dhalsim... although
>I think Chun-Li might go even with him.

Rogue? No. Keepaway doesn't work on her, and close up he gets pounded to
blood paste. Ditto for Bison. Cammy can stay close enough to cannon drill
easily, which means that she can get the rest of the distance and hurt him
closer than that. Wolvie isn't in as good of shape because he has no easy
way to punish the optic blast, so Cyke's range game works better on him.

>>>I was a huge Rogue fan, and got a lot of winning streaks with her, but she's
>>>definitely not top-tier.

>>Rogue is top tier in XSF, IMO, because of (a) power, (b) fairly good speed,
>>(c) air defense that friggin' NO ONE can get in on (not pixies, not Sabretooth,
>>NO ONE),

>Power? Maybe her super.... Speed I'll agree with. What's this mystical
>air-defense move you talk about? Against Sabretooth, crouching Fierce trades
>when he jumps close....

Not if timed right. It will hit him clean, every time, if she times it
correctly.

>And Crouching Forward trades a lot of the time too.

Who's stupid enough to use crouching forward on Rogue for air defense when
you've got her launchers?

>>(d) some of the best counterattacking in the game (rushing punches
>>at close range, Good Night Sugah at not-so-close range).

>Rushing punches aren't so great, and you're totally screwed if they block.

Then don't be stupid enough to use them unless you know they're going to hit.
In short, after a blocked move halfway close up or at the end of a chain.
There are a lot of situations where characters have annoying little moves
that would be difficult to deal with for someone else at close range but
aren't trouble for Rogue because of the rushing punches. Like Gambit's
Cajun strike. Or Wolvie's berserker barrage. Or Mag's disruptors. Or
Storm launching a typhoon. All sorts of little things like this that work
safely on other people because they don't have a halfway fast ground special
to punish them for it, but don't work on Rogue because the rushing punches
will get that short distance very quickly. Only specials that are better are
Bison's scissors (same speed, better range) and (you guessed it) Cyclops'
optic blast.

Please assume I have at least half a clue of what I'm talking about.

>>She DESTROYS Cyclops,
>>Dhalsim, Charlie, Juggernaut, Zangief, Ken, Akuma, and Storm, and has
>>matchups
>>ranging from even to significant advantage on the entire rest of the field.
>>There is no one that can count on character advantage to beat Rogue.

>Umm... Cyclops beats Rogue, and he doesn't win by doing Optic Blasts all day
>long.

See above. He can't keep her out, and close up he's blood paste.

>She's pretty even against Dhalsim although she does benefit from having a
>better Yoga Flame than him,

You are nuts. Rogue *mauls* Dhalsim. If she's even moderately intelligent,
she is going to get hit with absolutely none of his normal moves other than
drills, and she'll get hit by drills in the process of trading around five
to one in her favor on damage with his drills against her air defense. His
only hope is to keep her at a distance and pray she never gets his flame.
Close up, Dhalsim is far, far too slow to deal with Rogue's mobility and
her power racks up the damage against his flimsy frame very, very fast.
Once she's got the flame, it's time to switch out and pray, because his slim
hopes go to none once a Rogue-a Flame can penetrate every projectile he has
and whittle with impunity. Her attacks don't leave her open to counters
after blocking, at least certainly not from Dhalsim. The only thing that
even moderately worries me about Dhalsim against Rogue are (a) that he might
roast her in a jumping attack with his super, and (b) his quick dash. The
former is easily dealt with, because she can hit fast enough with her dive
kicks that this doesn't matter. Up, down, elapsed time 1/2 second, much
faster than the weenie roast comes out. And his dash doesn't matter because
Rogue has no reason to stay on the ground against him, because his air
defense against her is woefully inadequate.

So what it comes down to is, she can attack him at will, she can hurt him
a lot when she attacks, he can't attack her (both out of lack of speed and
priority) and when he does it'll hurt him more than her (the only attacks
he's got any business hitting are the ones she lets him hit with in very
bad trades). Dhalsim's only realistic hope against Rogue is a partner
that can handle her better than he can, because Dhalsim is very, very
easily Rogue's most one-sided crushing in the game.

>and I suppose she beats Charlie thanks to the
>terror she can be with a Stolen Sonic Boom.

She's a terror, yes... but Charlie has more weapons that don't rely on being
able to keep Rogue at a distance than Dhalsim does. Bad for Charlie, yes,
but worse for Dhalsim.

>Juggernaut and Zangief are definitely a big advantage, but I don't see why
>she'd have an advantage against Ken and Akuma.

Power and speed advantage. Blocked FB = super. No way to attack her from the
air, while she can do so on them fairly easily. Close up fight, as usual,
goes her way, because she's got safe attacks to mix it up with and they don't
at that range because the FB isn't safe once she gets close. The fight goes
one of several ways. One, they try to turtle behind air FBs, which works
until she patiently gets close and tags them. Two, they try to fight close
up, which gets them mauled because she has safe attacks that can whittle or
hurt relatively at will and they don't. I don't put Ryu in the field of
people she crushes as badly because his air FBs can keep her away better than
their can because she can't jump over them as easily.

>And Storm... you HAVE figured out what her off-screen BS is by now, haven't
>you?

Yes, I meant to qualify that by saying "Storm (if Storm stays on the screen)".
(My contempt for Milo is rather considerable, given that he'd rather just
sit back and be vague rather than just say outright, "Yo, Stilt, you're wrong."
when it can be proven. I'm stubborn, yes, but if I'm just plain wrong on
a point like that, I'll come clean when it's illustrated.)

If not, Rogue will need Cammy around to punish Storm for that stuff. Storm
tries a blocked super, "lock on!" After a bit of that, Storm will find reasons
to stay on the ground or die.

If Storm stays on the screen... well, this is bad. Very bad. Way too much
power and speed in Rogue's favor.

>I find it amusing that the reason you rate Cyclops so low in XSF and so high in
>MSF all relies upon one move.... the Optic Blast. It is a great move (in XSF),
>but as I said before... why in the hell would you want to use it when they're
>close?

You don't. But the point is, Cyclops is weaker in close because his close-up
weapons aren't as good as the OB is. Close up in MSF is halfway safe as long
as they don't anticipate, because block stun was good enough that they can't
retaliate (plus there's far fewer characters with the moves to retaliate with
to boot even if the block stun weren't there). A bit of borrowing of
old-school Ryu tactics concerning "faking" will help with the anticipation
part. Close up in XSF was suicide because most of the characters could
punish you for it; in MSF, even though the OB itself was chronologically
slower, his opponents' counters were MORE slower, so in the balance it came
out safe as long as Cyke's opponent doesn't anticipate it. For instance,
Cyke could do a blocked fierce blast as an air defense or a blocked standing
roundhouse, push them away, and OB once they hit the ground, and be perfectly
safe in MSF (except for Spidey's Maximum Spider... but you tell me the failing
with that plan :). In XSF, that'd get him smeared all over the walls.

>>>Strider does 1/3 off a low Short WITHOUT a super. As for Morrigan, I think
>>>she's pretty good but she's definitely not top-tier either.

>>That's true about Strider, but it's not enough that I'd put him top tier just
>>off of that any more than I'd put Wolvie there. With Morrigan, I'll agree
>>she probably has fewer blow-out matchups than some of the pixies, but she
>>also
>>doesn't have any significant weaknesses, either. Play her well enough and
>>you can tackle basically anyone. That's more important to me than a few
>>blow-outs traded for significant weaknesses.

>Not only can Strider chain for big damage off a low Short, he has massive
>priority and reach on his normal moves (which has already been mentioned before
>in this thread). While none of his supers are comboable, he can tick block
>damage safely very easily.

Not really. Ouroboros doesn't chip much at all, and Legion can be easily
super jumped over without taking a single hit. Super jump straight up and
a little forward... nothing will touch you.

>In comparison, Morrigan has way less priority and
>reach and can't do ridiculous chains from hell, but she does have one comboable
>super (which doesn't do much damage anyway).

She has less priority on her ground-to-ground moves, but that's what a soul
fist is for. Again, a little bit of old-school Ryu so they don't anticipate
and you're fine here. Her ground-to-AIR is some of the best priority overall
in the game -- better than Strider's by far, in fact. Her standing roundhouse
goes clean through anyone except Hulk or Venom Fang, and jab shadow blade
safely goes through those.

Where are you that the Silhouette Blade doesn't do much damage? My Silhouette
Blade chains do about 50% as long as you don't have them pinned in a corner,
in which case it's closer to 35-40%. I can certainly live with that (either
way).

>Not to mention most characters
>have air defense that can deal with her jump-ins, when Strider's Jumping
>Roundhouse slaughters all but a few.

Morrigan and Venom are two of the few. Her standing roundhouse and his
standing strong, if properly timed, go clean through Strider's air moves
without a hitch. Venom can't standing strong Spidey or Hulk and that's
about it. Morrigan can standing roundhouse Spidey but not Hulk; Hulk she
needs the jab shadow blade for, which is perfectly safe for her anyway,
so it doesn't make much different to her.

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

In article <6ic3lf$rv1$1...@user1.teleport.com>,

Stilt Man <stil...@user1.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <199804301608...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
>Lord BBH <lor...@aol.com> wrote:
>>In article <6i81s6$h23$1...@user2.teleport.com>, stil...@user2.teleport.com
>>(Stilt Man) writes:
>
>Mega Optic Blast is only useful for block damage, which it doesn't do enough of
>to be worth the super meter. His throws will help against characters that go
>for a fast poking game within kissing distance, but against Rogue? Bison?
>Dhalsim? All just fine from outside of throw range, thank you.

A) MOB combos all over the place, can be done to stuff anything
they do long range, and can hit switches/other mistakes.
B) If Rogue, Bison, or Dhalsim do just about anything, jab OB.
You'll hit them CLEAN from "poke distance." AFTER blocking too, in many
cases.

>High priority normals? Without his specials, that doesn't do him much good,
>because he can't do any block damage with them. Which puts him in very,
>very bad shape against anyone who has either the speed or priority or power
>or some combination of all three to match him, *plus* has safe ways to
>inflict block damage without burning a super meter.

Cyke has afer ways of doing blockdamage than anyone else in the
game, WTF are you talking about?

>>As Milo said, Cyclops beats all those characters except for Dhalsim...
>>although
>>I think Chun-Li might go even with him.

WHAT IS ROGUE GOING TO DO? She can't jump, she can't do block
damage, she can't kiss, and her throws are DIRECTLY inferior to Cykes.
Poke all day? Good, I block low all day. Do her "safe block damage"
rushing punches? I infinite you. YOU ARE FUCKING DEAD IF I BLOCK THIS
MOVE ONCE.

>Please assume I have at least half a clue of what I'm talking about.

Why?

>Power and speed advantage. Blocked FB = super. No way to attack her from the

You want to compare supers? Sure, Shoryureppa. Rogue does
ANYTHING, QCF+PP, smack, smack, flaming smack. You can also block much of
her crap and do this.

>air, while she can do so on them fairly easily. Close up fight, as usual,

No she can't. Low fierces, jab DPs, Shinryukens.

>goes her way, because she's got safe attacks to mix it up with and they don't
>at that range because the FB isn't safe once she gets close. The fight goes

Rogue can't do any specials either. Point?

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

In article <6ic0d5$p7t$1...@user1.teleport.com>,

Stilt Man <stil...@user1.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <Es8w2...@midway.uchicago.edu>,
>Shaun Patrick Mcisaac <spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>>In article <6iae03$iq1$1...@user2.teleport.com>,
>>Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>>>In article <Es8Gr...@midway.uchicago.edu>,
>>>Shaun Patrick Mcisaac <spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>>>> They did not. Dhalsim did, Juggernaut did, anyone else blocking a
>>>>OB had to special or super, and some of them couldn't even do that!
>>>Rogue has her super and her rushing punches (a little over half and about a
>>>third of the screen's range to punish, respectively).
>> Which are specials and supers, not normals.
>
>Hold on here. Does Cyclops care whether it's a normal move or a special
>move that drops him after a blocked optic blast? If I'm Cyclops, I sure
>as hell don't care. I'm on the ground having given away fifteen times
>or more of the damage I just dealt with a blocked optic blast. Who the
>hell cares whether Rogue hit me with a normal move or a super or her
>rushing punches? Pain is pain!

YOU said the following ppl have NORMALs that hit him. They don't.
And supers are only available at specific times.

>> Eight of those characters you listed do super responses. Well, is
>>Birdie top tier in A2 because he can jump chain? Hell no. You also can
>>fire off a pulse before the OB, making some of those countes fail, btw.
>
>Not from the kind of range they'll hit from. Juggernaut's head crush, if the
>pulse hasn't gone away yet, will just sail through it. Rogue's super or
>rushing punches are done from close enough that the pulse will have gotten
>there, and ditto for the vast majority of the others I listed.

The pulse pushes them out of favored range, plus also extra
recovery time for cyke.

>> You get within reach of Cyke, and he has a DEVASTATING close game
>>where his priority and infinite combo capabilities com into play.
>
>First off, Cyke needs you to be backed into a corner to do that. No one's
>going to get caught by Cyclops in a corner. If they've got a decent anti-Cyke
>character (i.e. someone who can punish a blocked optic blast easily) he's
>going to be backing away from them most of the time, which means that infinites
>go right out the window.

Stilt, I *ASSURE YOU* you can one of cykes infinites from ANYWHERE
on the screen, having done it myself. I *ASSURE YOU* you can do the other
one when you (Cyke) are backed into the corner by throwing them against
THAT wall. Zvi had done this to me about 10times, although he never got
the full combo off, it only would do 90 fucking percent.
"Dude, you wrong."

>So now that the infinite is aside, we've got plain ol' Cyclops, who can't get
>any particularly gross infinites in because it's his own back that's going to
>be to the corner most of the time, and who has only his normal moves and an
>array of specials, the latter of which all are a "spray and pray" situation
>because any of them that fail are going to be worth half his life or more
>against the likes of, say, Rogue, whereas her attack options are nowhere near
>that unsafe.

Her attack options are MORE unsafe because all close jabs lead to
infinites.

>Good Night without a whole lot of effort. Two kiss ticks into the corner
>into supers. Those are considerably easier to land from Rogue on Cyclops
>than a jab.

LOL. You must get NOTHING but perfects if you never get hit by a
jab. Can you parry EVERYTHING your opponent does in 2i?

>>He's got a killer AC? (Jab OB after they stick out anything?)
>

>completely safe, because I've got an option select of sorts: I can poke in
>either with a dive kick or a crouching strong on the ground, and if I hit,
>I finish with rushing punches or super. If you block, I power drain you.

You do that. Gene splice, mash mash mash. That tick sucks.

You ARE Rogue.

James Margaris

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

In article <6ibuo8$nqg$1...@user1.teleport.com>, stil...@user1.teleport.com (Stilt Man) wrote:
>In article <6ibbrs$m...@newsstand.cit.cornell.edu>,
>James Margaris <js...@cornell.edu> wrote:
>>In article <6i8nce$t8i$1...@user2.teleport.com>, stil...@user2.teleport.com
> (Stilt Man) wrote:

[big clip]

>Yes, I played SF2 for quite some time. Which was why I found it somewhat
>surprising when I discovered that the various sonic boom combos I used in
>the later versions suddenly were repeatable dizzies in WW. And that's what
>I'm talking about, WW Guile. And there, it's 100% true and *you* should
>know it.

OK....who the fuck cares about SF2:WW, undeniably the worst SF2, also
the first real one on one fighting game of the modern era? Comparing that to
MvC is rediculous. MvC benefits from how many fighting games under its belt?
Every SF2, SFA, SF3, X-Men, DS, every VS, and it *Still* has major major
problems.

If you are complaining about MvC compared to WW you have no real
point. No one cares. WW was in many ways a very annoying game. Luckily the
sequels were better...

James M

Allen Kim

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac wrote:
>
> In article <6ibbrs$m...@newsstand.cit.cornell.edu>,
> James Margaris <js...@cornell.edu> wrote:
>

> James, just stop. Stilt man is obviously an idiot, as Seth, Milo,
> and everyone else on this thread has noted before. He still doesn't
> unstand why jumping around like a madman in SF2 got you killed, how the
> hell can you expect real discussion here?

Ah, I see that old tactic brewing again. If you don't hate the Marvel
VS. series with a passion, you must be shunned into silence. A common
tactic with "old-schoolers" here.

Come on, Shaun, all of you guys bring up great points here. Stilt has
the art of Rogue down pat, and I don't think he being given the benefit
of the doubt here. Believe me, I've seen him play. On the other hand,
to me it sounds like Stilt is underestimating an expert Cyclops a little
bit. In the final analysis, I think the very fact that this debate is
taking place just shows you how nothing is a sure thing in X-Men vs. SF.

Side note: I wouldn't normally respond to messages like this, but I just
thought this was pretty cool with two of my worlds (James from Cornell,
Stilt from Portland, OR) collide like this.

--
Allen Kim
alle...@scic.intel.com

VGO Ken

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

>Ah, I see that old tactic brewing again. If you don't hate the Marvel
>VS. series with a passion, you must be shunned into silence. A common
>tactic with "old-schoolers" here.

While I personally see that tactic a lot, I'll take the old-school side here.
This arguing over VS series is very stupid....... it's clear to everyone who
knows anything about SF what's wrong with the series. They are worth it for a
kick, yeah, but to play them seriously is rather stupid. There is no immense
strategy, rather infinites and flashy combos. I heard someone compare it to
SF2.... what the hell? SF2 is OLD. Try comparing it to a current game. SF2
wasn't that good to begin with.....
Next off, I'd like to say that all Marvel games are not scrub-fests. MSH
requires a lot of skill to play, and has some deep strategy in it. It's one of
my favs. COTA was decent. All of the crossovers so far are really bad, except
that MvSF obviously stood out as the closest you can get to actual skill.
That's my take.

Milo D. Cooper

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

> Shaun Patrick Mcisaac wrote:
>> Stilt Man wrote:
>>
>> [...]

>> completely safe, because I've got an option select of sorts: I can poke in
>> either with a dive kick or a crouching strong on the ground, and if I hit,
>> I finish with rushing punches or super. If you block, I power drain you.
>

> You do that. Gene splice, mash mash mash. That tick sucks.
>
> You ARE Rogue.

Another thing: this is just another "Stilt" double standard. He
can evoke push-blocking to (try to) get around Cyke's fierce pulse
ticks and combos, but Rogue's dive-kick patterns are somehow im-
mune to the same response.
Rogue's dive kick patterns are nice, this is true, but that's
just about all she has, so it usually isn't difficult to see them
coming. We've got a couple of dudes here who won many games doing
that, for a while; afterward, they could barely a victory, because
their game relied too heavily on the tactic (which is mostly just
turtling in the air, which I guess explains Stilt's attraction to
her). Julien Beasley's Rogue is (was?) very good, I wish that I'd
played more than one game against him.

Stilt Man

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

In article <EsADL...@midway.uchicago.edu>,

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac <spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:

>In article <6ic0d5$p7t$1...@user1.teleport.com>,
>Stilt Man <stil...@user1.teleport.com> wrote:

>>Hold on here. Does Cyclops care whether it's a normal move or a special
>>move that drops him after a blocked optic blast? If I'm Cyclops, I sure
>>as hell don't care. I'm on the ground having given away fifteen times
>>or more of the damage I just dealt with a blocked optic blast. Who the
>>hell cares whether Rogue hit me with a normal move or a super or her
>>rushing punches? Pain is pain!

> YOU said the following ppl have NORMALs that hit him. They don't.

>And supers are only available at specific times.

When I said "normal", the general gyst of what I meant was "I can do this to
you regardless of whether I've got a super meter". With supers around, to
be honest I don't really consider "specials" to be a particularly accurate
term any more. In SF2, we had specials. In MvC... well, is anything really
"special"? You've got normal moves that just take buttons and you've got
normal moves that take buttons plus a joystick motion. My point is the
same.

>>Not from the kind of range they'll hit from. Juggernaut's head crush, if the
>>pulse hasn't gone away yet, will just sail through it. Rogue's super or
>>rushing punches are done from close enough that the pulse will have gotten
>>there, and ditto for the vast majority of the others I listed.

> The pulse pushes them out of favored range, plus also extra
>recovery time for cyke.

Not enough with guys like Jugs or Rogue. Those supers, within their favored
range, are *fast*.

>>> You get within reach of Cyke, and he has a DEVASTATING close game
>>>where his priority and infinite combo capabilities com into play.

>>First off, Cyke needs you to be backed into a corner to do that. No one's
>>going to get caught by Cyclops in a corner. If they've got a decent anti-Cyke
>>character (i.e. someone who can punish a blocked optic blast easily) he's
>>going to be backing away from them most of the time, which means that infinites
>>go right out the window.

> Stilt, I *ASSURE YOU* you can one of cykes infinites from ANYWHERE

>on the screen, having done it myself.

So can one of Rogue's (air dash chain infinite). What about it? Does it
really make a difference?

>I *ASSURE YOU* you can do the other
>one when you (Cyke) are backed into the corner by throwing them against
>THAT wall. Zvi had done this to me about 10times, although he never got
>the full combo off, it only would do 90 fucking percent.
> "Dude, you wrong."

Okay, on the existence of a jab infinite, I am wrong.

>>So now that the infinite is aside, we've got plain ol' Cyclops, who can't get
>>any particularly gross infinites in because it's his own back that's going to
>>be to the corner most of the time, and who has only his normal moves and an
>>array of specials, the latter of which all are a "spray and pray" situation
>>because any of them that fail are going to be worth half his life or more
>>against the likes of, say, Rogue, whereas her attack options are nowhere near
>>that unsafe.

> Her attack options are MORE unsafe because all close jabs lead to
>infinites.

Not impressed, because his jab doesn't hit clean on any of her attack options,
and she can easily push him out of reach

>>Good Night without a whole lot of effort. Two kiss ticks into the corner
>>into supers. Those are considerably easier to land from Rogue on Cyclops
>>than a jab.

> LOL. You must get NOTHING but perfects if you never get hit by a
>jab.

Be real here, dude. If I'm Rogue, how often am I going to stay close to
Cyclops enough to get hit by a close jab? I don't need to be that close
to start my attacks. I don't need to end my attacks that close. I'd have
to be a complete idiot to get there or stay there. It's not like he's going
to cross over with a jab or make me fall asleep on a block with a jab, nor
does he really have a whole lot of control over who gets to attack who once
Rogue gets in close.

>Can you parry EVERYTHING your opponent does in 2i?

Don't even have a 2i machine in my area, and am not likely to get one, because
SF3 (deservedly, IMNSHO) bombed here. I never bothered playing SF3 long
enough to even get parries down because I hated all the character designs.
It played, to me, like a mangled SF2 with parries thrown in for fun.

>>>He's got a killer AC? (Jab OB after they stick out anything?)

No answer to my comment on this one, I notice... you just deleted it. :)

>>completely safe, because I've got an option select of sorts: I can poke in
>>either with a dive kick or a crouching strong on the ground, and if I hit,
>>I finish with rushing punches or super. If you block, I power drain you.

> You do that. Gene splice, mash mash mash. That tick sucks.

Yes, I've done this one myself, albeit it was Cammy with a cannon spike. Once
someone demonstrates the willingness to do this, it's time to make them guess.
Gene splice hurts less than Good Night or rushing punches when he comes down,
so Rogue wins that guessing game. And if Cyke is actually capable of pulling
that off on reflex rather than guessing... oh well, she doesn't rely on it
anyway.

seth james killian

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) writes:

>To be honest, I don't much care about what you or anyone else thinks of my
>credibiility. (Ask one Seth Killian... he'll tell you all about how little
>I care of most anyone's opinion on this group.) I'm not likely to meet too
>many folks who are on here, so I just comment and let it go.

This is clearly a rationalization. You did at one time care,
but were so thoroughly beaten back (thus losing your "credibility" (a
poor term)), that to be able to stick around, you have been forced to
*claim* you no longer care. You've probably been telling yourself this
long enough so that you may even believe it, but your numerous 100+
line posts are plainly inconsistent with this.
You deal in half-truths, distortions, double-standards,
hypothetical creations, and the occassional outright bluff (pretending
to know something when you plainly do not). This has (arduously)
been exposed, hence your current "standing".

>Yes, I like the versus games. I object mainly to the apparent attitude that
>this makes me some kind of degenerate. As witness...

Only a fool would claim this alone makes you "some kind of
degenerate". I like Defender. I like Rolling Thunder. A lot. Sometimes
I prefer to play these games to SF. What makes you a "degenerate" if
anything is your *ludicrous* insistence that the VS games are on (or
even close to) the same level of depth and strategy as the SF series.
My liking Defender doesn't lead me to claim that it's got as much
strategy as SF. Does it have strategy? Hell yes. But it doesn't
approach SF. I still find it fun, but that is *beside the point*
as far as this discussion is concerned.

>Frankly, I don't care. I'll give a simple reason for why I think there's
>still some strategy involved and leave it at that. I don't feel like arguing
>with every anal old-schooler out there who feels like taking exception to my
>remarks, so I'm going to just say it once and be done with it.

The issue is NOT whether there is "some" strategy to the VS games.
Clearly there is. The issue is whether this level of strategy even begins
to approach the SF series, which it does not. Blurring lines with weak
or ambiguous claims may allow you to linger a while longer, wallowing in
confusions and poor word choice, but it will never make your silly points
any less silly than they so obviously are.

>That's my take on it right there. I liked SF2 a good deal, but I also
>happen to like the vs. games as well. They've got very different strategy
>involved, but there's still some involved in both. Yes, making a momentary
>screwup can get you killed.

Very obviously, it is the *nature* of your painfully generic
term "screwup" that is at issue here. Your refusal to acknowledge
the difference in the nature of a deadly SF2 screwup and a deadly
VS screwup is what is so unbelievable to everyone here. Yes, again
it allows you to try and maintain your arguments, but at the price
of being blatantly silly.

>> AND FOR YOU STILTMAN, to even think of claiming that the guile 4 hit TOD or
>>the ken TOD is at all similar to that of the immensely unskilled infinites or
>>TOD's found in the Vs. series is just......just.............just plain
>>STUPID!!!!!

>Why? With Guile, you didn't need any positioning, you didn't necessarily
>need any real skill. If you know roundhouse/low strong/SB/low forward, which
>can be done anywhere on the board, you have the game the instant you dizzy
>them once. Because somewhere in that collection, you will ALWAYS re-dizzy.
>Just hold the line long enough to dizzy them once, and it's over. Anticipate
>a FB, and it's over. Hit them a few times close together, and it's over.
>Heck, get a single jab hit at close range and repeat until they dizzy, and
>it's over.

This should really be archived as a perfect example of one of
your terrible arguments. Jumping in and landing this combo with Guile
is both far less common and far more difficult than a similarly deadly
tactic in the VS games.
You have equated the ease and effectiveness of jumping in in
the SF series with jumpin in in the VS series.

In VS games, when you jump in, you:
-can airblock everything
-exert a huge degree of control over the path of your jump
-can hit from a variety of distances and still land the deadly
combo.

In SF games, when you jump in, you:
-can airblock nothing
-exert no control over the path of your jump (exceptions in
later versions include airHKs, T.Hawk's dive, etc, but these
are rare and much less effective anyway).
-must hit from a fairly precise range (and height) to have
any hope of landing your combo.

Do you see any differences here? Let's continue...

In VS games, when you dash in, you:
-can stick out a high priority, extremely fast move, that must
be blocked low. If this hits, you can continue it (without
risk) into a gigantic combo of death/infinite.
-can still block if you feel nervous.

In SF games, when you dash in, you:
-for the most part, you can't. No dashing pre-SF3- this highly
effective avenue of attack is totally absent.
-even in SF3, you can't block while dashing.

Any difference here?

>If you consider it stupid to observe that people decry one and not the other,
>fine with me. I consider it a double standard.

Well, it should be pointed out that you have "decried" a problem
with the first SF *ever*, the first real fighting game ever, a quantum
leap forward in gaming. And you have done so by way of saying, in
comparison with that, a game made 8 years later *by the same company*
"isn't that much worse". A strong point indeed.

>> In Xmen it was wolvy and then sentinel.

>Okay. I'll bite. Just how the f*cking hell do you consider SENTINEL to be
>a pixie?

XMen: COTA had a lot more in common with standard SFs than current
vs games, although it was deeply flawed in it's own ways. (BTW- I love
COTA)

[Remainder of ridiculous hypothetical back-and-forth deleted]

Seth Killian

Kevin Eav

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

In article <6id859$e4t$1...@user2.teleport.com>, stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) wrote:

>Be real here, dude. If I'm Rogue, how often am I going to stay close to
>Cyclops enough to get hit by a close jab? I don't need to be that close
>to start my attacks. I don't need to end my attacks that close. I'd have
>to be a complete idiot to get there or stay there. It's not like he's going
>to cross over with a jab or make me fall asleep on a block with a jab, nor
>does he really have a whole lot of control over who gets to attack who once
>Rogue gets in close.

Ara. Last I checked, all of Rogue's moves save her stolen ones were
rushes that ended you close to your opponent (DP+K dive, DP+P diagonal
punch rush, punch rush, super, kiss if/when it misses/is outprioritized).
So... how do you not need to end attacks that close?

seth james killian

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

Allen Kim <alle...@scic.intel.com> writes:

>> James, just stop. Stilt man is obviously an idiot, as Seth, Milo,
>> and everyone else on this thread has noted before. He still doesn't
>> unstand why jumping around like a madman in SF2 got you killed, how the
>> hell can you expect real discussion here?

>Ah, I see that old tactic brewing again. If you don't hate the Marvel

>VS. series with a passion, you must be shunned into silence. A common
>tactic with "old-schoolers" here.

Very clever Allen- and this "tactic" is so common that Shaun
was clever enough to employ it after hundreds of lines of fruitless
arguing. Yes, far be it from the mysterious "old-schoolers" (a term
which has begun to make strange bed-fellows out of anyone who happens
to disagree with you) to make sensible points- instead they just
"shun" you into silence- where "shunning" = having a debate that
comprises the longest thread on the newsgroup.
I take it you're good at *something* Allen, but you reason
like a fucking dimwit. Maybe I should sell my Intel now.

>Come on, Shaun, all of you guys bring up great points here.

Which just happens to be completely contrary to the implication
of your first paragraph. Look at the potato-headed boy try and think.

> In the final analysis, I think the very fact that this debate is
>taking place just shows you how nothing is a sure thing in X-Men vs. SF.

Ah yes, just like the ending to a sit-com. "In this crazy old
thing called life, who can be sure of anything!" (laugh-track fades to
closing electric guitar theme). Right, wrong, forget about it! Without
certainty, we can just all be friends.
And the fact of this continuing debate absolutely does *not*
show anything about "sure things" in XvsSF, unless you want to go the
extra mile and deny that the game can have facts associated with it.
All the presence of a debate shows is confusion, and willingness of
the participants to continue it (or in Stilt's case, propogate it)...

>Side note: I wouldn't normally respond to messages like this, but I just
>thought this was pretty cool with two of my worlds (James from Cornell,
>Stilt from Portland, OR) collide like this.

Then get back in your box, potato-head.

Kisses,
Seth Killian

Stilt Man

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

In article <6ideac$gng$1...@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>,

seth james killian <skil...@students.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>Allen Kim <alle...@scic.intel.com> writes:
>>> James, just stop. Stilt man is obviously an idiot, as Seth, Milo,
>>> and everyone else on this thread has noted before. He still doesn't
>>> unstand why jumping around like a madman in SF2 got you killed, how the
>>> hell can you expect real discussion here?

>>Ah, I see that old tactic brewing again. If you don't hate the Marvel
>>VS. series with a passion, you must be shunned into silence. A common
>>tactic with "old-schoolers" here.

> Very clever Allen- and this "tactic" is so common that Shaun
>was clever enough to employ it after hundreds of lines of fruitless
>arguing. Yes, far be it from the mysterious "old-schoolers" (a term
>which has begun to make strange bed-fellows out of anyone who happens
>to disagree with you) to make sensible points- instead they just
>"shun" you into silence- where "shunning" = having a debate that
>comprises the longest thread on the newsgroup.

Okay, maybe his term "shun" was a bit inaccurate. "Insulted into silence",
perhaps? "Treated like pond scum until you shut the hell up", maybe? Does
that hit closer to the mark?

>> In the final analysis, I think the very fact that this debate is
>>taking place just shows you how nothing is a sure thing in X-Men vs. SF.

> Ah yes, just like the ending to a sit-com. "In this crazy old
>thing called life, who can be sure of anything!" (laugh-track fades to
>closing electric guitar theme). Right, wrong, forget about it! Without
>certainty, we can just all be friends.
> And the fact of this continuing debate absolutely does *not*
>show anything about "sure things" in XvsSF, unless you want to go the
>extra mile and deny that the game can have facts associated with it.
>All the presence of a debate shows is confusion, and willingness of
>the participants to continue it (or in Stilt's case, propogate it)...

I'm protesting the assertion that there's no strategic value in the vs.
games. Don't tell me that no one says there isn't, because they do. But,
when I press them hard enough, there comes out a few grudging admissions
that there is, just "not as much as SF2 was". That's a start. And it's
most of what I'm after. However, that's come at the cost of enough personal
insults directed at me and, now that Allen's dared to pipe up in my defense,
him as well, that I'm not going to pretend that I'm thrilled with it.

Regressing back to your UIUC days again, Seth. That's not a compliment.

Stilt Man

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

In article <6iddsv$k9r$2...@supernews.com>,

Kevin Eav <uk...@maison-otaku.net> wrote:
>In article <6id859$e4t$1...@user2.teleport.com>, stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) wrote:

>>Be real here, dude. If I'm Rogue, how often am I going to stay close to
>>Cyclops enough to get hit by a close jab? I don't need to be that close
>>to start my attacks. I don't need to end my attacks that close. I'd have
>>to be a complete idiot to get there or stay there. It's not like he's going
>>to cross over with a jab or make me fall asleep on a block with a jab, nor
>>does he really have a whole lot of control over who gets to attack who once
>>Rogue gets in close.

>Ara. Last I checked, all of Rogue's moves save her stolen ones were

>rushes that ended you close to your opponent (DP+K dive, DP+P diagonal
>punch rush, punch rush, super, kiss if/when it misses/is outprioritized).
>So... how do you not need to end attacks that close?

Maybe by tacking on an extra blocked move that pushes Cyclops out of close
jab reach?

Stilt Man

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

In article <6idd5t$fjr$1...@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>,

seth james killian <skil...@students.uiuc.edu> wrote:

>stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) writes:
>>To be honest, I don't much care about what you or anyone else thinks of my
>>credibiility. (Ask one Seth Killian... he'll tell you all about how little
>>I care of most anyone's opinion on this group.) I'm not likely to meet too
>>many folks who are on here, so I just comment and let it go.

> This is clearly a rationalization. You did at one time care,
>but were so thoroughly beaten back (thus losing your "credibility" (a
>poor term)), that to be able to stick around, you have been forced to
>*claim* you no longer care.

I did? What, you think I actually cared when the likes of Lord Baal or
JQR flamed me all the time? You think I actually cared when you used to
call me a scrub left and right? Irritated a little, yes. Really cared
in the long run, no. Certainly not enough that I was going to change my
opinion because yours of me was low. That one's never happened.

The only spot where, IMO, I've been just plain wrong was with the Storm
off-the-screen stuff. That's because I misinterpreted what was being said,
and no one I was arguing with had the courtesy to bother explaining things.
Am I stubborn? Yes. But do I continue my hallmark defiance when there's
a simple, proveable fact that has been shown? No.

Just one simple observation Seth: have you ever actually seen someone say
that they've played me and felt that I wasn't worth taking seriously? Ever?
At any point in the years I've been here? Don't rationalize as to the why
of that, because as a simple point of fact, you don't know because you've
never been out in my neck of the woods yourself. I've talked to folks in
your neck of the woods, I've talked to folks at Sunnyvale, and by and large
they have generally communicated that I seemed to have a half clue of what
I was talking about.

>>Yes, I like the versus games. I object mainly to the apparent attitude that
>>this makes me some kind of degenerate. As witness...

> Only a fool would claim this alone makes you "some kind of
>degenerate". I like Defender. I like Rolling Thunder. A lot. Sometimes
>I prefer to play these games to SF. What makes you a "degenerate" if
>anything is your *ludicrous* insistence that the VS games are on (or
>even close to) the same level of depth and strategy as the SF series.
>My liking Defender doesn't lead me to claim that it's got as much
>strategy as SF. Does it have strategy? Hell yes. But it doesn't
>approach SF. I still find it fun, but that is *beside the point*
>as far as this discussion is concerned.

I'd rate Defender behind the vs. series, too, actually... :)

>>That's my take on it right there. I liked SF2 a good deal, but I also
>>happen to like the vs. games as well. They've got very different strategy
>>involved, but there's still some involved in both. Yes, making a momentary
>>screwup can get you killed.

> Very obviously, it is the *nature* of your painfully generic
>term "screwup" that is at issue here. Your refusal to acknowledge
>the difference in the nature of a deadly SF2 screwup and a deadly
>VS screwup is what is so unbelievable to everyone here.

Actually, Seth, if you were to check DejaNews, you'll find several spots
where I do say rather clearly that there's a difference there. Yes, it's
easier to screw up in VS in order to lose a lot of health quickly. My
postulation isn't that it's not easier to screw up, but rather that this
by itself doesn't take *that* much away from the strategy involved.

My position is this:

1. Yes, it's easier to screw up and lose a lot of health in that
game.

2. No, that doesn't mean that the VS games lose so much of their
strategic merit that a bit of thinking ahead of time and molding
your instincts and mental skills at the controls won't get you
further than just mashing on the buttons and leaving the brain at
the door.

3. And no, that doesn't mean that pixies are the single most dominant
characters in any given VS game. (More specifically, it's my opinion
that Cyclops in XSF and Strider in MvC aren't as heinous as they're
widely made out to be. So I've got a difference of opinion on which
characters are the most powerful, what else is new? :) I think that
their overreliance on button mashing and weakness in most other areas
weakens them once someone has developed the mental skills necessary to
keep their chaotic attacking under control.

>>> AND FOR YOU STILTMAN, to even think of claiming that the guile 4 hit TOD or
>>>the ken TOD is at all similar to that of the immensely unskilled infinites or
>>>TOD's found in the Vs. series is just......just.............just plain
>>>STUPID!!!!!

>>Why? With Guile, you didn't need any positioning, you didn't necessarily
>>need any real skill. If you know roundhouse/low strong/SB/low forward, which
>>can be done anywhere on the board, you have the game the instant you dizzy
>>them once. Because somewhere in that collection, you will ALWAYS re-dizzy.
>>Just hold the line long enough to dizzy them once, and it's over. Anticipate
>>a FB, and it's over. Hit them a few times close together, and it's over.
>>Heck, get a single jab hit at close range and repeat until they dizzy, and
>>it's over.

> This should really be archived as a perfect example of one of
>your terrible arguments. Jumping in and landing this combo with Guile
>is both far less common and far more difficult than a similarly deadly
>tactic in the VS games.

That's not what I said. I said that if you dizzy in WW with Guile, it's
over. How you dizzy is irrelevant, but it isn't that hard. Guile's dizzy
power in WW was insane, and once he had it once, he could redizzy at will.
And Guile, if you'll recall, *was* the dominant char in WW. It's a random
counterexample to the argument that infinite combos ruin the VS series.

To be perfectly honest, I do not, as a matter of practice, use infinites
myself. It's not that I'm not capable of them, I just don't find them fun
to use and yes, they screw up the strategy of the VS series. That is the
one point that I've sort of gingered around when I've been arguing this,
because I admittedly don't have much of a leg to stand on there. I consider
infinites to be about as legit in VS as the M2PD was in SSF2: it's in there,
and if you really want to play "anything goes" it ruins the game, but for
real competitive purposes it should be frowned upon. I've played (and beaten)
people who have demonstrated the ability to do infinites, but I have admittedly
not devoted a whole lot of science to them as a matter of competitive
principle. I suppose I consider it *gasp* "cheap". ;)

>>If you consider it stupid to observe that people decry one and not the other,
>>fine with me. I consider it a double standard.

> Well, it should be pointed out that you have "decried" a problem
>with the first SF *ever*, the first real fighting game ever, a quantum
>leap forward in gaming. And you have done so by way of saying, in
>comparison with that, a game made 8 years later *by the same company*
>"isn't that much worse". A strong point indeed.

Actually, I'd call WW worse for those sorts of reasons than the VS series,
simply because real skill-wise it isn't as hard to land Guile's redizzy as
it is the infinites (for the most part) in VS. Sure, Jin's taunt infinite
is a rather gross counter-example to that point, but you get the idea.

I'm trying to have fun. I succeed. I do it by thinking. And yes, I
generally tend to play "barring infinites" as a matter of principle. I
know where to find the information on them, but I've never printed them
out and/or practiced them because I don't see a point. Why deliberately
ruin the game when I can play it just fine the way it is? You'll recall
that I objected to complaints that SSF2 sucked solely on the basis of Gief's
magic grab for more or less the same reason.

Ed Trempe

unread,

May 1, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/1/98

In article <6i8nce$t8i$1...@user2.teleport.com>, stil...@user2.teleport.com
(Stilt Man) wrote:

> In article <354780AE...@idt.net>, Angel <ami...@idt.net> wrote:
> >Cyke improved in MSF? Again ARE YOU MAD? "optic blast was safer in this
> >version" LOL, I ask, what game were you playing??
>
> I was playing XSF, in which Rogue, Dhalsim, Juggernaut, Magneto, Bison, and
> Cammy all had normal moves that could punish an optic blast from as much as
> half the screen's distance away, and MSF, when the block stun from the optic
> blast and the lower number of characters that had quick ground moves caused
> the slower optic blast to be nonetheless safer as long as you could force
> someone to block it.

And how, pray-tell do you do this. The slower start up means you can see it
coming a mile away. With Shuma, in MvsSF, one of the slower jumpers on the
Marvel team, I can cleanly jump a computer or human opponent's crouching optic
blast and clean their clock with a combo that can end with an energy drain
after
the up-fierce air combo finisher if their near the corner. And this is
from one third to one fourth screen away from him. If he does the
standing one, I just
do a crouching forward (great range!), or dash under it and combo him more.

> > Now let's get into MvC. I and many have said it then and I'll say it now
> >the best characters in this game, by far, are strider, wolverine, spider man,
> >and chun li, followed closely by that of other characters such as
morrigan and
> >capcom and gambit and megawimp. There is no debate here, no discussion,
for it
> >has been proven post wise, discussion wise, and with the highest levels
of play
> >that strider is one unbelievably overpowered son of a gun who owns this game.
>
> Now you're spouting drivel. That has not been proven. That's a matter of
> opinion that I happen to disagree with.

Everyone doesn't flock to the top three because they suck...

> >Again I reiterate to you the dash aspect,
>
> Not impressed; other folks have dashes as fast as his.

Yes, but most can't use it to get close to hit him because the sword out-
prioritizes virtually every other normal in the game (as well as a few
specials and supers). That and the fact that he has the full zig-zag
ground/superjump
chain as well as good damage and speed make him a formidable force.

> >the throw range (which strider possesses),
>
> Still not impressed. It's not that much better than anyone else's.

True, I think Chun-Li has the better range.

> >and the potential to punish a missed block attempt or ill timed
> >move of any sort.
>
> Nothing that every other character in the game doesn't also have.

But other characters don't have it so easy.

> >He has massive range, priority, easy to do high damage
> >combos, and most importantly, (one main aspect of this game which you have
> >failed to mention) the most lethal character in a team beat down situation
> >making the Oh-you-bore-us a lot more useful and deadly than you may
perceive it
> >to be.
>
> Been there. Dealt with that. Never heard of watching the character that
> doesn't have the "COM" label on him, you say? Watch him, the Ouroboros is
> just as useless in team beatings as it is usually.

It does insane damage when you do his ground chain with it activated, get hit
with it once and you can't block the rest, can make an effective cross-up when
he quickly teleports behind his opponent, can be used in conjuction with his
other two supers for a 100% damage combo, no projectile/beam super can
penetrate
it, nobody can grab him through it (except maybe Mega-Zangief, but not without
massive damage inflicted upon him first), combined with other specials can a
least TICK for 15% damage minimum, and you think it's useless in and out
of team
beatings?

Ed Trempe

Kevin Eav

unread,

May 2, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/2/98

In article <6idjfu$bne$1...@user2.teleport.com>, stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) wrote:

>>Ara. Last I checked, all of Rogue's moves save her stolen ones were
>>rushes that ended you close to your opponent (DP+K dive, DP+P diagonal
>>punch rush, punch rush, super, kiss if/when it misses/is outprioritized).
>>So... how do you not need to end attacks that close?
>
>Maybe by tacking on an extra blocked move that pushes Cyclops out of close
>jab reach?

Last I checked, all those moves had end-lag too, (Rogue does her final
air 'fierce uppercut' finisher on the rushing punches, a whiffed kiss
doesn't have instant recovery). The super -might- let you do that
extra blocked move, but hell if you can do it off a blocked rushing punch
or a whiffed/blocked rising rushing punches.

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

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May 2, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/2/98

In article <6idlfi$g7j$1...@user2.teleport.com>,

Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <6idd5t$fjr$1...@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>,
>seth james killian <skil...@students.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>>stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) writes:
>Just one simple observation Seth: have you ever actually seen someone say
>that they've played me and felt that I wasn't worth taking seriously? Ever?
>At any point in the years I've been here? Don't rationalize as to the why
>of that, because as a simple point of fact, you don't know because you've
>never been out in my neck of the woods yourself. I've talked to folks in
>your neck of the woods, I've talked to folks at Sunnyvale, and by and large
>they have generally communicated that I seemed to have a half clue of what
>I was talking about.

Pardon? Seth's neck of the woods? Chicago? I haven't seen
either Chris, Adam, Zvi, or anyone else jump up in your defense. Was this
in years before? If so I don't think it can apply here as they'd prolly
not think very much about your thoughts of VS..

>> Very obviously, it is the *nature* of your painfully generic
>>term "screwup" that is at issue here. Your refusal to acknowledge
>>the difference in the nature of a deadly SF2 screwup and a deadly
>>VS screwup is what is so unbelievable to everyone here.
>Actually, Seth, if you were to check DejaNews, you'll find several spots
>where I do say rather clearly that there's a difference there. Yes, it's

!@#$ you you do. You have repeatedly stated where's the
difference between four fierce and chain into dialing infin.

>easier to screw up in VS in order to lose a lot of health quickly. My
>postulation isn't that it's not easier to screw up, but rather that this
>by itself doesn't take *that* much away from the strategy involved.

>My position is this:
> 1. Yes, it's easier to screw up and lose a lot of health in that
> game.
> 2. No, that doesn't mean that the VS games lose so much of their
> strategic merit that a bit of thinking ahead of time and molding
> your instincts and mental skills at the controls won't get you
> further than just mashing on the buttons and leaving the brain at
> the door.

All of your wonderful poking and turtling and keepaway means
fuckass shit if cyke throws or jabs you once. Once. *ONCE*. If you do
not get all perfects, it means that the brain dead, 1/0-ing player has
RAPED YOU for 100 per-friggin-cent, because the openning needed -- a jab
-- is damned small.
In SF2 you have the same case -- 93 second victories, etc --
except that there are much greater risks involved for the TODer. For one
thing, he gets DPed (assuming this is Ken v Ryu, a very usual example,
but there are fine others, say flash kicks or whatever). Then he eats a
fireball (blocked) and then another one (blocked too).

> 3. And no, that doesn't mean that pixies are the single most dominant
> characters in any given VS game. (More specifically, it's my opinion
> that Cyclops in XSF and Strider in MvC aren't as heinous as they're
> widely made out to be. So I've got a difference of opinion on which
> characters are the most powerful, what else is new? :) I think that
> their overreliance on button mashing and weakness in most other areas
> weakens them once someone has developed the mental skills necessary to
> keep their chaotic attacking under control.

Cyke has everything. He kills you when he throws you, he's get a
better fireball than you, air d, great priority, an alpha counter like jab
OB, great supers, a jab infinite, and very damaging combos besides. What
else do you want?

>> This should really be archived as a perfect example of one of
>>your terrible arguments. Jumping in and landing this combo with Guile
>>is both far less common and far more difficult than a similarly deadly
>>tactic in the VS games.
>
>That's not what I said. I said that if you dizzy in WW with Guile, it's
>over. How you dizzy is irrelevant, but it isn't that hard. Guile's dizzy
>power in WW was insane, and once he had it once, he could redizzy at will.
>And Guile, if you'll recall, *was* the dominant char in WW. It's a random
>counterexample to the argument that infinite combos ruin the VS series.

Stilt, you dumass, Guile DID ruin WW, just like dial of death
ruins VS.

>Actually, I'd call WW worse for those sorts of reasons than the VS series,
>simply because real skill-wise it isn't as hard to land Guile's redizzy as
>it is the infinites (for the most part) in VS. Sure, Jin's taunt infinite
>is a rather gross counter-example to that point, but you get the idea.

So are the Cyke infinites. He has to jump at you in WW, so you
get to anti air him, now tell me how it so difficult to DP, uppercut
(shotos), stand fierce (blanka / honda), or simply block? It's not like
there's much that will stun you for very long cept a fireball, which is a
pretty big mistake. Getting jabbed is not. Getting throw is not.

James Margaris

unread,

May 2, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/2/98

In article <6idjca$bgb$1...@user2.teleport.com>, stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) wrote:

>
>I'm protesting the assertion that there's no strategic value in the vs.
>games. Don't tell me that no one says there isn't, because they do. But,
>when I press them hard enough, there comes out a few grudging admissions
>that there is, just "not as much as SF2 was". That's a start. And it's
>most of what I'm after. However, that's come at the cost of enough personal
>insults directed at me and, now that Allen's dared to pipe up in my defense,
>him as well, that I'm not going to pretend that I'm thrilled with it.

Trying to keep this at least *somewhat* civil....

Of course the vs games take some stragtegy. Almost *ANY* one on one
game takes at least marginal amounts of strategy. (Arm wrestling or similar
games being the exception)

Everyone will admit it takes some strategy. For example:

a)Always keep your hand on the controller
b) Throw random attacks to build meter
c) Don't do the Birdie super

etc, etc. However, the vs games utterly *fail* compared to SF. Here is
a rundown:

a) You can block any move at any
b) Dashes, super jumps, etc, remove almost all positional play, all
corner trapping (not corner combos, mind you, but corner trapping)

combine a) and b) to get the absolutely retarded pogo matches between
Zangief and Spider-Man, where the *only* thing Zangief can do is match super
jumps with Spider-Man and desperatly flail.

b also leads to the rediculous situations where the super jumping
player and the grounded player both wiggle around trying to confuse the other
player and get them to mis-block.

c) Over prioritized low shorts and chaining: Why low roundhouse when
you can low short instead? Yes, there are reasons under certain circumstances,
but in general low shorts are way too good

d) Over prioritized fast launchers. Most launchers are fierce or
roundhouse hits to begin with, plus hitting with a launcher allows a free air
combo. Why use a Ryu/Ken stand strong as air defense when a low fierce gets
you 10x times the damage. This leads to the Ryu/Ken/Akuma/Chun-Li/Cyclops/etc
tactic of always trying to dash underneath your opponent to launch them as
they mis-block. Boring.

e) retarded characters and balance. How about that Blackheart? *NO
WAY* to do damage against a patient person. A blocked judgment day does only
recoverable damage. Gee, Dark Thunder sure is useful. Force an opponent to
*block* this and you eat super 1/2 the time. Zangief? No chance against the
pixies, as long as they don't act like retards. Super jump forever and you
will not lose. Spider-Man? Hit wtih a low short or jump roundhouse and you get
a full air-combo *every* time, without any need for distance considerations.
Hell, if you can dash as you hit the ground you can get a full combo from
almost any character out of any landed jump attack.

f) Shorter block stun. Block a move, super. Wow, what strategy. makes
heavy attack that much more useless.

g) Easy supers. Low short, low forward->super does crazy damage on MvC
for Akuma Ryu, just for getting hit with a low short. *Low Short.* This is so
wrong.

h) How about those x-men Vs SF throws. Super after a throw? Did they
have to make it so obvious? Does Charlie really have to kick his opponenent 30
feet into the air after his hold? Talk about timing...or how about Rogue kiss
into super? Corner yourself on purpose? Lame.

i) Little anticipation required. Take Ken, CapCom, Hulk, etc. These
characters can super after a luancher, which in itself is not so bad, except
that they have plenty of time to see if the launcher connects first, at least
1/2 second. You can do the launcher, crack your knuckles, then decide if you
want to super. You don't have to anticipate if you were going to hit, don't
have to analyze the opponent strategy and think about whether they were going
to try a kick...

j) Pet peave: Why the fuck does air-blocking a blackheart demon push
him back??? If you push block Collosus I go backwards? Does this make sense to
*anyone?* Push blocking is a lame, poorly implemented idea to balance chains.
(And of course the people it screws most are the non-chain heavy guys, as they
usually have the worst dashes and least maneuverable super jumps)

k) Infinites.

l) In SF, one pivotal moment can completly turn the match around, due
to the positioning game. Knockdown from Sakura or Zangief at the right range?
Sagat pushes you to safe fireball distance? In the vs games, with dashing,
sjumping, etc, events exist as self-contained combos and are not linked in any
coherent matter. How often in a vs game does one critical move still effect
the game 25 seconds later? (I don't mean effect as in you took damage, and I
will discount infinites)

j) I could probably make it to Z. The fact is that (just look at the
recycled characters, easy infinites, horrible background graphics) the VS
games are put togeter without a lot of thought or effort, and it shows. If you
enjoy them on some level that's ok with me, I get a kick out of a Sabretooth
combo too, but don't try to claim strategy approaches any SF game. Leave your
skill at home.

Yes, some skill and strategy is required. Why don't we argue about
Connect-4 vs. Chess? Lining up those red and black circles...whoah.

James M

R.D.

unread,

May 2, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/2/98

In article <6ift0i$2...@newsstand.cit.cornell.edu> js...@cornell.edu (James Margaris) writes:

> j) I could probably make it to Z. The fact is that (just look at the
>recycled characters, easy infinites, horrible background graphics) the VS
>games are put togeter without a lot of thought or effort, and it shows. If you
>enjoy them on some level that's ok with me, I get a kick out of a Sabretooth
>combo too, but don't try to claim strategy approaches any SF game. Leave your
>skill at home.

Maybe they should consult the 10's of people in this NG before they make a
game, after all it's not about games, it's making sure noone has to learn to
play a game.

> Yes, some skill and strategy is required. Why don't we argue about
>Connect-4 vs. Chess? Lining up those red and black circles...whoah.

Why don't we, umm because THERE NOT THE SAME GAME... umm do i need to post
that seperatly to get the point across ? =)

I refuse to argue the many points of why the VS games are not like ST because
i'm sure most of us have noticed by now.. how bout a nice little SF combo
where ken connects with a jumping attack and that's the game... Why everyone
thinks that there is only ONE skill far eludes me, could it be fustration when
someone wins in a game without having 3 yrs experience in SF gaming?

I don't know whether my competition just sucks or not but i've NEVER been
trapped in an infinite combo although that may be the only reasonable
complaint i've seen lately. Does this happen as often as everyone's
complaining about?

I'll take your ? again, because kasparov loses in a connect 4 game does that
mean that connect 4 takes no skill, i'd think not, it means it's not the same
game as chess, he'd probably say and fighting games took no skill at ALL
(and we all agree with him right? =P )... don't know how long it will take to
realize that just because VS is made by capcom, that the name of the game is
not SF2:one more game. Just imagine what were saying here, gee what else
doesn't take any skill from this standpoint, tekken, VF or any 3d game, MK, do
i need to go on... so someone argues, oh these take skill, i'm pretty sure i
can put together the same argument, <name> does too much damage for me, don't
know in comparision to what... other games you thought were supposed to be the
same?

I'm sure the first thing that will happen when SFA3 comes is everyone rushes
to the arcade, plays their character in ST mode, or SFA2 mode for that matter,
then they lose, and proceed to attack the things put in the game that made
them lose.

Maybe it's different in your arcade, but mine doesn't randomly assign a
winner. And last time i checked both sides of the machine had the same six
buttons and joystick. And it doesn't mean you are the greatest capcom player
ever to grace the earth, it means you won that game. should i say because i
beat RE in under a couple hours i am the god of SF, sure it's not a
fighting game but it's made by the company, doesn't that apply?

A couple gracious people have tried to state they do not want another ST,
however the only ideas suggested are to take things OUT of games to make them
resemble ST. Is there a new idea in this NG that would please the whining
population. Until then i'm going to the arcade, and i actually look at the
screen and realize what game it is before i put money in. If you want to stay
in your room with SF2 and do TOD's to the computer all day that's fine with me.

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

unread,

May 2, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/2/98

In article <rxd30.3....@psu.edu>, R.D. <rx...@psu.edu> wrote:
>In article <6ift0i$2...@newsstand.cit.cornell.edu> js...@cornell.edu (James Margaris) writes:

>> j) I could probably make it to Z. The fact is that (just look at the
>>recycled characters, easy infinites, horrible background graphics) the VS
>>games are put togeter without a lot of thought or effort, and it shows. If you
>>enjoy them on some level that's ok with me, I get a kick out of a Sabretooth
>>combo too, but don't try to claim strategy approaches any SF game. Leave your
>>skill at home.

>Maybe they should consult the 10's of people in this NG before they make a
>game, after all it's not about games, it's making sure noone has to learn to
>play a game.

That's actually the problem with VS to a large extent; THERE IS
NOTHING TO LEARN. No positional game worth talking about, just
SJ/dash/roll+block. No fireball trapping. No trapping period. No
ticking game.

>> Yes, some skill and strategy is required. Why don't we argue about
>>Connect-4 vs. Chess? Lining up those red and black circles...whoah.

><any reference to 'you' is not personal, just to the collective>
>Why don't we, umm because THERE NOT THE SAME GAME... umm do i need to post
>that seperatly to get the point across ? =)

IT DOESN"T FUCKING MATTER.

>I refuse to argue the many points of why the VS games are not like ST because
>i'm sure most of us have noticed by now.. how bout a nice little SF combo
>where ken connects with a jumping attack and that's the game... Why everyone
>thinks that there is only ONE skill far eludes me, could it be fustration when
>someone wins in a game without having 3 yrs experience in SF gaming?

What are fucking spazzing about?

>I refuse to argue the many points of why the VS games are not like ST because
>i'm sure most of us have noticed by now.. how bout a nice little SF combo

Let's not compare, but here's a Ken TOD, of course you have to
make a much bigger fuck up to do it.

>I don't know whether my competition just sucks or not but i've NEVER been
>trapped in an infinite combo although that may be the only reasonable
>complaint i've seen lately. Does this happen as often as everyone's
>complaining about?

YOUR COMPETITION SUCKS. Really. They do. Total ass. Around
here you saw an infinite ONCE A GAME. And no one here is all that
great... infins are just too straightforward..

seth james killian

unread,

May 2, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/2/98

stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) writes:

>The only spot where, IMO, I've been just plain wrong was with the Storm
>off-the-screen stuff. That's because I misinterpreted what was being said,
>and no one I was arguing with had the courtesy to bother explaining things.

Anyone who can use DejaNews can see that this is, not to
mince words, bull. Misinterpreting is what you're doing with the above,
not the root of your conflict with Milo.
And the only reason you admit this (even to this degree), is
that, in short, you've had it stuffed down your throat. You escape
embarrassments like the Storm thread routinely only because you
speak incredibly vaguely, using lots of metaphor, etc. Just within
this current thread, you've already conceded that you've made several
not-insubstantial factual mistakes. Mysteriously, none of these have
in any way damaged your overall "argument", whatever that may be.

>Am I stubborn? Yes. But do I continue my hallmark defiance when there's
>a simple, proveable fact that has been shown? No.

Fortunately for you, you don't deal in facts, or address them
when they come up.

>Just one simple observation Seth: have you ever actually seen someone say
>that they've played me and felt that I wasn't worth taking seriously? Ever?
>At any point in the years I've been here?

No, I haven't. But notice that the same could be said for any
number of people who admit they're complete scrubs, or even for someone
who doesn't play SF at all. What is this claim supposed to establish?
Such a thing *couldn't* be said because *you never play anyone
else* who is themselves worth taking at all seriously (please correct
me if there's something I don't know here, but don't bother offering
up Allen Kim if that's all you've got- unless Allen's got someone
to vouch for him?)

Don't rationalize as to the why
>of that, because as a simple point of fact, you don't know because you've
>never been out in my neck of the woods yourself. I've talked to folks in
>your neck of the woods, I've talked to folks at Sunnyvale, and by and large
>they have generally communicated that I seemed to have a half clue of what
>I was talking about.

I haven't been to your "neck of the woods" because it is precisely
that- woods. I have been to California, New York, Chicago + a few others.
I'm glad you've *talked* to people from Sunnyvale and UIUC who think
you know what you're talking about- you clearly know something about
these games (if much less than is typically implied by your tone), and
you're certainly a more capable writer than most of the posters here.
In your case, however, this is a bad thing, because you employ your
skills (such as they are) for obfuscation and misinformation, hiding
your ignorance.
And please, since I'm sure that by "having talked to people
in my neck of the woods", you are referring to Caine Schneider, you'd
do well not to take any of that too seriously. Caine was a fellow
SF junkie who started school with me- we were both up-and-comings
on the local scene our freshman year. I proceeded to the head of
the class, and after a point, Caine simply could not beat me (despite
his impressive showings against some others). This drove him up
the wall, and I'm pretty sure he hated me (not that I mocked him-
he just plainly couldn't stand his inability to beat me).

>I'd rate Defender behind the vs. series, too, actually... :)

Perhaps. But see what people remember 20 years down the road.
Defender will be in there. SF will definitely be in there. MvC,
somehow... I doubt posterity will look too kindly on it.

>Actually, Seth, if you were to check DejaNews, you'll find several spots
>where I do say rather clearly that there's a difference there. Yes, it's
>easier to screw up in VS in order to lose a lot of health quickly. My
>postulation isn't that it's not easier to screw up, but rather that this
>by itself doesn't take *that* much away from the strategy involved.

If it takes away even some significant amount (which seems
a clear implication of your own writing above), then, unless it adds
new strategies in their place, by definition, it is not as in depth
or on the same level with SF.
That's all I've been saying here, and if any of your posts
had contained this as an appendix, I doubt anyonoe would have objected.
It's not like MvC combo,etc posts are hunted down and picked on. Just
silly, inflamatory claims about the level of the game like yours.

>My position is this:

> 2. No, that doesn't mean that the VS games lose so much of their
> strategic merit that a bit of thinking ahead of time and molding
> your instincts and mental skills at the controls won't get you
> further than just mashing on the buttons and leaving the brain at
> the door.

Nice bit of writing. However, the *point* (you remember that,
right?) you make in the above is true of essentially every single game
known to man (not just vids here). Almost any game people play
rewards some element of thought. Wow. Revolutionary. The issue
here is a matter of degree.

> 3. And no, that doesn't mean that pixies are the single most dominant
> characters in any given VS game. (More specifically, it's my opinion

If anything, you've proven this point can't be decided on a
newsgroup. I read the above as: Pixies don't dominate my area (and I
never go anywhere else, or watch Gamest tapes, or anything that might
give me some kind of perspective). I'm happy to agree that, if you
say so, Pixies don't dominate around you. You've made clear that
arguing anything beyond this is pointless.

>That's not what I said. I said that if you dizzy in WW with Guile, it's
>over. How you dizzy is irrelevant, but it isn't that hard. Guile's dizzy
>power in WW was insane, and once he had it once, he could redizzy at will.
>And Guile, if you'll recall, *was* the dominant char in WW. It's a random
>counterexample to the argument that infinite combos ruin the VS series.

No, it's not. These things to a large degree ruined WW. WW is
not a game that can be (or is) seriously played by people of any skill.
Fortunately, being 8 years ago as it was, and the first of its kind,
people weren't that good at it, and were able to enjoy it when played
at sub-optimal levels. And Guile's dizzy power was insane? So was
that of *everyone* dizzies (or even combos generally) were not the
reason WW had problems. Duh. But again, your point is crap, because
it's predicated on the idea that WW is a good game. It isn't. It
is revolutionary, innovative, and incredible *for the time*, but as
a real test of player skill, it's limited, much like MvC.

>To be perfectly honest, I do not, as a matter of practice, use infinites
>myself. It's not that I'm not capable of them, I just don't find them fun
>to use and yes, they screw up the strategy of the VS series. That is the
>one point that I've sort of gingered around when I've been arguing this,
>because I admittedly don't have much of a leg to stand on there.

While I'm sure your inability to use infinites and comparative
inexperience with them was VERY obvious to most of those reading what
you had to say, if you'd admitted this a few hundred lines ago, a lot
of this could have been avoided. The whole point of many of these
posts has been how much infinites hurt the game.

I consider
>infinites to be about as legit in VS as the M2PD was in SSF2: it's in there,
>and if you really want to play "anything goes" it ruins the game, but for
>real competitive purposes it should be frowned upon.

Another classic instance of Stiltman double-talk. You won't
need DejaNews to re-read your old post from this very thread in which
you denounce Guile's magic throw as "a clear bug" while calling
redizzies (the functional equivalent of infinite combos, in terms of
leaving you dead) a "natural progression of the game engine". You
can't have it both ways, Stilt, although of course, you always do.
I've been lucky enough to have caught you in your own web of BS
within a space of a few posts this time. Usually you spread it
much thinner, with vaguer points that makes catching you with
your pants down somewhat more challenging.
Another contradiction for Stilt, suggesting that not even
he knows what the hell he means...

I've played (and beaten)
>people who have demonstrated the ability to do infinites, but I have admittedly
>not devoted a whole lot of science to them as a matter of competitive
>principle. I suppose I consider it *gasp* "cheap". ;)

Um, okay. So you should strive for a big combo, but at some
point, it becomes *too* big? You cross the line from your "impressive"
15 hit air raves to someone else's "cheap" infinite? Because they can
do the same thign you were doing for a longer time? Your position here
is cute, but this is why it's much better to start with a well-designed
game and not have to make apologies for the engine. Pushing your own
play to the limits is fun in this environment, rather than self-
retarding and lame as with your described style of play.

No, I don't get the idea. It is *not* harder to land the
infinites in MvC than it is to get a Guile redizzy. It's a slightly
different pattern, but a pattern at that. Don't guess that because
you and your Portland cronies can't crank out infinites on command
that there are people elsewhere who can't. You'd be wrong.

>I'm trying to have fun. I succeed. I do it by thinking. And yes, I
>generally tend to play "barring infinites" as a matter of principle. I
>know where to find the information on them, but I've never printed them
>out and/or practiced them because I don't see a point. Why deliberately
>ruin the game when I can play it just fine the way it is? You'll recall
>that I objected to complaints that SSF2 sucked solely on the basis of Gief's
>magic grab for more or less the same reason.

And perhaps rightly so. But Capcom not only offered a version of
SSF2 that had no M2PD, if Ming hadn't been such a freak in the first
place, the M2PD probably never would have been discovered. Infinites,
however, are fairly obvious extensions of things that were plainly
intended to be in the game. I'm sure the designers had 50+ hit combos
in mind, so the fact that some go to 90+ hits is just a little slip.
Anyway, just for the record, where does a combo stop being "impressive"
and start being "cheap"? Yes, I fully intend to laugh at whatever
answer you give, although I think it's possible to give a reasonable
one...

I'm done with you for now.

Seth Killian

R.D.

unread,

May 2, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/2/98

In article <EsCLp...@midway.uchicago.edu> spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu (Shaun Patrick Mcisaac) writes:

> That's actually the problem with VS to a large extent; THERE IS
>NOTHING TO LEARN. No positional game worth talking about, just
>SJ/dash/roll+block. No fireball trapping. No trapping period. No
>ticking game.

No fireball trapping, no ticking game, hmmm, maybe you've confused this game
with other Capcom games like i said already. Maybe you have nothing to learn,
i was talking about people who actually want to play the game.

>>> Yes, some skill and strategy is required. Why don't we argue about
>>>Connect-4 vs. Chess? Lining up those red and black circles...whoah.

>><any reference to 'you' is not personal, just to the collective>

>>Why don't we, umm because THERE NOT THE SAME GAME... umm do i need to post
>>that seperatly to get the point across ? =)
> IT DOESN"T FUCKING MATTER.

I know, people will complain about anything they can no matter how
many times i try to be rational, point taken i won't post a seperate message
then. However my point was that this negative comment along with the 1000
like it are because they made a new game (sorta) that doesn't keep all the
aspects of the games they made before... even tho it's not a SF sequel, so
does it have to conform anyway?

And i mean, that almost sums it up for me right there "It doesn't matter", yes
people should be able to win simply on subjective opinion, there are the
"chosen" that were around since the begginning, and every game capcom makes in
the future must ensure that those "chosen" must win because they are good at
certain other SF games.

>>I refuse to argue the many points of why the VS games
are not like ST because >>i'm sure most of us have noticed by now.. how bout
a nice little SF combo >>where ken connects with a jumping attack and that's
the game... Why everyone >>thinks that there is only ONE skill far eludes me,
could it be fustration when >>someone wins in a game without having 3 yrs
experience in SF gaming?

> What are fucking spazzing about?

I'm going by the assumption i made earlier that the MvC machines do not have
"ST" written on them (although i could be wrong), so far in your post you've
pretended this is the case, that it is some sort of deciet(sp?) by capcom.

>>I refuse to argue the many points of why the VS games are not like ST because

>>i'm sure most of us have noticed by now.. how bout a nice little SF combo

> Let's not compare, but here's a Ken TOD, of course you have to
>make a much bigger fuck up to do it.

>>I don't know whether my competition just sucks or not but i've NEVER been
>>trapped in an infinite combo although that may be the only reasonable
>>complaint i've seen lately. Does this happen as often as everyone's
>>complaining about?

> YOUR COMPETITION SUCKS. Really. They do. Total ass. Around
>here you saw an infinite ONCE A GAME. And no one here is all that
>great... infins are just too straightforward..

wow, once a game, i'd think people would have stopped playing it by then, or
else they think the game is going to somehow change it's programming because
their special. But i do see a lot of those people ... is that the problem? =)
Rather then accepting the game as it is, it seems as if so many try to
invalidate the game, what do you do, go to the arcade, put your money in the
machine, lose, and then reason why it didn't count anyway...

So, where does this leave us, if people truly want "better" capcom games,
they'd be offering some advice on how to make a game that actually appeals to
everyone and is technically sound... if someone would like to debate this
point in some coherent manner feel free too. All i see is fustrated people
making broad sweeping generalzations (i probably did myself, feel free to
critique, exculde the grammar/spelling erors please) =)

R.D.

unread,

May 2, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/2/98

In article <EsCy0...@midway.uchicago.edu> spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu (Shaun Patrick Mcisaac) writes:

>In article <rxd30.4....@psu.edu>, R.D. <rx...@psu.edu> wrote:
>>In article <EsCLp...@midway.uchicago.edu> spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu (Shaun Patrick Mcisaac) writes:
>>> That's actually the problem with VS to a large extent; THERE IS
>>>NOTHING TO LEARN. No positional game worth talking about, just
>>>SJ/dash/roll+block. No fireball trapping. No trapping period. No
>>>ticking game.
>>No fireball trapping, no ticking game, hmmm, maybe you've confused this game
>>with other Capcom games like i said already. Maybe you have nothing to learn,
>>i was talking about people who actually want to play the game.

> Then what, pray tell, IS there to learn in this game?

>>like it are because they made a new game (sorta) that doesn't keep all the
>>aspects of the games they made before... even tho it's not a SF sequel, so
>>does it have to conform anyway?

> Risk versus reward is not a SF concept. strategy -- of any type,
>not just the fighting game positional strategy -- is not a SF concept. VS
>is essentially devoid of both.

>>> YOUR COMPETITION SUCKS. Really. They do. Total ass. Around
>>>here you saw an infinite ONCE A GAME. And no one here is all that
>>>great... infins are just too straightforward..
>>wow, once a game, i'd think people would have stopped playing it by then, or
>>else they think the game is going to somehow change it's programming because
>>their special. But i do see a lot of those people ... is that the problem? =)
>>Rather then accepting the game as it is, it seems as if so many try to
>>invalidate the game, what do you do, go to the arcade, put your money in the
>>machine, lose, and then reason why it didn't count anyway...

> LOL. You automatically assume that everyone who hates these games
>was getting infin.ed and lost for it. No, the ppl DOING THE INFINITES
>realized what garbage they were too. We accepted the game as it is --
>fluff.

Well why this attitude is still popular i don't know, but it seems
it's always "The odds are against me", and if you succeed it's in spite of
them.

> And that was just around the time we stopped playing, thank you.

Didn't the other message say that infinites were being done once a game.
aren't those people part of "we" anymore? =)

>>So, where does this leave us, if people truly want "better" capcom games,
>>they'd be offering some advice on how to make a game that actually appeals to
>>everyone and is technically sound... if someone would like to debate this
>>point in some coherent manner feel free too. All i see is fustrated people
>>making broad sweeping generalzations (i probably did myself, feel free to
>>critique, exculde the grammar/spelling erors please) =)

> Sweeping generalization: #1: Lack of strategy sucks
> Sweeping generalization: #2: Lack of risk vs reward sucks
> Sweeping generalization: #3: Lack of balance sucks

>There yah go. There are those sweeping generalizations.

>As to offering advice on how to make a game better, that's called beta
>testing, maybe you've heard of it. It's something Capcom is horrific at.
>As for this NG and offering advice, that has been done so many times it's
>crazy, but even recently Onaje was involved (along with someone else whose
>name I fail to recall) about how to save the VS series, or at least get
>some of the garbage out. And thats for VS alone.

Yeah, i agree they should have cut out the infinites, that's about all
tho. The VS series needs to be saved? from what? your opinion? man, i thought
the crusades were awhile back.

Well this is going to get circular very quick, so i'll save us all the
trouble. In my opinion, it is simply embarassing to yourself to end every
message with how much the VS games suck, almost as bad as the people who come
in with the one line "this is better than this". It doesn't show much
either for the people who loudly applaud every wannabe that imitates your
opinion but offers nothing but caps and profanity to defend it. Trying to say
a game requires little or no skill as compared to another game is
absurd and will never and cannot be proven to anyone who truly believes
otherwise. I challenged that statement, and apparantly hoped that some people
in this NG would be slightly more reasonable and mature about it than the
usual i-net masses, instead of putting up an argument similar to what my 8 yr
old sister turns out. And to think noone's stormed the lottery offices yet,
but i wonder how many people would be behind me if i say "MAN, THE LOTTERY
TAKES MORE SKILL THAN VS GAMES, HE HE".

I guess you win, i'll resort to my pathetic life in the arcade playing VS
games with my friends when i could be sharpening my skills in a "real" game
for... ummm.. a future message where i declare myself the greatest person
alive. If you want to look any further, i bet most of the argument above
could be made about SFA3 even tho noone's played it, and it won't really
matter.

Nice posting with ya, we'll have to do it again soon =). Hell, maybe we'll
play some SF sometime, your choice =).

Ultima

unread,

May 2, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/2/98

Useless factor: Flogging a dead horse...
Rambling factor: HIGH

Warning: Read at your own discretion
************************************

James Margaris wrote:

[SLASH]

Only certain things Iwant to comment on here.

> However, the vs games utterly *fail* compared to SF. Here is
> a rundown:
>

> a) You can block any move at any [time]

Necessary for the rest of the garbage in the game. But still sucks.

> b) Dashes, super jumps, etc, remove almost all positional play, all corner trapping (not corner combos, mind you, but corner trapping)

Well, interruptible dashes that lead into chain into super garbage are
bad. The rest are what ruin positional play. But dashes in general I
think are good (as I was discussing with somebody today, they're good if
you don't play FB characters a lot; if you do, then you more likely to
feel they ruinous).

[good points snipped]

> i) Little anticipation required. Take Ken, CapCom, Hulk, etc. These characters can super after a luancher, which in itself is not so bad, except that they have plenty of time to see if the launcher connects first, at least 1/2 second. You can do the launcher, crack your knuckles, then decide if you want to super. You don't have to anticipate if you were going to hit, don't have to analyze the opponent strategy and think about whether they were going to try a kick...

Hmmm... I kinda disagree with the above examples. I'm not sure about Ken
or HUlk (since I don't play them), but half a second for CapCom? Is it
that much? It seems I have to swing from down to forward as soon as the
roundhouse hits to hit them with the Captain Sword, otherwise their
block it (or at least Chun Li and the pixies.. maybe that's why.. :| ).

> j) Pet peave: Why the fuck does air-blocking a blackheart demon push him back??? If you push block Collosus I go backwards? Does this make sense to *anyone?* Push blocking is a lame, poorly implemented idea to balance chains. (And of course the people it screws most are the non-chain heavy guys, as they usually have the worst dashes and least maneuverable super jumps)

I think push-blocking is a less abusive alternative to ACs and parries.
But yeah, they do screw up the non-chainers (or the slower characters,
who are more often the same group) more.

> j) I could probably make it to Z. The fact is that (just look at the recycled characters, easy infinites, horrible background graphics)

Horrible background graphics..? They're bland. I wouldn't call them
horrible (SS4 - now those are horrible, IMO).

> the VS games are put togeter without a lot of thought or effort, and it shows.

Yeah. BUt then again, so was HF... In fact, MvC required far more effort
for Capcom than HF due to the new characters and helpers. Which makes it
even worse then... :(

--
Ultima
http://www.concentric.net/~Ultima1 - Street Fighter RPG, Final
Fantasy VII, Fan art, and miscellaneous rambling...

SFCode Ver 5.0:
{V+ MB+ Rl+ Cr+[SFA2] I[III]+ Ax[I,III]+}
[ac- +cc+(!ccRl&MB) ch- cn- c m+ 2+ n++ os+ p+ r@++ sp- st ta--
t(t+SCR) tm-- tr-:- th--@- v+(v++SFA2)]

"If you were stuck on a deserted island, and you could only
choose between MK and SF to be stuck with, and you choose MK,
then you deserve to be on that island" - Slasher Quan

"If an arcade doesn't contain some version of SF or SS in it,
then's it's not an arcade"

Ultima

unread,

May 2, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/2/98

Useless factor: HIgh
Rambling factor: Average

Warning: Read at your own discretion
************************************

seth james killian wrote:

[SLASH]

Er, just one question Seth: Do you consider anyone who either a) you
haven't played and don't know anyone who has played that person or b)
cannot beat you a scrub?

[remaining stuff SLASHED - for the record, I think Stilt's only digging
himself deeper the hole he's made for himself with this thread, and
should get out while he still can]

--
Ultima
.sig slashed for no particular reason

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

unread,

May 3, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/3/98

And that was just around the time we stopped playing, thank you.

>So, where does this leave us, if people truly want "better" capcom games,

>they'd be offering some advice on how to make a game that actually appeals to
>everyone and is technically sound... if someone would like to debate this
>point in some coherent manner feel free too. All i see is fustrated people
>making broad sweeping generalzations (i probably did myself, feel free to
>critique, exculde the grammar/spelling erors please) =)

Sweeping generalization: #1: Lack of strategy sucks
Sweeping generalization: #2: Lack of risk vs reward sucks
Sweeping generalization: #3: Lack of balance sucks

There yah go. There are those sweeping generalizations.

As to offering advice on how to make a game better, that's called beta
testing, maybe you've heard of it. It's something Capcom is horrific at.
As for this NG and offering advice, that has been done so many times it's
crazy, but even recently Onaje was involved (along with someone else whose
name I fail to recall) about how to save the VS series, or at least get
some of the garbage out. And thats for VS alone.

VGO Ken

unread,

May 3, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/3/98

>but even recently Onaje was involved (along with someone else whose
>name I fail to recall) about how to save the VS series, or at least get
>some of the garbage out. And thats for VS alone.

'Twas I that wasted my time making a post on "How to save the VS series". But
it doesn't matter, because

a. Capcom won't listen
and
b. Not many people even care

I think the VS games would be much better if what you guys pointed out wasn't
right :)

Wanderer

unread,

May 3, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/3/98

Stilt Man wrote:
>
> In article <199804301608...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
> Lord BBH <lor...@aol.com> wrote:
> >In article <6i81s6$h23$1...@user2.teleport.com>, stil...@user2.teleport.com
> >(Stilt Man) writes:
> >>>Wha...? Charlie I can understand, but Rogue and Bison? Where are Cyclops and
> >>>Sabretooth. Cyclops was hands-down the strongest character barring infinites,
> >>>and WITH infinites he's still god since he can start one off his rushing grab
> >>>(or just about any of his throws except the Strong one)
>
> >>I don't have Sabretooth in there because he dies against turtles. He has
> >>no safe way to whittle at all. Pick your character intelligently against
> >>him (read: one with air defense) and Sabretooth is meat for the eating.
> >>He's low rent but comparatively weak once the opponent knows what they're
> >>doing.
>
> >I see. So to beat Sabretooth, you just sit in the corner and stick out
> >air-defense moves when he jumps in?
>
> No, actually you don't need to be in the corner. It depends on who he's
> up against.

Certainly. As I was saying,I'd go air-to-air with him-Sabertooth's
air-to-ground is nasty as hell,but his air-to-air can be beaten or
traded nicely.

<Cyke-rant snipped to>

> >an opponent? At that range, Cyclops can make use of his high-priority normals,
> >his throws/running grab, or a Mega/Searchlight Optic Blast, among others. Mega
> >Optic Blast is TOTALLY SAFE when blocked no matter where he is on the screen.

In what world is this true? Heck,Wolvie could sliding Fierce afterwards
and nail a hit,Magneto sliding RH. Not even close to "totally safe".

> Rogue? No. Keepaway doesn't work on her, and close up he gets pounded to
> blood paste. Ditto for Bison. Cammy can stay close enough to cannon drill
> easily, which means that she can get the rest of the distance and hurt him
> closer than that. Wolvie isn't in as good of shape because he has no easy
> way to punish the optic blast, so Cyke's range game works better on him.

Again,sliding Fierce. It also usually is a good reflex vs. a
Blast-trapping Cyke,as it goes under the shot and gets you in for
whatever else you may enjoy...

<snip-snap>

> >Rushing punches aren't so great, and you're totally screwed if they block.
>
> Then don't be stupid enough to use them unless you know they're going to hit.
> In short, after a blocked move halfway close up or at the end of a chain.
> There are a lot of situations where characters have annoying little moves
> that would be difficult to deal with for someone else at close range but
> aren't trouble for Rogue because of the rushing punches. Like Gambit's
> Cajun strike. Or Wolvie's berserker barrage. Or Mag's disruptors. Or
> Storm launching a typhoon. All sorts of little things like this that work
> safely on other people because they don't have a halfway fast ground special
> to punish them for it, but don't work on Rogue because the rushing punches
> will get that short distance very quickly. Only specials that are better are
> Bison's scissors (same speed, better range) and (you guessed it) Cyclops'
> optic blast.

From experience with good Rogue players,YES. Trained me to chip with
Mag's air diagonal FB,and only to EMD at extreme ranges or when Rogue's
jumping away. Cyclops has the best punisher to any delay-rich move...and
it's the Blast.

-Wanderer

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

unread,

May 3, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/3/98

In article <rxd30.9....@psu.edu>, R.D. <rx...@psu.edu> wrote:
>In article <EsCy0...@midway.uchicago.edu> spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu (Shaun Patrick Mcisaac) writes:
>>In article <rxd30.4....@psu.edu>, R.D. <rx...@psu.edu> wrote:
>>>In article <EsCLp...@midway.uchicago.edu> spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu (Shaun Patrick Mcisaac) writes:

> Well this is going to get circular very quick, so i'll save us all the

That's it. I give up. You're either trolling along random bable
or are simply too stupid to live. You have no idea what the words you
even use mean. At least Stilt has a degree of intellectual competency
making him worth debating, something you lack.

It's been foolish debating you, why did I even try. Perhaps some
day you'll stop using the bong before posting.

Stilt Man

unread,

May 3, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/3/98

In article <6ig4h6$mfe$1...@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>,

seth james killian <skil...@students.uiuc.edu> wrote:

>stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) writes:
>>The only spot where, IMO, I've been just plain wrong was with the Storm
>>off-the-screen stuff. That's because I misinterpreted what was being said,
>>and no one I was arguing with had the courtesy to bother explaining things.

> Anyone who can use DejaNews can see that this is, not to
>mince words, bull. Misinterpreting is what you're doing with the above,
>not the root of your conflict with Milo.
> And the only reason you admit this (even to this degree), is
>that, in short, you've had it stuffed down your throat. You escape
>embarrassments like the Storm thread routinely only because you
>speak incredibly vaguely, using lots of metaphor, etc. Just within
>this current thread, you've already conceded that you've made several
>not-insubstantial factual mistakes. Mysteriously, none of these have
>in any way damaged your overall "argument", whatever that may be.

Seth... now it is you who are just plain distorting. Milo, at first, said
nothing more than "you can't do anything if Storm goes off the screen." He
offered absolutely nothing in the way of explanation for how this was
accomplished beyond a vague statement that I should go to DejaNews. Not
really wanting to search thousands of articles without even a subject name
to work with, I instead assumed that he meant flying off of the normally
visible playing area, rather than super jumping and then LA'ing off of the
entire normal playing field altogether. This misconception on my part was,
I think, rather clear throughout my posts during that mess. No one set me
straight, and Milo didn't say anything but "can't either", which I found
understandably infuriating and just assumed he was an idiot who was busy
trolling. Somebody else finally emailed me telling me what it meant when
I outright asked for someone to set me straight if I wasn't getting it right.
Upon that simple demonstration, I immediately said... "Ick. That IS ugly."

>>Just one simple observation Seth: have you ever actually seen someone say
>>that they've played me and felt that I wasn't worth taking seriously? Ever?
>>At any point in the years I've been here?

> No, I haven't. But notice that the same could be said for any
>number of people who admit they're complete scrubs, or even for someone
>who doesn't play SF at all. What is this claim supposed to establish?
> Such a thing *couldn't* be said because *you never play anyone
>else* who is themselves worth taking at all seriously (please correct
>me if there's something I don't know here, but don't bother offering
>up Allen Kim if that's all you've got- unless Allen's got someone
>to vouch for him?)

Okay. So let's see here. How big is UIUC, again? OSU was a campus of a
good 15,000 or more students, with literally thousands of Asian folks coming
over the Pacific on campus. Loosely translated, it was a *perfect* demographic
setting to establish a strong SF2 following in its heyday, which it most
assuredly did. Yet because only one other player there and I had net access,
you felt more comfortable believing that I just plain was amidst a collection
of scrubs rather than that maybe I knew something you didn't when I came to
different conclusions on how different matchups went than you did.

Case in point: the "boot of doom", as it was coined by a Bison on our rival
campus down in Eugene, which I also frequented along with the entire western
part of Oregon when I learned of an arcade that had much of a population.
Slightly larger campus, similar demographics. This particular tactic was a
devastatingly effective way for Bison to just plain dominate Zangief in both
SSF2 and SSF2T. Drove you nuts when I brought it up. If I remember the quote
at all precisely, your words were to the effect of "When you have something,
let some of the rest of us know instead of getting that shit-eating grin on
your face and shouting BOOT OF DOOM, BOOT OF DOOM." That sound at all
familiar? :)

Then there's the Reed College stuff. This took place shortly after one of
OSU's better *overall* Fei Longs (if not its most technically competent) was
rather unjustly ridiculed, largely from the UIUC crowd, when he admitted he
couldn't pull off Fei's flame kick very consistently and had instead
improvised. This didn't make a lot of difference in his overall effectiveness
because we didn't exploit it quite as mercilessly as we might have; for air
defense, Fei's standing fierce worked just as well in most cases, which left
a generally small diminution of his overall win-loss record. The catcalls
from UIUC gave the folks at the much smaller Reed College the impression that
no one at OSU knew what they were doing, and as such they sort of expected to
be the guys who could claim that they set Stilt Man straight when they invited
me up. Didn't quite happen that way. If I remember right, the win-loss
record between my Bison and their crowd at large was 30-2 or so that day (in
my favor, in case anyone wasn't sure). It wasn't that Reed didn't have any
players that couldn't have held their own at your usual mall crowd... they
just weren't up to the kind of players OSU could field. The strength of the
university's demographics was rather well borne out, because OSU (as well as
UO down in Eugene) were far and away the strongest SF2 centers in Oregon.

Did I know everything? No. But did I have reason to believe that I knew what
I was doing? Yes. Did I have just cause to get a bit miffed when a few folks
at UIUC adopted the attitude that anyone from anywhere they hadn't played at
automatically sucked? Definitely. Did you or anyone else at UIUC have any
basis whatsoever for your judgment of OSU's overall strength at the game as
a whole? No. You had one guy who was at a most generous description a
middle-tier player who did decently against scrubby Kens with Fei Long and
against other Fei Longs, but who tended to get mauled when I brought most
any of my better characters in (Bison, Sagat, Dhalsim, Guile, what have you)
and by most every one of the other real top-tier players at the game. The
last time I played an extended match against Jasper, I think the tally between
my Bison and his Fei went something like 15 to 1 or so. Jasper ticked, Jasper
could do rushing punch combos, Jasper could protect himself from the air, and
overall I would say he was a competent player on the basics, he just had a
habit of wanting to play the "different" characters and often settled on ones
that just couldn't hold their own too well. So, in short, your one contact
at OSU other than me was in no way representative of the best players there.

>> Don't rationalize as to the why
>>of that, because as a simple point of fact, you don't know because you've
>>never been out in my neck of the woods yourself. I've talked to folks in
>>your neck of the woods, I've talked to folks at Sunnyvale, and by and large
>>they have generally communicated that I seemed to have a half clue of what
>>I was talking about.

> I haven't been to your "neck of the woods" because it is precisely
>that- woods.

It's woods that happens to have a million people in it around the Portland
metro area, along with quite a college population along the Willamette Valley.
(Two universities that get a large number of international students numbering
amongst their 15,000+ population each, plus numerous smaller colleges dotting
the area.) Loosely translated, there are quite enough people of the right
demographic group here to establish a good following for a game and figure out
how to play it, despite you insistence that everyone I've ever played against
must be a scrub simply because I disagree with you on a few things as to who
wins between which two characters.

> And please, since I'm sure that by "having talked to people
>in my neck of the woods", you are referring to Caine Schneider, you'd
>do well not to take any of that too seriously. Caine was a fellow
>SF junkie who started school with me- we were both up-and-comings
>on the local scene our freshman year. I proceeded to the head of
>the class, and after a point, Caine simply could not beat me (despite
>his impressive showings against some others). This drove him up
>the wall, and I'm pretty sure he hated me (not that I mocked him-
>he just plainly couldn't stand his inability to beat me).

That's kind of unfortunate. But whether Caine could beat you or not, the
fact remains that he was still one of the better players at UIUC... and it
was clearly established to both he and I that I knew quite a bit more about
Bison than he did, either from his own playing or from having seen the
Bisons there. Draw from that what you will.

>>I'd rate Defender behind the vs. series, too, actually... :)

> Perhaps. But see what people remember 20 years down the road.
>Defender will be in there. SF will definitely be in there. MvC,
>somehow... I doubt posterity will look too kindly on it.

Put in those terms, you're probably right. MvC is a fun game, and gets
the blood pumping enough that I probably would get bored at something
like, say, SF3. Yes, I think MvC is a better game than SF3. I like
the character designs better, I like the general feel of the game better,
and yes, I even like the strategy better. Is the strategy different?
Yes. But barring infinites, I wouldn't say it lacks depth. Note: I
*am* saying "barring infinites".

>>Actually, Seth, if you were to check DejaNews, you'll find several spots
>>where I do say rather clearly that there's a difference there. Yes, it's
>>easier to screw up in VS in order to lose a lot of health quickly. My
>>postulation isn't that it's not easier to screw up, but rather that this
>>by itself doesn't take *that* much away from the strategy involved.

> If it takes away even some significant amount (which seems
>a clear implication of your own writing above), then, unless it adds
>new strategies in their place, by definition, it is not as in depth
>or on the same level with SF.

Take out infinites and it isn't *that* far off. Sure, pixies dominate in
a lot of areas, but I don't think this is necessarily all that indicative
of inherent ability, merely low rent to learning to play them. I think that
if a few of the old geniuses from SF2 were to put those mental skills to real
work in figuring out how to break pixies, they could. I've found that to be
the case myself.

>>My position is this:
>> 2. No, that doesn't mean that the VS games lose so much of their
>> strategic merit that a bit of thinking ahead of time and molding
>> your instincts and mental skills at the controls won't get you
>> further than just mashing on the buttons and leaving the brain at
>> the door.

> Nice bit of writing. However, the *point* (you remember that,
>right?) you make in the above is true of essentially every single game
>known to man (not just vids here). Almost any game people play
>rewards some element of thought. Wow. Revolutionary.

That's not the statement I've been getting from numerous folks on this NG.
Check your DejaNews, Seth, this thread has a few folks who do, in fact,
say that there is ZERO strategic merit to these games. Not just "very
little", ZERO.

>> 3. And no, that doesn't mean that pixies are the single most dominant
>> characters in any given VS game. (More specifically, it's my opinion

> If anything, you've proven this point can't be decided on a
>newsgroup. I read the above as: Pixies don't dominate my area (and I
>never go anywhere else, or watch Gamest tapes, or anything that might
>give me some kind of perspective).

Been to various points around the state of Washington, including the Tri-
Cities and Seattle. Not Spokane yet... I've heard they've got good players
out there but it's far enough away from anything I get much chance to go to
normally that I haven't been there yet. Been around Portland a fair amount.

There are indeed some pixie players that are among the dominant figures
here. I've even gone so far as to dub one collection of them that frequent
Lloyd Center in Portland the "pixie clique", because not too long ago the
best player among them was the single dominant player in the Portland area,
head and shoulders over everyone else (including me). He still crushes
everyone else. Just not me any more, nor does any other pixie player in
this area that I've seen. Do I *always* beat them? No. Do I beat them a
fair amount more often than not? By and large, yes... one or two occasionally
swap tactics and throw me for a loop before I eventually adjust my own tactics
and start beating them again. Are these the best pixies I've encountered that
I'm talking about? Yes... although it has literally only been the last week
or so that I've finally managed to start beating the lord of the "pixie clique"
more often than not. He's probably the best overall player I've seen in any
CapCom fighter, though, and he's got a brain in his head, too, so I'm not
resting on my laurels just yet. There've been a couple of times before when
I've thought I was starting to get him, but he's managed to stay ahead of me
until now. We'll see if I can keep ahead of him now... check back in a little
while. Thus far, I have yet to encounter the player that could catch me again
once I'd passed them to this degree. But I also hadn't encountered someone
who could readjust with as much versatility as this guy did when I started to
catch him before... so I could be in for another struggle. :)

So are there pixie players among the dominant players in my area? Yes.
"Pixie lord" is probably still overall the most dominant single player here,
despite the fact that I seem to own the guy myself these last several days
and am certainly now knocking on his door. The other lesser dominators around
here tend to do worse against him than me, still... the guy I consider the
#2 rival behind "pixie lord" tends to consistently hold the line at an even
win-loss record against me, but pretty much never beats "pixie lord". I
haven't seen him do it yet in the entire time I've watched them play each
other on MvC. I'm going to have to start putting the brain work into beating
him now that I seem to have figured out "pixie lord"... although, for the
record, #2 is *not* a pixie player. Plays Carnage (his most effective overall
character), Gambit, Hulk, War Machine, and CapCom, all pretty damn effectively.
I tend to beat him about 70% of the time when he doesn't have Carnage on his
team and roughly 50% or a little less when he does. Just too easy for him
to throw into a ground chain into a super... I've figured a thing or two out
that has brought it up to 50% against his Carnage teams, and I'm confident it
will get better, but I'm not there yet.

>>That's not what I said. I said that if you dizzy in WW with Guile, it's
>>over. How you dizzy is irrelevant, but it isn't that hard. Guile's dizzy
>>power in WW was insane, and once he had it once, he could redizzy at will.
>>And Guile, if you'll recall, *was* the dominant char in WW. It's a random
>>counterexample to the argument that infinite combos ruin the VS series.

> No, it's not. These things to a large degree ruined WW. WW is
>not a game that can be (or is) seriously played by people of any skill.

Okay. We're agreed on that much.

>>To be perfectly honest, I do not, as a matter of practice, use infinites
>>myself. It's not that I'm not capable of them, I just don't find them fun
>>to use and yes, they screw up the strategy of the VS series. That is the
>>one point that I've sort of gingered around when I've been arguing this,
>>because I admittedly don't have much of a leg to stand on there.

> While I'm sure your inability to use infinites and comparative
>inexperience with them was VERY obvious to most of those reading what
>you had to say, if you'd admitted this a few hundred lines ago, a lot
>of this could have been avoided. The whole point of many of these
>posts has been how much infinites hurt the game.

That's not the point that's been coming across in this thread at all. You
have pointed it out once in a different thread. That's it. No one has yet
directly said that infinites were the main thing that ruin the vs. series.
I'll even agree with much of that... but I still hold the line on the claim
that there's a fair amount of depth to them if you hold infinites aside.

>> I've played (and beaten)
>>people who have demonstrated the ability to do infinites, but I have admittedly
>>not devoted a whole lot of science to them as a matter of competitive
>>principle. I suppose I consider it *gasp* "cheap". ;)

> Um, okay. So you should strive for a big combo, but at some
>point, it becomes *too* big? You cross the line from your "impressive"
>15 hit air raves to someone else's "cheap" infinite? Because they can
>do the same thign you were doing for a longer time?

No. I'm simply saying that repetitive combos (i.e. infinites) generally are
an abuse of the engine. Doing a one-jump chain that gets up to 15 hits is
all well and good... hitting the start button with Jin and then mashing on
the punch buttons is a bit different. Hitting jab/short forever with Gambit
is a bit different. Chaining dashing air kicks with Rogue is a bit different.
Infinite Rogue-booms or short Rogue earthquakes in the corner is a bit
different. There's a repetitiveness to one that isn't in the other if you
accept that you go up for one super jump and chain whatever you can in that.
For the most part, CapCom has succeeded in keeping it that way as time
progresses... they've just left in some rather stupid ones like Jin's taunt
infinite, Chun Li's head stomp infinite, and the like.

>>Actually, I'd call WW worse for those sorts of reasons than the VS series,
>>simply because real skill-wise it isn't as hard to land Guile's redizzy as
>>it is the infinites (for the most part) in VS. Sure, Jin's taunt infinite
>>is a rather gross counter-example to that point, but you get the idea.

> No, I don't get the idea. It is *not* harder to land the
>infinites in MvC than it is to get a Guile redizzy. It's a slightly
>different pattern, but a pattern at that. Don't guess that because
>you and your Portland cronies can't crank out infinites on command
>that there are people elsewhere who can't. You'd be wrong.

I didn't say that. I'm just saying it would take a bit more work and
manual dexterity. Anyone who can land a basic combo can hit Guile's
redizzy in WW with little likelihood of screwing up. Somewhere in the
midst of hitting buttons dozens of times, someone's liable to fudge the
timing and blow the infinite. Not that there aren't people who can
avoid that... but by and large not many arcades tend to be infinite-prone,
which is one major reason why the vs. games haven't died out yet.

>>I'm trying to have fun. I succeed. I do it by thinking. And yes, I
>>generally tend to play "barring infinites" as a matter of principle. I
>>know where to find the information on them, but I've never printed them
>>out and/or practiced them because I don't see a point. Why deliberately
>>ruin the game when I can play it just fine the way it is? You'll recall
>>that I objected to complaints that SSF2 sucked solely on the basis of Gief's
>>magic grab for more or less the same reason.

> And perhaps rightly so. But Capcom not only offered a version of
>SSF2 that had no M2PD, if Ming hadn't been such a freak in the first
>place, the M2PD probably never would have been discovered.

Don't pat your local crowd too hard on the back. I'd noticed a slight oddity
in some 2PDs I was getting on wake ups with forward kicks that didn't seem to
come out with roundhouses from about SPD range a good month before Ming
explicitly identified the bug. I assumed at the time that the forward 2PD
just had longer range than the roundhouse for the instant 2PD grab rather than
the flying power bomb, and just didn't give much thought into why it didn't
work when I ticked with it instead of waking up with it. Looking back, I know
for a simple fact that I was unwittingly doing M2PDs on wake up that I just
never happened to do from far enough away that I noticed something that seemed
grossly whack-a-ding-hoy. To put it in short... *somebody* would've found it.
Ming just happened to be the first guy that practiced SPD motions with that
particular button under that particular condition that clearly demonstrated
that something was horribly wrong.

>Infinites,
>however, are fairly obvious extensions of things that were plainly
>intended to be in the game.

I've heard that versions of XSF have been offered that had most of the
infinites from the original taken out. Any truth to that?

>I'm sure the designers had 50+ hit combos
>in mind, so the fact that some go to 90+ hits is just a little slip.

I'm sure they had 30+ hit combos in mind with supers involved. I don't
think they ever intended for it to go into the 50s.

>Anyway, just for the record, where does a combo stop being "impressive"
>and start being "cheap"?

Okay... you're about to get a professional software engineer's comment
on bugs. :)

It's a simple matter of intent. The existence of combos in general was
not intentional in WW, which is one reason why I'd say that Guile's redizzy
is a bit abusive. (Which is why, on the rare occasions I played humans in
that game, I didn't tend to use it much... I'd fill out a four fierce and
then let them live.) In the vs. series, infinites are clearly an unintentional
result of the designers/testers failing to find certain spots where you can
repeat a chain pattern indefinitely. They're, for the most part, fairly
obscure (the jumping in the corner infinites) or happen in fairly rare
positional situations (Jin actually connecting a taunt when he's got an
opponent pinned in the corner)... in short, they happen in spots that
aren't always intuitive to testers that it'll happen in a real game.

The chain combos in vs. are clearly intentional when there's just a single
chain (or an air chain into a ground chain into a single-chain air combo,
maybe). But there's clearly supposed to be an end to it somewhere. The
chain series goes from small to large, and only Wolvie can repeat something
along the way (at least, that easily comes to mind). Once you get to one
of the largest ones, it pushes them back to the ground where they're supposed
to be out of harm's way, and the natural progression of the chain assures
that you can't go back and start over again once you get past a certain
point. You can jump in with an air chain. Then you can do a ground chain
that ends in a launcher. Then you can do an air combo chain that ends with
some form of termination move that sends your opponent out of further harm's
way to the ground and the rest of the game goes on. At least, that's the
intent.

A combo system quite this all-encompassing isn't easy to test. There's so
many different situations where you can combo with it that if Capcom were
to test it all, these games would take years between releases. They'd have
to basically employ their own cast of players who would master the games before
they'd be released and report back if any infinites were found. By the time
that happens, Capcom loses their market. This is what happens when you let
the pointy-haired bosses manage the software, but it happens. If Capcom
were to go the MK route and release successive versions that have such things
removed, the vs. games would eventually mature into some pretty solid stuff,
IMO. Unfortunately, they aren't, so they get left in. Relatively speaking,
I can't say that this really is that much worse than anywhere else in the
software industry. The Borg (i.e. Microsoft) are horrendous in their testing
procedures, which is one reason why there is a great deal of (legitimate)
criticism of Windows (both 3.x and 95) for its instability. You get something
that complex, it's hard to test every single possible situation. Realistically
speaking, once you get past a certain point it's prohibitively difficult.

Capcom could've tested these a *little* better than they did. Their testing
department doesn't seem to have gotten very good at anticipating these sorts
of problems. But, first and last, they *are* unintentional problems in the
same way that the M2PD was in SSF2 or the various Guile and Dhalsim bugs were
in WW (and, for that matter, so were redizzies). Capcom clearly did not
intend for chain patterns to be repeated in these ways. They're as much a
bug as the earlier examples.

Doing a single, fluid chain with lots of hits is something I'd be impressed
with. Doing a repetitive pattern that exploits a bug is not. I run video
game tournaments myself with a shareware game whose keeping has been entrusted
to me. I know the difference between one and the other when I see it. And,
a couple of times, it's been tried in the game I run tournaments for, and has
been disallowed in the game's official tournaments. It's perfectly reasonable
to assume that an officially-sanctioned tournament for a given game is to be
played out within the reasonably-understood intended parameters of the game.
Infinites are not within those parameters. It's clear beyond all reasonable
doubt that Capcom doesn't want them in there, that they try to eliminate them
when they release new games, and that they are simply incompetent at doing so.

Are they being sloppier about it now than they were with redizzies back in
the SF2 series? Yes. But unfortunately that kind of meticulousness didn't
pay their bills towards the end of the SF2 series with the likes of MK around
with notoriously less care taken towards testing before release. If you scorn
infinites as bugs as I believe they should be, the VS series has a fair amount
of merit to it, yes even on a level approaching SF2. Unfortunately infinites
do indeed screw up a bit of that merit, but not beyond redemption to a point
that an arcade that frowns on them or remains blissfully unware of it can't
explore the *intentional* features of the game and enjoy them on their own
qualities. In my case, it's willful denial. I'll cheerfully admit that.
But I don't consider willful denial of bug exploitation to be all that crazy
an outlook. It's still a fun game. So I play it. End of story.

Try not to laugh too hard. :)

Stilt Man

unread,

May 3, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/3/98

In article <etrempe-0105...@acs-ebu2-339-mac13.ucsd.edu>,
Ed Trempe <etr...@ucsd.edu> wrote:
>In article <6i8nce$t8i$1...@user2.teleport.com>, stil...@user2.teleport.com

>(Stilt Man) wrote:
>> In article <354780AE...@idt.net>, Angel <ami...@idt.net> wrote:
>> >There is no debate here, no discussion, for it
>> >has been proven post wise, discussion wise, and with the highest levels of
>> >play that strider is one unbelievably overpowered son of a gun who owns
>> >this game.

>> Now you're spouting drivel. That has not been proven. That's a matter of
>> opinion that I happen to disagree with.

>Everyone doesn't flock to the top three because they suck...

Everyone flocked to Ken and Ryu in the entire SF2 series. They were never
the dominant characters, merely the most numerous. Why? Because they were
low rent. So are pixies. People flock to them for the same reason, IMO.
I have found that I can beat even the most insane chaining pixies in my
area, who are quite capable of some of the rather gross pokes-into-30-to-40%
damage combos attributes to one Strider Hiryu, among other things. In other
words, as a simple statement of fact, I see everything on the Internet short
of infinites demonstrated in my local arcade, even with some brains behind it,
and I still can beat them more often than not. (Strider, to date, has not
been discovered to have any infinites to my knowledge, so that's irrelevant
here.) Somebody sucks here, and it's either my pixies or your non-pixies.
Given that I see a lot more demonstration of the sorts of chaining in my
arcade that is being complained about here than I see the complainers thinking
hard about how to deal with it, I think it's your non-pixies.

>> >Again I reiterate to you the dash aspect,

>> Not impressed; other folks have dashes as fast as his.

>Yes, but most can't use it to get close to hit him because the sword out-
>prioritizes virtually every other normal in the game (as well as a few
>specials and supers).

"Virtually". Not all. And some are fast enough or of a nature that the sword
can be rendered moot, either by combinations of speed and reach (Venom's
tongue, Carnage's crouching fierce) or by the fact that they're projectiles
(Morrigan, MegaMan, CapCom, etc).

>That and the fact that he has the full zig-zag
>ground/superjump chain as well as good damage and speed make him a
>formidable force.

Formidable? Yes. Head-and-shoulders ahead of everyone else, bar none? No.
Keep a wary blocking scheme up and Strider can be stopped. He suffers from
a lack of fast supers and any effective whittle weaponry short of a super or
a helper. That's a weakness that can be exploited.

>> >and the potential to punish a missed block attempt or ill timed
>> >move of any sort.

>> Nothing that every other character in the game doesn't also have.

>But other characters don't have it so easy.

They don't need to have it so easy as long as they have it and as long as it
hurts.

>> >He has massive range, priority, easy to do high damage
>> >combos, and most importantly, (one main aspect of this game which you have
>> >failed to mention) the most lethal character in a team beat down situation
>> >making the Oh-you-bore-us a lot more useful and deadly than you may
>perceive it
>> >to be.

>> Been there. Dealt with that. Never heard of watching the character that
>> doesn't have the "COM" label on him, you say? Watch him, the Ouroboros is
>> just as useless in team beatings as it is usually.

>It does insane damage when you do his ground chain with it activated,

If it hits.

>get hit with it once and you can't block the rest,

Which is slow enough that it's not like you're going to get hit with it too
often, since you get practically a week to see it coming.

>can make an effective cross-up when
>he quickly teleports behind his opponent,

Been there. Blocked that. You get to see a black pattern, then he appears,
then the satellites appear. Elapsed time, well within human reaction time
to turn a joystick the opposite direction as long as you're not asleep.

>can be used in conjuction with his
>other two supers for a 100% damage combo,

Considering that they're not much faster than it is (not enough faster,
anyway), this isn't impressive against anyone who isn't idiotic enough to
get hit with it in the first place. You get a full second and a half from
activation to first impact. Learn how to block a crossup and you're perfectly
safe from it.

>no projectile/beam super can penetrate it,

Bullshit.

>nobody can grab him through it (except maybe Mega-Zangief,
>but not without massive damage inflicted upon him first),

True.

>combined with other specials can a least TICK for 15% damage minimum,

If you don't push block so that Strider spends more of his time half way
across the screen than he does close enough to hit with anything, that
is.

>and you think it's useless in and out of team beatings?

Yes, I do, as a matter of fact.

VGO Ken

unread,

May 3, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/3/98

>Seth... now it is you who are just plain distorting. Milo, at first, said
>nothing more than "you can't do anything if Storm goes off the screen." He
>offered absolutely nothing in the way of explanation for how this was
>accomplished beyond a vague statement that I should go to DejaNews. Not
>really wanting to search thousands of articles without even a subject name
>to work with, I instead assumed that he meant flying off of the normally
>visible playing area, rather than super jumping and then LA'ing off of the
>entire normal playing field altogether. This misconception on my part was,
>I think, rather clear throughout my posts during that mess. No one set me
>straight, and Milo didn't say anything but "can't either", which I found
>understandably infuriating and just assumed he was an idiot who was busy
>trolling. Somebody else finally emailed me telling me what it meant when
>I outright asked for someone to set me straight if I wasn't getting it right.
>Upon that simple demonstration, I immediately said... "Ick. That IS ugly."

This is outrageous. Stilt, if you don't recall, both you and I were on the
receiving end of that loss. I openly admit I made a jackass of myself because
I didn't read a vital part of Milo's post....... I admit I was stupid not to
read that, it was out in the open. You, however, refuse to acknowledge Milo
put it out in the open...... he did.

VGO Ken

unread,

May 3, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/3/98

>I see everything on the Internet short
>of infinites demonstrated in my local arcade, even with some brains behind
>it,
>and I still can beat them more often than not. (Strider, to date, has not
>been discovered to have any infinites to my knowledge, so that's irrelevant
>here.) Somebody sucks here, and it's either my pixies or your non-pixies.

Strider doesn't need infinites, he has enough 100% combos. And if your pixies
don't use them, and my East Coast ones do, then something's up at your arcade.
Bad pixie competition.

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

unread,

May 3, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/3/98

In article <6ihhtc$g96$1...@user2.teleport.com>,

Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <6ig4h6$mfe$1...@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>,
>seth james killian <skil...@students.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>>stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) writes:
>>>Just one simple observation Seth: have you ever actually seen someone say
>>>that they've played me and felt that I wasn't worth taking seriously? Ever?
>>>At any point in the years I've been here?
>> No, I haven't. But notice that the same could be said for any
>>number of people who admit they're complete scrubs, or even for someone
>>who doesn't play SF at all. What is this claim supposed to establish?
>> Such a thing *couldn't* be said because *you never play anyone
>>else* who is themselves worth taking at all seriously (please correct
>>me if there's something I don't know here, but don't bother offering
>>up Allen Kim if that's all you've got- unless Allen's got someone
>>to vouch for him?)

>assuredly did. Yet because only one other player there and I had net access,

BS. Not at a university.

>you felt more comfortable believing that I just plain was amidst a collection
>of scrubs rather than that maybe I knew something you didn't when I came to
>different conclusions on how different matchups went than you did.

This still doesn't answer his question. You said:
>>>Just one simple observation Seth: have you ever actually seen someone say
>>>that they've played me and felt that I wasn't worth taking seriously? Ever?
>>>At any point in the years I've been here?

And he responded:

>> No, I haven't. But notice that the same could be said for any
>>number of people who admit they're complete scrubs, or even for someone
>>who doesn't play SF at all. What is this claim supposed to establish?

Which you have side stepped. No one here has played against
lovegun and said he shouldn't be taken seriously, so he must really be
good? Uhm, no.

>>>I'd rate Defender behind the vs. series, too, actually... :)
>> Perhaps. But see what people remember 20 years down the road.
>>Defender will be in there. SF will definitely be in there. MvC,
>>somehow... I doubt posterity will look too kindly on it.
>Put in those terms, you're probably right. MvC is a fun game, and gets
>the blood pumping enough that I probably would get bored at something
>like, say, SF3. Yes, I think MvC is a better game than SF3. I like
>the character designs better, I like the general feel of the game better,
>and yes, I even like the strategy better. Is the strategy different?
>Yes. But barring infinites, I wouldn't say it lacks depth. Note: I
>*am* saying "barring infinites".

What strategy? MvC is all of SF3's faults taken to the extreme,
even barring the infinites. Lets see:

SF3 MvC
Parrys Alpha Counters

Parrys have something of a greater
reward, but unlike ACs they at least take
a *little* bit of work and have some degree
of risk.

Air Parry Air Block

Air blocking is, without a doubt, MUCH
worse than the air parrys. All the air d
that ppl use recovers b/f the air parrying
guy can attack, so at least the grounded
player is somewhat safe. MvC doesn't have
that.

SuperJumps SuperJumps

SF3. By a longshot. In VS, you have 10x
the safety and control making it a reposition-
ing technique of choice.

Tech hits Tech hits

Oh well. At least you can't tech out of
command throws.

Overheads Overheads

Advantage SF3; at least they're useful attacking
methods.

Range game Range game

Neither has it; the fireball trap is DEAD.

Distance game Distance game

SF3 has more of it, because it's harder to air
parry your way into close range than it is to air
block your way in.

Risk versus Reward

SF3, even without the infinites. Why? Because in MvC there are
non-infinites that do full bars easy, and not just the strider crap. SF3
also has less characters that can punish you heavily for a misblocked
low/standing jab/short. For those who don't know, those characters for
SF3 are (you guessed it) Yun (standing 1,2,3 youhou, juggles), Yang (low
4, 5, rekka kenx3), and Ibuki (1,2,3, hashin sho, juggles; low 4, low 2,
special). You could put ken in there too (standing 5, shippu jinrai
kyaku) as an honorable mention.
Who does it in MvC? Uhm, everyone does, pretty much. Certainly
Capt. Striderine Man. Certainly Ryu & Hulk. Do you want more?

>of inherent ability, merely low rent to learning to play them. I think that
>if a few of the old geniuses from SF2 were to put those mental skills to real
>work in figuring out how to break pixies, they could. I've found that to be
>the case myself.

Or they can use the pixies, and instead of just beating up scrubs,
they can beat other masters.

>> Nice bit of writing. However, the *point* (you remember that,
>>right?) you make in the above is true of essentially every single game
>>known to man (not just vids here). Almost any game people play
>>rewards some element of thought. Wow. Revolutionary.
>That's not the statement I've been getting from numerous folks on this NG.
>Check your DejaNews, Seth, this thread has a few folks who do, in fact,
>say that there is ZERO strategic merit to these games. Not just "very
>little", ZERO.

Near zero, yes. Total flailing is of course not the most powerful
thing in the game. Flailing with low shorts into chains into more chains,
.. is.

>> If anything, you've proven this point can't be decided on a
>>newsgroup. I read the above as: Pixies don't dominate my area (and I
>>never go anywhere else, or watch Gamest tapes, or anything that might
>>give me some kind of perspective).
>Been to various points around the state of Washington, including the Tri-
>Cities and Seattle. Not Spokane yet... I've heard they've got good players
>out there but it's far enough away from anything I get much chance to go to
>normally that I haven't been there yet. Been around Portland a fair amount.
>

>manual dexterity. Anyone who can land a basic combo can hit Guile's
>redizzy in WW with little likelihood of screwing up. Somewhere in the
>midst of hitting buttons dozens of times, someone's liable to fudge the
>timing and blow the infinite. Not that there aren't people who can

Not really.

>avoid that... but by and large not many arcades tend to be infinite-prone,

You haven't seen the right arcades, I say. I've been to a bunch
too, and guess what? They can...

>>I'm sure the designers had 50+ hit combos
>>in mind, so the fact that some go to 90+ hits is just a little slip.
>
>I'm sure they had 30+ hit combos in mind with supers involved. I don't
>think they ever intended for it to go into the 50s.

There are supers that do well into the 50s. Dhalsim noggie->
super->team super, or just two supers give 50 hits (it doesn't count the
noggies) and giantass damage.

>It's a simple matter of intent. The existence of combos in general was
>not intentional in WW, which is one reason why I'd say that Guile's redizzy

This has been discussed to death. Look up Kenichiro Tanaka's
Combos were not an accident posts. 2in1s are unintentional, not combos.

>repeat a chain pattern indefinitely. They're, for the most part, fairly
>obscure (the jumping in the corner infinites) or happen in fairly rare

Jab, jab, FF jab and short, repeat. Doesnt seem very obscure.

>positional situations (Jin actually connecting a taunt when he's got an
>opponent pinned in the corner)... in short, they happen in spots that
>aren't always intuitive to testers that it'll happen in a real game.

Like hell. You mean you can do BIGGER combos in the corner? Who
would've thought?

>chain series goes from small to large, and only Wolvie can repeat something

There're others.

>that complex, it's hard to test every single possible situation. Realistically
>speaking, once you get past a certain point it's prohibitively difficult.

Hrm.. I know a few CS profs who would have a coniption at a
statement like that.

>of merit to it, yes even on a level approaching SF2. Unfortunately infinites

No one telling me that VS approachs SF2 has given me reason to
believe it, would you care to start?

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

unread,

May 3, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/3/98

In article <6ihj5q$h1e$1...@user2.teleport.com>,

Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <etrempe-0105...@acs-ebu2-339-mac13.ucsd.edu>,
>Ed Trempe <etr...@ucsd.edu> wrote:
>>In article <6i8nce$t8i$1...@user2.teleport.com>, stil...@user2.teleport.com
>>(Stilt Man) wrote:
>
>Formidable? Yes. Head-and-shoulders ahead of everyone else, bar none? No.
>Keep a wary blocking scheme up and Strider can be stopped. He suffers from
>a lack of fast supers and any effective whittle weaponry short of a super or
>a helper. That's a weakness that can be exploited.

Strider? Strider can whittle too, Stilt. Have you ever actually
sat down and PLAYED this character? Even once?

>>> >and the potential to punish a missed block attempt or ill timed
>>> >move of any sort.
>>> Nothing that every other character in the game doesn't also have.
>>But other characters don't have it so easy.
>They don't need to have it so easy as long as they have it and as long as it
>hurts.

Yes they do, actually. Why is SSF2 Zan not top tier? He can
crossover fi. into five jabs into SPD, and it'll dizzy and kill on the
repeat. It's hard for him to do that? Oh.

Justin Boley

unread,

May 3, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/3/98

Stilt Man wrote:

> I didn't say he couldn't whittle. I said he had no *effective* whittle

> weaponry short of a super or a helper.

<snip>
Did I miss anything
> here that changes that equation?

Yeah. Ghram, Dp + P/K. (The "wind-up" slash) Half-screen range, very
little end lag, perfect for tacking onto blocked chains. BTW, checked
out some of the stuff you said about Strider v. Venom. Venom's c.
strong just doesn't seem as fast as you were making it out to be; (e.g.
"near-instant, etc.) not so that it unequivocally beats out any of
Strider's normals. Strider's range on the Ghram and c. RH doesn't
really restrict him to playing close for damage. c. strong _is_ a great
normal for Venom, but it's not as if it pins Strider down completely,
since he can work from outside that range plenty fine and gaining that
distance is pretty eash (Everybody's favorite pals, the push-block and
back-dash.)

--Justin

Stilt Man

unread,

May 4, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/4/98

In article <EsEBu...@midway.uchicago.edu>,

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac <spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>In article <6ihhtc$g96$1...@user2.teleport.com>,
>Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>>assuredly did. Yet because only one other player there and I had net access,

> BS. Not at a university.

Shaun... small perspective here. We *are* talking about conversations that
took place close to five years ago. Back then, very few people other than
the propeller-headed computer sci majors had net access. There was no AOL,
there was no "every school has an Internet connection"... heck, this was closer
to Internet Worm days than to now.

>>you felt more comfortable believing that I just plain was amidst a collection
>>of scrubs rather than that maybe I knew something you didn't when I came to
>>different conclusions on how different matchups went than you did.

>>>>I'd rate Defender behind the vs. series, too, actually... :)

>>> Perhaps. But see what people remember 20 years down the road.
>>>Defender will be in there. SF will definitely be in there. MvC,
>>>somehow... I doubt posterity will look too kindly on it.

>>Put in those terms, you're probably right. MvC is a fun game, and gets
>>the blood pumping enough that I probably would get bored at something
>>like, say, SF3. Yes, I think MvC is a better game than SF3. I like
>>the character designs better, I like the general feel of the game better,
>>and yes, I even like the strategy better. Is the strategy different?
>>Yes. But barring infinites, I wouldn't say it lacks depth. Note: I
>>*am* saying "barring infinites".

> What strategy? MvC is all of SF3's faults taken to the extreme,
>even barring the infinites. Lets see:

> SF3 MvC
>Parrys Alpha Counters

>Parrys have something of a greater
>reward, but unlike ACs they at least take
>a *little* bit of work and have some degree
>of risk.

So do Alphas. Do Morrigan's Alpha Counter into Chun Li's Thousand Burst
Kick and you die.

>Air Parry Air Block

>Air blocking is, without a doubt, MUCH
>worse than the air parrys. All the air d
>that ppl use recovers b/f the air parrying
>guy can attack, so at least the grounded
>player is somewhat safe. MvC doesn't have
>that.

So no one knows how to do safe air defense where you are? I'll just let that
speak for itself...

>SuperJumps SuperJumps

>SF3. By a longshot. In VS, you have 10x
>the safety and control making it a reposition-
>ing technique of choice.

I'd call this one in MvC's favor. At least you're not going to see someone
super jump over a FB and tag you.

>Tech hits Tech hits

>Oh well. At least you can't tech out of
>command throws.

Some of 'em, you can. (e.g. Vector Drain)

>Overheads Overheads

>Advantage SF3; at least they're useful attacking
>methods.

I'm personally not fond of overheads in either game, so I'd rate this the
opposite way simply because MvC's are rarer and more useless.

>Range game Range game

>Neither has it; the fireball trap is DEAD.

Depends. Playing keepaway in MvC is a real possibility, and you can't just
parry away all the block damage. In SF3? Fuggetaboutit, man.

>Distance game Distance game

>SF3 has more of it, because it's harder to air
>parry your way into close range than it is to air
>block your way in.

Is it easy to get from all the way across the screen to half way across the
screen in MvC? Yes. Is it easy to cover that last distance and stay there?
No, not if your opponent can play a decent distance game.

>Risk versus Reward

>SF3, even without the infinites. Why? Because in MvC there are
>non-infinites that do full bars easy, and not just the strider crap. SF3
>also has less characters that can punish you heavily for a misblocked
>low/standing jab/short. For those who don't know, those characters for
>SF3 are (you guessed it) Yun (standing 1,2,3 youhou, juggles), Yang (low
>4, 5, rekka kenx3), and Ibuki (1,2,3, hashin sho, juggles; low 4, low 2,
>special). You could put ken in there too (standing 5, shippu jinrai
>kyaku) as an honorable mention.
> Who does it in MvC? Uhm, everyone does, pretty much. Certainly
>Capt. Striderine Man. Certainly Ryu & Hulk. Do you want more?

I'd rather have more characters able to do it than fewer, actually. Makes
for better balance. And against good players, you're not going to catch
them off guard that often unless you start mixing it up with the occasional
tick or toss.

>>of inherent ability, merely low rent to learning to play them. I think that
>>if a few of the old geniuses from SF2 were to put those mental skills to real
>>work in figuring out how to break pixies, they could. I've found that to be
>>the case myself.

> Or they can use the pixies, and instead of just beating up scrubs,
>they can beat other masters.

We're working under opposite assumptions. You're a believer that pixies have
no real limits in MvC. I'm not.

>>> Nice bit of writing. However, the *point* (you remember that,
>>>right?) you make in the above is true of essentially every single game
>>>known to man (not just vids here). Almost any game people play
>>>rewards some element of thought. Wow. Revolutionary.

>>That's not the statement I've been getting from numerous folks on this NG.
>>Check your DejaNews, Seth, this thread has a few folks who do, in fact,
>>say that there is ZERO strategic merit to these games. Not just "very
>>little", ZERO.

> Near zero, yes. Total flailing is of course not the most powerful
>thing in the game. Flailing with low shorts into chains into more chains,
>.. is.

I disagree. It's limited once people figure out to block low when they see
a dash in.

[remainder of one-liners snipped]

Stilt Man

unread,

May 4, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/4/98

In article <EsEC6...@midway.uchicago.edu>,

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac <spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:

>In article <6ihj5q$h1e$1...@user2.teleport.com>,

>Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>>Formidable? Yes. Head-and-shoulders ahead of everyone else, bar none? No.
>>Keep a wary blocking scheme up and Strider can be stopped. He suffers from
>>a lack of fast supers and any effective whittle weaponry short of a super or
>>a helper. That's a weakness that can be exploited.

> Strider? Strider can whittle too, Stilt. Have you ever actually

>sat down and PLAYED this character? Even once?

I didn't say he couldn't whittle. I said he had no *effective* whittle
weaponry short of a super or a helper. Ouroboros is an effective whittle
if your opponent is dumb enough not to push block two or three times while
it's up, but it's a super. So is Legion, with a different qualification:
push blocking doesn't help, but super jumping over it does, allowing you
to avoid it clean even if Strider's standing right next to you when he uses
it. Which generally means that Strider either needs to catch his opponent
out of good position to avoid it somehow to even get that much, such as when
they're jumping in or after pinning them down with a helper.

Now, what normal specials does he have? Bomb? Easily avoided. Calling the
robomutt? Easily avoided and only really useful for cancelling projectiles
coming at him. Dashing slash? Combo bait. Air multi-hit drill? Both combo
bait if it's blocked *and* risky against folks that have shadow blades, dragon
punches, and the like. The charge move with the mini-Ouroboros? Well, that's
halfway good, but you're not exactly going to be trading it with Ryu to stay
ahead in the whittle damage department with just that. Did I miss anything

here that changes that equation?

>>>> >and the potential to punish a missed block attempt or ill timed
>>>> >move of any sort.

>>>> Nothing that every other character in the game doesn't also have.
>>>But other characters don't have it so easy.

>>They don't need to have it so easy as long as they have it and as long as it
>>hurts.

> Yes they do, actually. Why is SSF2 Zan not top tier? He can

>crossover fi. into five jabs into SPD, and it'll dizzy and kill on the
>repeat. It's hard for him to do that? Oh.

Do you have a *relevant* anecdote?

seth james killian

unread,

May 4, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/4/98

stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) writes:

Stilt, what can I say? Your sad backpedalling at this point
won't help, and your refusal to acknowledge even this, when you were
approximately as wrong as a person can be, only shores up your image
as a self-delusional jackass.

>Okay. So let's see here. How big is UIUC, again? OSU was a campus of a
>good 15,000 or more students, with literally thousands of Asian folks coming
>over the Pacific on campus.

UIUC has about 28,000 undergrads. Major engineering school,
and while we're throwing the stereotypes around, UIUC is about 15% asian
by enrollment.

Loosely translated, it was a *perfect* demographic
>setting to establish a strong SF2 following in its heyday, which it most
>assuredly did.

Perhaps it was a perfect place to develop a hotbed of SF. But
here are some points to consider: Plenty of places in and around Chicago
were very much "hotbeds" of SF, with people playing constantly, etc.
Yet they sucked. All of them. Also, consider NYC- certainly a
large base of potential players, certainly plenty of "asians", and
tons of dedicated fans. Yet they all sucked.
Demographics can be part of an explanation, but in this case,
trying to use them to prop up your obvious knowledge/skill deficit is
embarrassing. What distinguished places like Sunnyvale, UIUC, LA,
Berkeley (and to a lesser extent SD?)? What set them apart from the
plethora of other demographically identical locations? Who knows?
But the fact remains that these places produced players who knew more
about the game and just plain kicked more ass than anywhere else.
All the hypothetical demographics you want won't get around
that.

Yet because only one other player there and I had net access,
>you felt more comfortable believing that I just plain was amidst a collection
>of scrubs rather than that maybe I knew something you didn't when I came to
>different conclusions on how different matchups went than you did.

I didn't base any opinions on how many people from OSU had
net access, I based the opinions on what got said by those people.
Consider Sunnyvale- outside of the Cannon brothers (mostly Tom at
that point), none of their players were on a.g.sf2. Then Brian
Weissman (a sunnyvale player) came on. Did I ridicule him because
there was only one of him? Did I give him respect because I was
in awe of where he was from? I did neither. We started talking,
and he impressed me with what he knew about the game, and I was
surprised to see people thousands of miles away whom I'd never
heard of or played, had come to the same conclusions about even
the finest points of the game.
People have routinely "come out of nowhere" onto a.g.sf2
to earn the respect of the other serious players here (Chris Finney
being a somewhat more recent example). You did not, because you
have never shown anything beyond a fairly basic and remarkably
uninsightful understanding of the game. Beyond the level of the
scrubs, you have never taught anyone here anything.

>Case in point: the "boot of doom",

>Drove you nuts when I brought it up. If I remember the quote
>at all precisely, your words were to the effect of "When you have something,
>let some of the rest of us know instead of getting that shit-eating grin on
>your face and shouting BOOT OF DOOM, BOOT OF DOOM." That sound at all
>familiar? :)

Um, yeah. I have no idea why you bring this up, however. I was
making fun of you for repeating an elementary tactic (in slogan form,
at that) instead of ever contributing anything substantial to a dialogue.

>Then there's the Reed College stuff. This took place shortly after one of
>OSU's better *overall* Fei Longs (if not its most technically competent) was
>rather unjustly ridiculed, largely from the UIUC crowd, when he admitted he
>couldn't pull off Fei's flame kick very consistently and had instead
>improvised.

I have no idea why you would willingly embarrass yourself by
bringing this up... Stilt, anyone who counts as a *good* Fei Long
should *at the very minimum* be able to do all of the important moves
for that character. That you would think otherwise even for a minute
makes it very clear you have no idea what it is to be truly good at a
game like this.

This didn't make a lot of difference in his overall effectiveness
>because we didn't exploit it quite as mercilessly as we might have; for air
>defense, Fei's standing fierce worked just as well in most cases, which left
>a generally small diminution of his overall win-loss record.

The Flamekick's (Fei's DP) primary use (in the hands of a good
Fei) is *not* air defense. I guess this is exhibit B in proving you
are an unrepentant SCRUB.

The catcalls
>from UIUC gave the folks at the much smaller Reed College the impression that
>no one at OSU knew what they were doing, and as such they sort of expected to
>be the guys who could claim that they set Stilt Man straight when they invited
>me up. Didn't quite happen that way. If I remember right, the win-loss
>record between my Bison and their crowd at large was 30-2 or so that day (in
>my favor, in case anyone wasn't sure). It wasn't that Reed didn't have any
>players that couldn't have held their own at your usual mall crowd... they
>just weren't up to the kind of players OSU could field.

Goody-goody for OSU. So Reed sucks even worse than OSU. That
burning question in the mind of SF fans worldwide has now been answered...

The strength of the
>university's demographics was rather well borne out, because OSU (as well as
>UO down in Eugene) were far and away the strongest SF2 centers in Oregon.

Your demographics are BS. Is OSU (along with UO, of course) the
strongest SF2 center *in all of Oregon*!!? I happy to say I neither know,
nor care, as neither has ever given anyone any reason to think they're
doing anything other than sucking over there.

>Did I know everything? No. But did I have reason to believe that I knew what
>I was doing? Yes. Did I have just cause to get a bit miffed when a few folks
>at UIUC adopted the attitude that anyone from anywhere they hadn't played at
>automatically sucked? Definitely.

This is always the scrub's first line of defense: "You haven't
played me- you can't *know/prove* I suck!" Aside from being a completely
empty claim, it ignores the fact that UIUC/old-schoolers/whoever *routinely*
accept that certain others they haven't played don't suck. Bob Painter-
never played him (I'm *still* coming for you, Bob :), but I have little
to no doubt he doesn't suck. This was based on his posts at first, and
then I saw him play on tape. He don't suck.
You, however, I do suspect you suck, at least a little bit.

Did you or anyone else at UIUC have any
>basis whatsoever for your judgment of OSU's overall strength at the game as
>a whole? No.

Wrong. I had your myriad garbage posts.

You had one guy who was at a most generous description a
>middle-tier player who did decently against scrubby Kens

Jasper ticked, Jasper
>could do rushing punch combos, Jasper could protect himself from the air, and
>overall I would say he was a competent player on the basics, he just had a
>habit of wanting to play the "different" characters and often settled on ones
>that just couldn't hold their own too well. So, in short, your one contact
>at OSU other than me was in no way representative of the best players there.

Umm, I don't even remember who the hell you're talking about,
and I certainly didn't base my opinion of you or OSU on his testimony.

>> I haven't been to your "neck of the woods" because it is precisely
>>that- woods.

>It's woods that happens to have a million people in it around the Portland
>metro area, along with quite a college population along the Willamette Valley.
>(Two universities that get a large number of international students numbering
>amongst their 15,000+ population each, plus numerous smaller colleges dotting
>the area.) Loosely translated, there are quite enough people of the right
>demographic group here to establish a good following for a game and figure out
>how to play it, despite you insistence that everyone I've ever played against
>must be a scrub simply because I disagree with you on a few things as to who
>wins between which two characters.

Again, your demographics are *meaningless*. Your scrubbery and
garbage posts speak louder than any amount of silly number crunching that
is supposed to imply "given x, y, and z, we can predict N many good SF
players...". Geez.

>That's kind of unfortunate. But whether Caine could beat you or not, the
>fact remains that he was still one of the better players at UIUC... and it
>was clearly established to both he and I that I knew quite a bit more about
>Bison than he did, either from his own playing or from having seen the
>Bisons there. Draw from that what you will.

1) Caine was not one of the better players at UIUC. Yes, he
won some Chicago tourneys, and yes, he could demolish scrubs, etc. At
any given time, however, there were *at least* 10 or so people I'd
consider better than he was, and 5 or so he was completely unable to
beat. So Caine was a good player, but he was among the worst of the
good players.
2) Part of the reason why Caine had such an evident upper
boundary to his skills was that he was *extremely* unobservant, and
slow to pick up new tactics. I think this would account for his
being amazed by your flaccid Bison knowledge more than anything else.
We didn't have serious Bison players in HF (he sucked), maybe that's
part of the explanation, but mostly I'd have to say Caine was just
pretty clueless.

>Take out infinites and it isn't *that* far off.

What a conveniently vague claim. I'd say MvC is several light-years
away from ST. This is also a vague claim. Now I've essentially shot my
mouth off without anything real being said. I can be just like Stiltman
too!

>That's not the statement I've been getting from numerous folks on this NG.
>Check your DejaNews, Seth, this thread has a few folks who do, in fact,
>say that there is ZERO strategic merit to these games. Not just "very
>little", ZERO.

Stilt, try- TRY not to be dumb. Anyone who says "MvC takes
ZERO skill" is either obviously exaggerating out of frustration or
too stupid to be worth a response. Again- MvC, like EVERY OTHER DAMN
GAME IN THE WORLD, takes some skill. Is this your thesis? If so,
I'm glad to grant it to you.

>Been to various points around the state of Washington, including the Tri-
>Cities and Seattle. Not Spokane yet... I've heard they've got good players
>out there but it's far enough away from anything I get much chance to go to
>normally that I haven't been there yet. Been around Portland a fair amount.

Well, I'm glad your extensive travels to SF hotspots within
(parts of) the world-famous pacific northwest region have confirmed your
ideas about MvC and SF. That about settles it, I'd say.

>So are there pixie players among the dominant players in my area? Yes.
>"Pixie lord" is probably still overall the most dominant single player here,

Oh man. So your sad little claim that "Pixies don't dominate
MvC" isn't true even in your own tiny little SF world? So that means
your entire argument is (as if this should come as any surprise) based
on more baseless hypotheticals which, although you may not have actually
seen or done these things, *should* work, according to, what? your
"calculations"?

>>>And Guile, if you'll recall, *was* the dominant char in WW. It's a random
>>>counterexample to the argument that infinite combos ruin the VS series.

>> No, it's not. These things to a large degree ruined WW. WW is
>>not a game that can be (or is) seriously played by people of any skill.

>Okay. We're agreed on that much.

I don't think we're really agreed here. I agree that WW is not
a challenging game for people that have been playing advanced variants
thereof for 8+ years. Your example is still brain-dead stupid in the
first place, in any event.

>> No, I don't get the idea. It is *not* harder to land the
>>infinites in MvC than it is to get a Guile redizzy. It's a slightly
>>different pattern, but a pattern at that. Don't guess that because
>>you and your Portland cronies can't crank out infinites on command
>>that there are people elsewhere who can't. You'd be wrong.

>I didn't say that. I'm just saying it would take a bit more work and
>manual dexterity.

With the emphasis on "a *bit* more". Doing the MvC infinites
is no harder than doing Guile's 4 fierce 15-20 times in a row, whihc
I think is a task even a scrub like you could master with some
practice.

Anyone who can land a basic combo can hit Guile's
>redizzy in WW with little likelihood of screwing up. Somewhere in the
>midst of hitting buttons dozens of times, someone's liable to fudge the
>timing and blow the infinite. Not that there aren't people who can
>avoid that... but by and large not many arcades tend to be infinite-prone,
>which is one major reason why the vs. games haven't died out yet.

And again, this evaluation is based on your extensive touring
of the SF-crazy pacific northwest. There are arcades with people like
this. If anything, by and large, people are probably just unaware of
how to do the infinites in the first place.

>> And perhaps rightly so. But Capcom not only offered a version of
>>SSF2 that had no M2PD, if Ming hadn't been such a freak in the first
>>place, the M2PD probably never would have been discovered.

>Don't pat your local crowd too hard on the back. I'd noticed a slight oddity
>in some 2PDs I was getting on wake ups with forward kicks that didn't seem to
>come out with roundhouses from about SPD range a good month before Ming
>explicitly identified the bug.

Blah blah blah fuck you. "I noticed an irregularity!" -whatever.
Ming (not the "UIUC crowd", just Ming) found the Magic piledriver, and
what's more, was willing to post it. You have never found anything
of interest, bug or otherwise, hence your garbage "theoretical" posts,
full of confusions and half-truths.
Trying to jump on the bandwagon and steal some kind of sad faded
glory like this is really you at your lowest.

>Looking back, I know
>for a simple fact that I was unwittingly doing M2PDs on wake up that I just
>never happened to do from far enough away that I noticed something that seemed
>grossly whack-a-ding-hoy.

Wow. Now that I think about it, looking back, I've been
personally discovered every major SF tactic that ever was, MYSELF!
I'm sure I unwittingly "ticked" people in SF2:WW, I'm sure I unwittingly
set up inescapable FB traps before anyone else, and I'm *positive* I
must have been doing Valle CCs (again, unwittingly, you understand)
waaay before anyone posted anything. So I guess I'm a fucking SF
genius, huh? You are really pathetic.

To put it in short... *somebody* would've found it.
>Ming just happened to be the first guy that practiced SPD motions with that
>particular button under that particular condition that clearly demonstrated
>that something was horribly wrong.

Yeah. Apply this argument generally. "Einstein ain't all
that! If he hadn't done it, *somebody* would've! He ain't deserve
no prizes nohow!" Sour grapes, scrub.

>I've heard that versions of XSF have been offered that had most of the
>infinites from the original taken out. Any truth to that?

They tried to take out the most pathetic ones, like Ryu's
low strong, hopping forward, repeat... but the combo system is just
so infinite prone that even when removing infinites was their
explicit intent, they utterly failed to do it (I believe way more
than half of the characters still had them).

>I'm sure they had 30+ hit combos in mind with supers involved. I don't
>think they ever intended for it to go into the 50s.

Well, I'm glad to have your insight here. I can see them sitting
around the table now... "Yes, we're agreed. 30 hit combos are fine. But
50 hits! That's ridiculous!"

>Okay... you're about to get a professional software engineer's comment
>on bugs. :)

[GIGANTIC pile of crap deleted]

>Are they being sloppier about it now than they were with redizzies back in
>the SF2 series? Yes. But unfortunately that kind of meticulousness didn't
>pay their bills towards the end of the SF2 series with the likes of MK around
>with notoriously less care taken towards testing before release. If you scorn
>infinites as bugs as I believe they should be, the VS series has a fair amount
>of merit to it, yes even on a level approaching SF2.

Ah, the content-free super-vague claim returns.

Unfortunately infinites
>do indeed screw up a bit of that merit, but not beyond redemption to a point
>that an arcade that frowns on them or remains blissfully unware of it can't
>explore the *intentional* features of the game and enjoy them on their own
>qualities. In my case, it's willful denial. I'll cheerfully admit that.
>But I don't consider willful denial of bug exploitation to be all that crazy
>an outlook. It's still a fun game. So I play it. End of story.

The unintentional aspects were precisely what was responsible for
SF being as great as it turned out to be. If the game had come with some
sort of crappy guide book of how the designers intended it to be played,
SF would have sucked, and would have died out long, long ago. Creating
a challenging, innovative engine/environment and then turning clever,
out-for-blood players loose in it is what makes any game great. You
want rules? Hardwire them. But don't apologize for their inability
to figure out what they're doing. They make crap? Call it crap,
and wait for something better (or play it and at least ADMIT you're
playing crap), or play an earlier version where they got it right.
Apologizing for the crappy work of professionals is a waste of time,
and an embarrassment to those involved.

Seth Killian

Chocobo

unread,

May 4, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/4/98

Come on Stilt Man, just give it up. You've proven that you're a scrub
(Cyclops's optic blast better in MSF? smoke on), it's a well known fact
that MVC is garbage, you're just nuts if you think the SF series or even
SF3 or anywhere near as bad. None of your arguments make any sense, you
just state your opinions, and say that you can't be proven wrong until
each and every person who disagrees with you drives out to wherever you
live, and beats you in MVC. Just end this thread, it's going nowhere,
you're not going to get anyone to believe you.

Stilt Man

unread,

May 4, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/4/98

In article <6ije8i$fhk$1...@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>,

seth james killian <skil...@students.uiuc.edu> wrote:

>stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) writes:
>>Seth... now it is you who are just plain distorting. Milo, at first, said
>>nothing more than "you can't do anything if Storm goes off the screen." He
>>offered absolutely nothing in the way of explanation for how this was
>>accomplished beyond a vague statement that I should go to DejaNews.

> Stilt, what can I say? Your sad backpedalling at this point
>won't help, and your refusal to acknowledge even this, when you were
>approximately as wrong as a person can be, only shores up your image
>as a self-delusional jackass.

Seth, I'm not saying I wasn't wrong. You're distorting my statement once
again. If my statement wasn't clear, I'll outline it here:

1. I came into the discussion late in the game, after Milo had
posted the original discovery of the thing.

2. Milo gave no indication while we were arguing of the precise
method to get Storm off the screen. He only repeatedly insisted
in vague terms that she could get off the screen without explaining
how. Since I'd missed the original post and didn't feel like
searching bazillions of articles on DejaNews without even a subject
line to go on, I attempted to get him to explain himself in simple
terms rather than just flaming me.

3. On several occasions during that discussion, I stated my
(incorrect) understanding of what he was talking about and said,
"Is this right, and if not, what is?" Milo's response was,
unfailingly, "No, and I'm not going to tell you."

4. At some other point, someone else finally emailed me after
about the third or fourth time I asked that question and gave me
an explanation of what it meant. At that point, I immediately
stated that this had taken place in public, and said in no uncertain
terms, "Milo, you're right, I'm wrong. But you've been a complete
@$$ in your preference to just keep the argument going rather than
simply telling me where I was wrong, when it was a simple, demonstrable
fact that I was."

At no point in the discussion did Milo offer an explanation of where I was
wrong. I do not hold Milo in contempt because he was right and I was wrong.
I hold him in contempt because he figured it was more fun to just gloat over
it rather than just say, "here's where you're wrong" and be done with it.
That's what I would've done.

Call that what you will... but if you deviate in any way from this version of
events, someone in the chain of communication is being lied to.

>>Okay. So let's see here. How big is UIUC, again? OSU was a campus of a
>>good 15,000 or more students, with literally thousands of Asian folks coming
>>over the Pacific on campus.

> UIUC has about 28,000 undergrads. Major engineering school,
>and while we're throwing the stereotypes around, UIUC is about 15% asian
>by enrollment.

I didn't stereotype. It's no great secret that SF2 was much more popular in
Asia even than it was here. That's the only reason I mentioned that. It was
a simple (if unexplained) observation that many folks at OSU came from
countries where SF2 was even more popular than it was here. I at no point
said that Asian people are somehow racially inclined to like SF2 or any such
drivel that you're attempting to put in my mouth, I was simply making a
demographic comment that the nationality of various students was from such
countries. I meant it in the same light as observing that a university in
Japan might like Go or that a university in Russia might like chess. Nothing
more.

>>Loosely translated, it was a *perfect* demographic
>>setting to establish a strong SF2 following in its heyday, which it most
>>assuredly did.

> Perhaps it was a perfect place to develop a hotbed of SF. But
>here are some points to consider: Plenty of places in and around Chicago
>were very much "hotbeds" of SF, with people playing constantly, etc.
>Yet they sucked. All of them. Also, consider NYC- certainly a
>large base of potential players, certainly plenty of "asians", and
>tons of dedicated fans. Yet they all sucked.
> Demographics can be part of an explanation, but in this case,
>trying to use them to prop up your obvious knowledge/skill deficit is
>embarrassing.

Obvious? In SF2? Based on what?

>> Yet because only one other player there and I had net access,
>>you felt more comfortable believing that I just plain was amidst a collection
>>of scrubs rather than that maybe I knew something you didn't when I came to
>>different conclusions on how different matchups went than you did.

> I didn't base any opinions on how many people from OSU had
>net access, I based the opinions on what got said by those people.
>Consider Sunnyvale- outside of the Cannon brothers (mostly Tom at
>that point), none of their players were on a.g.sf2. Then Brian
>Weissman (a sunnyvale player) came on. Did I ridicule him because
>there was only one of him? Did I give him respect because I was
>in awe of where he was from? I did neither. We started talking,
>and he impressed me with what he knew about the game, and I was
>surprised to see people thousands of miles away whom I'd never
>heard of or played, had come to the same conclusions about even
>the finest points of the game.

Funny. When I talked with Weissman myself, we came to more or less the
same conclusion about one another. Take from that what you will. He wasn't
quite a subscriber to my belief that Bison was the best character in the
game, but he did acknowledge that a strong argument could be advanced for
that opinion. That statement was made within a week after talking to me.

> People have routinely "come out of nowhere" onto a.g.sf2
>to earn the respect of the other serious players here (Chris Finney
>being a somewhat more recent example). You did not, because you
>have never shown anything beyond a fairly basic and remarkably
>uninsightful understanding of the game. Beyond the level of the
>scrubs, you have never taught anyone here anything.

That's a matter of opinion on your part. And one that's provably false.

>>Case in point: the "boot of doom",
>>Drove you nuts when I brought it up. If I remember the quote
>>at all precisely, your words were to the effect of "When you have something,
>>let some of the rest of us know instead of getting that shit-eating grin on
>>your face and shouting BOOT OF DOOM, BOOT OF DOOM." That sound at all
>>familiar? :)

> Um, yeah. I have no idea why you bring this up, however. I was
>making fun of you for repeating an elementary tactic (in slogan form,
>at that) instead of ever contributing anything substantial to a dialogue.

Seth... you are very simply full of sh*t on this one. You and the rest of
the UIUC crowd (as well as the Sunnyvale folks, even) were on record at that
time behind the belief that Zangief/Bison went 7-3 in Gief's favor at the
very least. Don't give me this "repeating an elementary tactic" bullshit.
Zangief took it very, very badly from the "boot of doom", and you were very
simply one of the clueless on that one. The first believers on it were RpM,
myself, and some of the folks at UO who discovered about the same time I
did.

Which, of course, is one thing that really bugs me about you, Seth. You say
nothing about general tactics. You flame most anyone who does as a scrub.
Then when it's demonstrated that they know something you don't, you backtrack
on it later on and claim it was just "common knowledge". I distinctly remember
sharing exclamations of disbelief with Mr. Weissman about some of your remarks
on Bison in response to some of mine. When I pointed this out to you later,
you were like, "well duh, I knew that all along" despite the fact that you'd
posted the exact opposite not two months before. If I'd had DejaNews at the
time, I could've strung you up so damn many times that you'd have rope burns
on your neck now.

>>Then there's the Reed College stuff. This took place shortly after one of
>>OSU's better *overall* Fei Longs (if not its most technically competent) was
>>rather unjustly ridiculed, largely from the UIUC crowd, when he admitted he
>>couldn't pull off Fei's flame kick very consistently and had instead
>>improvised.

> I have no idea why you would willingly embarrass yourself by
>bringing this up... Stilt, anyone who counts as a *good* Fei Long
>should *at the very minimum* be able to do all of the important moves
>for that character. That you would think otherwise even for a minute
>makes it very clear you have no idea what it is to be truly good at a
>game like this.

And what happens if, for various purposes, the flame kick wasn't important?
Your only examples you gave for why it was included various things that could
be cured by other moves, and a few ways for dealing with tactics that only a
complete scrub would use in the first place. (Including *scoff* using Bison's
torp as a whittle weapon frequently.) Loosely translated, you said it was
necessary to prevent abusive tactics that most experienced players wouldn't
want to use against *anyone*, let along Fei.

>> This didn't make a lot of difference in his overall effectiveness
>>because we didn't exploit it quite as mercilessly as we might have; for air
>>defense, Fei's standing fierce worked just as well in most cases, which left
>>a generally small diminution of his overall win-loss record.

> The Flamekick's (Fei's DP) primary use (in the hands of a good
>Fei) is *not* air defense. I guess this is exhibit B in proving you
>are an unrepentant SCRUB.

Okay, brainiac. What *is* the primary use?

>> The strength of the
>>university's demographics was rather well borne out, because OSU (as well as
>>UO down in Eugene) were far and away the strongest SF2 centers in Oregon.

> Your demographics are BS. Is OSU (along with UO, of course) the
>strongest SF2 center *in all of Oregon*!!? I happy to say I neither know,
>nor care, as neither has ever given anyone any reason to think they're
>doing anything other than sucking over there.

Well, since you don't care, I'll tell you anyway. It was one of the best two,
UO being the other. I think UO was slightly stronger, although I was able to
hold the machine quite well in either place.

>>Did I know everything? No. But did I have reason to believe that I knew what
>>I was doing? Yes. Did I have just cause to get a bit miffed when a few folks
>>at UIUC adopted the attitude that anyone from anywhere they hadn't played at
>>automatically sucked? Definitely.

> This is always the scrub's first line of defense: "You haven't
>played me- you can't *know/prove* I suck!" Aside from being a completely
>empty claim, it ignores the fact that UIUC/old-schoolers/whoever *routinely*
>accept that certain others they haven't played don't suck. Bob Painter-
>never played him (I'm *still* coming for you, Bob :), but I have little
>to no doubt he doesn't suck. This was based on his posts at first, and
>then I saw him play on tape. He don't suck.
> You, however, I do suspect you suck, at least a little bit.

*shrug* Oh well. Thanks for clearing that up, Seth. I'm not sure I could've
figured your opinion on that one out on my own.

>> Did you or anyone else at UIUC have any
>>basis whatsoever for your judgment of OSU's overall strength at the game as
>>a whole? No.

> Wrong. I had your myriad garbage posts.

Were some of my posts early on garbage? Yes. I'll freely admit that. I
don't think I really came to understand the game until about SSF2 or so.
That's when I finally started essaying away from Bison and started playing
a good many other characters with some degree of competence. Anything much
before that is probably garbage. I've been consistent on that one. Find my
old articles and you'll see that opinion given in hindsight quite a bit: I
don't think I really mastered the game until SSF2.

After that point, I think you need to get a shred of honesty and admit that
I knew a thing or two and had a bit of insight, regardless of my admittedly
bad on-line attitude at times. (The Reed folks agreed with me that I was a
lot nicer in real life than I was here on the NG. :)

>>Take out infinites and it isn't *that* far off.

> What a conveniently vague claim. I'd say MvC is several light-years
>away from ST. This is also a vague claim. Now I've essentially shot my
>mouth off without anything real being said. I can be just like Stiltman
>too!

Seth... shut off the BS for a moment and take an honest look at what you've
really said about the game mechanics themselves. Have you really said anything
that wasn't vague, if we're using this particular definition for vagueness?
In your years at UIUC, how much did you really say that wasn't similarly vague
as far as game strategy and mechanics went? I think I saw all of about two
or three posts that actually ventured a concrete description of tactics in
your entire time there. The rest was flames.

> Stilt, try- TRY not to be dumb. Anyone who says "MvC takes
>ZERO skill" is either obviously exaggerating out of frustration or
>too stupid to be worth a response. Again- MvC, like EVERY OTHER DAMN
>GAME IN THE WORLD, takes some skill. Is this your thesis? If so,
>I'm glad to grant it to you.

Good. Because that's the better part of it.

>>Been to various points around the state of Washington, including the Tri-
>>Cities and Seattle. Not Spokane yet... I've heard they've got good players
>>out there but it's far enough away from anything I get much chance to go to
>>normally that I haven't been there yet. Been around Portland a fair amount.

> Well, I'm glad your extensive travels to SF hotspots within
>(parts of) the world-famous pacific northwest region have confirmed your
>ideas about MvC and SF. That about settles it, I'd say.

Seth... be real here. How many folks even go that far? Sure, you do, and
so do a good raw number of folks, but what percentage of the gaming population
does that? 0.01%, maybe? Give me a *little* credit here.

>>So are there pixie players among the dominant players in my area? Yes.
>>"Pixie lord" is probably still overall the most dominant single player here,

> Oh man. So your sad little claim that "Pixies don't dominate
>MvC" isn't true even in your own tiny little SF world?

[remainder of gross distortion of what I said out of context snipped with
extreme prejudice]

No, that's not the case. Yes, it's true in Portland that pixies do not
have an unquestioned dominance of MvC. The facts are this:

1. We have one player, Frank, who is among the three or four best
players in the area. He plays pixies. The others in that echelon
do not (myself included).

2. These days, I can beat Frank very, very consistently. My win
loss record against him in the last week is 4-1 in my favor.

3. There are, however, a few other non-pixie folks who do better
against me than they do against Frank. There is, for example, a
dude name of Marty who can keep it close to even against me but who
*always* loses to Frank. My statement that Frank is "probably still
overall the most dominant single player here" is based upon the
observation that he still beats many other folks worse than I do...
although lately even that observation is becoming tenuous. Marty is
the only counterexample of that magnitude I can think of, to be honest.
The bulk of folks die consistently against both of us.

Why do I do better against Frank than I do against Marty? Okay, that's where
I have to conjecture. I believe it has something to do with the fact that
95% of the thought I've put into what I need to do differently in this game
has been directed at how to beat Frank. I've only given sporadic thought
to how I'm going to beat Marty. Now that I seem to have Frank under control,
that's something I intend to change. Check back in a couple of months... :)

>>>>And Guile, if you'll recall, *was* the dominant char in WW. It's a random
>>>>counterexample to the argument that infinite combos ruin the VS series.

>>> No, it's not. These things to a large degree ruined WW. WW is
>>>not a game that can be (or is) seriously played by people of any skill.

>>Okay. We're agreed on that much.

> I don't think we're really agreed here. I agree that WW is not
>a challenging game for people that have been playing advanced variants
>thereof for 8+ years. Your example is still brain-dead stupid in the
>first place, in any event.

It wasn't intended to be considered intelligent by anyone who saw it... merely
an illustration of a parallel. It is that. Even you are powerless to deny
that much. And given that, stupidity is irrelevant.

>> Anyone who can land a basic combo can hit Guile's
>>redizzy in WW with little likelihood of screwing up. Somewhere in the
>>midst of hitting buttons dozens of times, someone's liable to fudge the
>>timing and blow the infinite. Not that there aren't people who can
>>avoid that... but by and large not many arcades tend to be infinite-prone,
>>which is one major reason why the vs. games haven't died out yet.

> And again, this evaluation is based on your extensive touring
>of the SF-crazy pacific northwest. There are arcades with people like
>this. If anything, by and large, people are probably just unaware of
>how to do the infinites in the first place.

I'm quite sure that's not the case. Allen Kim has access to the web sites
that have these things. I know of several other folks I meet at the arcades
I play at who see my posts here, and suspect that they've got access to it as
well. I don't see infinites from these people. I know as a simple matter
of fact that it ain't because they don't have a lack of awareness of their
existence or where to find the means to do them. Draw the rest of that
scenario on your own.

>>> And perhaps rightly so. But Capcom not only offered a version of
>>>SSF2 that had no M2PD, if Ming hadn't been such a freak in the first
>>>place, the M2PD probably never would have been discovered.

>>Don't pat your local crowd too hard on the back. I'd noticed a slight oddity
>>in some 2PDs I was getting on wake ups with forward kicks that didn't seem to
>>come out with roundhouses from about SPD range a good month before Ming
>>explicitly identified the bug.

> Blah blah blah fuck you. "I noticed an irregularity!" -whatever.
>Ming (not the "UIUC crowd", just Ming) found the Magic piledriver, and
>what's more, was willing to post it. You have never found anything
>of interest, bug or otherwise, hence your garbage "theoretical" posts,
>full of confusions and half-truths.
> Trying to jump on the bandwagon and steal some kind of sad faded
>glory like this is really you at your lowest.

Seth... please at least stay on the subject. You stated, and it's right up
there for all to see, "If Ming hadn't been such a freak in the first place,
the M2PD probably never would have been discovered." I stated that this is
a load of sh*t on your part and gave an example of why.

>> To put it in short... *somebody* would've found it.
>>Ming just happened to be the first guy that practiced SPD motions with that
>>particular button under that particular condition that clearly demonstrated
>>that something was horribly wrong.

> Yeah. Apply this argument generally. "Einstein ain't all
>that! If he hadn't done it, *somebody* would've! He ain't deserve
>no prizes nohow!" Sour grapes, scrub.

Excuse me. Did I say that Ming didn't deserve credit for it? No. Did I
fail to say that he *did* deserve the credit for it? No.

So you tell me... WTF is your problem now?

>>Okay... you're about to get a professional software engineer's comment
>>on bugs. :)

> [GIGANTIC pile of crap deleted]

>>Are they being sloppier about it now than they were with redizzies back in
>>the SF2 series? Yes. But unfortunately that kind of meticulousness didn't
>>pay their bills towards the end of the SF2 series with the likes of MK around
>>with notoriously less care taken towards testing before release. If you scorn
>>infinites as bugs as I believe they should be, the VS series has a fair amount
>>of merit to it, yes even on a level approaching SF2.

> Ah, the content-free super-vague claim returns.

And if I were to delete 90% of a commentary you'd written, I imagine that I
could manage to find one paragraph out of context that, by itself, is content
free and super vague, too.

Can you say "unimpressive"? I knew you could.

>> Unfortunately infinites
>>do indeed screw up a bit of that merit, but not beyond redemption to a point
>>that an arcade that frowns on them or remains blissfully unware of it can't
>>explore the *intentional* features of the game and enjoy them on their own
>>qualities. In my case, it's willful denial. I'll cheerfully admit that.
>>But I don't consider willful denial of bug exploitation to be all that crazy
>>an outlook. It's still a fun game. So I play it. End of story.

> The unintentional aspects were precisely what was responsible for
>SF being as great as it turned out to be.

I'll agree without comment.

>You want rules? Hardwire them. But don't apologize for their inability
>to figure out what they're doing. They make crap? Call it crap,
>and wait for something better (or play it and at least ADMIT you're
>playing crap), or play an earlier version where they got it right.
>Apologizing for the crappy work of professionals is a waste of time,
>and an embarrassment to those involved.

Can I forward this to Microsoft? :)

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

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May 4, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/4/98

In article <6ij9n9$hqr$1...@user1.teleport.com>,

Stilt Man <stil...@user1.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <EsEBu...@midway.uchicago.edu>,
>Shaun Patrick Mcisaac <spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>>In article <6ihhtc$g96$1...@user2.teleport.com>,
>>Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>> SF3 MvC
>>Parrys Alpha Counters
>>Parrys have something of a greater
>>reward, but unlike ACs they at least take
>>a *little* bit of work and have some degree
>>of risk.
>So do Alphas. Do Morrigan's Alpha Counter into Chun Li's Thousand Burst
>Kick and you die.

Not if you wait for the last of it, and in some VS you don't even
need that.

>>Air Parry Air Block
>>Air blocking is, without a doubt, MUCH
>>worse than the air parrys. All the air d
>>that ppl use recovers b/f the air parrying
>>guy can attack, so at least the grounded
>>player is somewhat safe. MvC doesn't have
>>that.
>So no one knows how to do safe air defense where you are? I'll just let that
>speak for itself...

You do that. Some characters DO NOT have safe air d in MvC.

>>SuperJumps SuperJumps
>>SF3. By a longshot. In VS, you have 10x
>>the safety and control making it a reposition-
>>ing technique of choice.
>I'd call this one in MvC's favor. At least you're not going to see someone
>super jump over a FB and tag you.

If you're throwing FBs when they can counter, you deserve to lose
some energy.

>>Tech hits Tech hits
>>Oh well. At least you can't tech out of
>>command throws.
>Some of 'em, you can. (e.g. Vector Drain)

In *Three* you can't, which is what I was refering to.

>>Overheads Overheads
>>Advantage SF3; at least they're useful attacking
>>methods.
>I'm personally not fond of overheads in either game, so I'd rate this the
>opposite way simply because MvC's are rarer and more useless.

Not fond of anything that isn't low blockable? Kami-sama, Seth's
right, your answers are turtle turtle turtle!

>>Range game Range game
>>Neither has it; the fireball trap is DEAD.
>Depends. Playing keepaway in MvC is a real possibility, and you can't just
>parry away all the block damage. In SF3? Fuggetaboutit, man.

SuperJump or Jump over those FBs, and air block. Never take block
damage again.

>>Distance game Distance game
>>SF3 has more of it, because it's harder to air
>>parry your way into close range than it is to air
>>block your way in.
>Is it easy to get from all the way across the screen to half way across the
>screen in MvC? Yes. Is it easy to cover that last distance and stay there?
>No, not if your opponent can play a decent distance game.

Sure it is, just pixie away the final gap. Push blocking doesn't help,
and interruptable dashes HURT. (Really.)

>>Risk versus Reward

>I'd rather have more characters able to do it than fewer, actually. Makes
>for better balance.

So does MK, by homogenization. Everyone kills you with 2-3
shorts, wonderful balanced game?

> And against good players, you're not going to catch
>them off guard that often unless you start mixing it up with the occasional
>tick or toss.

You're not going to hit with shorts more often than fierces? In
what universe?

>> Near zero, yes. Total flailing is of course not the most powerful
>>thing in the game. Flailing with low shorts into chains into more chains,
>>.. is.
>
>I disagree. It's limited once people figure out to block low when they see
>a dash in.

Of course you low block dashes, but of course they can also just
throw you, too. This was part of Cyke's Hell, if he did decide he was
coming to get you, he could try to put together a ground assualt or just
straight up toss you, both into an infinite. Damn, that sucked. He
didn't need to even do that much really, just throw into super or what
have you for giant damage.
The balance is in favor of pixieism because when you geuss wrong,
you get RAPED for much more damage than what you do when you geuss
right.

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

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May 4, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/4/98

In article <354D5CD6...@mindspring.com>,

Chocobo <cho...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>(Cyclops's optic blast better in MSF? smoke on),

This needs to be read again.

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

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May 4, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/4/98

In article <6ijov4$5o3$1...@user1.teleport.com>,

Stilt Man <stil...@user1.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <6ije8i$fhk$1...@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>,
>seth james killian <skil...@students.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>>stil...@user2.teleport.com (Stilt Man) writes:
>>>Okay. So let's see here. How big is UIUC, again? OSU was a campus of a
>>>good 15,000 or more students, with literally thousands of Asian folks coming
>>>over the Pacific on campus.
>> UIUC has about 28,000 undergrads. Major engineering school,
>>and while we're throwing the stereotypes around, UIUC is about 15% asian
>>by enrollment.
>
>I didn't stereotype. It's no great secret that SF2 was much more popular in

>countries. I meant it in the same light as observing that a university in
>Japan might like Go or that a university in Russia might like chess. Nothing
>more.

That's stereotyping. Thank you for calling, thank you for
calling...

>> People have routinely "come out of nowhere" onto a.g.sf2
>>to earn the respect of the other serious players here (Chris Finney
>>being a somewhat more recent example). You did not, because you
>>have never shown anything beyond a fairly basic and remarkably
>>uninsightful understanding of the game. Beyond the level of the
>>scrubs, you have never taught anyone here anything.
>That's a matter of opinion on your part. And one that's provably false.

What HAVE you ever taught everyone? Give me a combo, technique,
strategic series, glitch, ANYTHING.

>> I have no idea why you would willingly embarrass yourself by
>>bringing this up... Stilt, anyone who counts as a *good* Fei Long
>>should *at the very minimum* be able to do all of the important moves
>>for that character. That you would think otherwise even for a minute
>>makes it very clear you have no idea what it is to be truly good at a
>>game like this.
>And what happens if, for various purposes, the flame kick wasn't important?
>Your only examples you gave for why it was included various things that could
>be cured by other moves, and a few ways for dealing with tactics that only a
>complete scrub would use in the first place. (Including *scoff* using Bison's
>torp as a whittle weapon frequently.) Loosely translated, you said it was
>necessary to prevent abusive tactics that most experienced players wouldn't
>want to use against *anyone*, let along Fei.

Wouldnt want to use unless they worked on someone. If I KNOW the
guy can't counterthrow or reversal DP worth a shit, I'm going to tick him
into the GRAVE. This is not so dissimilar a case.
Anyways, your response is still to stupid for words, the guy
couldn't do a DPA+K and you think he's good? Whatever.

>Okay, brainiac. What *is* the primary use?

High priority quick frame hitting attack.

>Give me a *little* credit here.

Why? Your posts even after SSF2 still leave you wanting. Ryu vs
Bison ring a bell?

>existence or where to find the means to do them. Draw the rest of that
>scenario on your own.

They don't care enough about the game to bother going for the best
combos, that's the scenario. Oh..

Shaun Patrick Mcisaac

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May 4, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/4/98

In article <6ijanh$ioe$1...@user1.teleport.com>,
Stilt Man <stil...@user1.teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <EsEC6...@midway.uchicago.edu>,

>Shaun Patrick Mcisaac <spmc...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:

>>In article <6ihj5q$h1e$1...@user2.teleport.com>,

>>Stilt Man <stil...@user2.teleport.com> wrote:
>I didn't say he couldn't whittle. I said he had no *effective* whittle
>weaponry short of a super or a helper. Ouroboros is an effective whittle

>Now, what normal specials does he have? Bomb? Easily avoided. Calling the

>robomutt? Easily avoided and only really useful for cancelling projectiles
>coming at him. Dashing slash? Combo bait.

Nope. Not intelligently done.

>Do you have a *relevant* anecdote?

Do you have a relevant *thought*?

Kuroyume

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May 4, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/4/98

Useless factor: None
Rambling factor: None

Warning: None
*************

skil...@students.uiuc.edu (seth james killian) wrote:

And if I can manage to stay on the run for one or two more years,
we'll probably be retired from the game and I'll be safe and sound! =)

--
Bob Painter
bpai...@rohan.sdsu.edu

Kevin Eav

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May 4, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/4/98

In article <6ij9n9$hqr$1...@user1.teleport.com>, stil...@user1.teleport.com (Stilt Man) wrote:

>>SuperJumps SuperJumps
>
>>SF3. By a longshot. In VS, you have 10x
>>the safety and control making it a reposition-
>>ing technique of choice.
>
>I'd call this one in MvC's favor. At least you're not going to see someone
>super jump over a FB and tag you.

Bullshit. The superjump, ever since it was instigated (back in the King
of Fighters games? Not sure, on this) has been a way of destroying the FB
trap.

>Is it easy to get from all the way across the screen to half way across the
>screen in MvC? Yes. Is it easy to cover that last distance and stay there?
>No, not if your opponent can play a decent distance game.

What's challenging about superjumping and following your opponent?
Guaranteed 'getting in', right there.

>We're working under opposite assumptions. You're a believer that pixies have
>no real limits in MvC. I'm not.
>

But you want to assume that people won't know how to -use- pixies.
And the fact is, the pixies are the easiest characters to learn.

>I disagree. It's limited once people figure out to block low when they see
>a dash in.

So... you're able to block every jab/short, ducking or standing, off a
jump/superjump/dash or even just walking up? Those would be some pretty
impressive reflexes. But here's the deal--it doesn't matter -how- many
of those you block if -one- gets through and your opponent knows an
infinite. And I can guarantee that you are -not- going to block -every-
low jab/dashing low jab/short etc. that comes your way in a game.

Here's the point. It is much more difficult to set up your opponent for a
big combo in a game where crossing up is more difficult than simply
tapping down, up and guiding your character over the little arrow that
denotes where your opponent is, and it is much more difficult to pull off
a large combo when you cannot lead from the game's fastest attacks into
the game's stronger attacks into a special/super. Ken's TOD, as you are
so fond of mentioning, is much easier to see coming than a low jab from a
character who, in a game engine, can stay in your face and poke at you
until he hits, with virtually whatever he wants, and with little fear of
retaliation, because his chances of landing that jab or short are much
higher.

>[remainder of one-liners snipped]
>
>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
> The Stilt Man stil...@teleport.com
> http://www.teleport.com/~stiltman/stiltman.html
> < We are Microsoft Borg '98. Lower your expectations and >
> < surrender your money. Antitrust law is irrelevant. >
> < Competition is irrelevant. We will add your financial and >
> < technological distinctiveness to our own. Your software >
> < will adapt to service ours. Resistance is futile. >

bea...@math.jussieu.fr

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May 4, 1998, 3:00:00 AM5/4/98

In article <354A2156...@milos-chalkboard.net>#1/1,
"Milo D. Cooper" <mi...@milos-chalkboard.net> wrote:

> Rogue's dive kick patterns are nice, this is true, but that's
> just about all she has, so it usually isn't difficult to see them
> coming. We've got a couple of dudes here who won many games doing
> that, for a while; afterward, they could barely a victory, because
> their game relied too heavily on the tactic (which is mostly just
> turtling in the air, which I guess explains Stilt's attraction to
> her). Julien Beasley's Rogue is (was?) very good, I wish that I'd
> played more than one game against him.

Hey, thanks! I guess we were spending too much time playing that retarded
MSF.. :)

I actually, like stiltman, foolishly thought "cyclops sucks because he cant
OB" for a short while. Then I got beat on by Kris G, Itai, and Master John
among others at B2 (low forw into infinite beats EVERY air attack). As much
fun as XSF can be, there really is no strategy. It's just jump into air combo
and throw into super.
And rogue has problems because she cant infinite (besides certain steals). If
you cant infinite, are not top tier. Well there is her air dash infinite but I
have never seen ANYONE pull that off.
XSF is an okay game on free play, but it's not worth spending anymore than 5c
a game on. Keep your quarters for ST, and (hopefully !) SFA3.

Julien

PS: Stiltman, if you are reading this... do you really think you know what you
are talking about??? I mean, how can you take yourself seriously with
ridiculous assertions like "Bison is top tier in XSF.. he can psyco crusher if
cyke does an OB"?? Do you still wear Bison pajamas and an old air force cap to
bed?

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