Archive for January, 2014

This Week’s Adventure in BlazBlue…

Wednesday, January 8th, 2014

Last night comprised of me being moral support for Tyler as he started working on more Kokonoe combos. Honestly? I haven’t been practicing any of anything. And yes, the local tournament is coming up on Saturday. All of my practice has come from Estevan, Jamie, and Tyler. Which is nice, believe me, but I don’t think that’s enough. With all these mechanic changes and me trying to break out of old bad muscle memory habits, I really think I need to play more. So, while he was hammering out those combos, I just sat around and watched a bunch of Japanese match vids.

There are so many things I love about fighting games. Some of these things include frame data, combo threads, and match vids. I like seeing other strategies I could be using. I like knowing where I have advantages I’m not using. I also like trying out new things to add to my repertoire. I love observing other people’s play styles. It’s so rewarding.

I guess there were a couple of observations I made while sitting around and drowning myself in research.

Gravity Seed: You would almost think this move doesn’t even exist for my Nu. The only time you’ll see me use it is when I use it ON ACCIDENT. I think this was a residual effect of me playing a really heavy rushdown Lambda (yeah, yeah, I know… it doesn’t make a lick of sense… but apparently it worked well enough because no one expected it). Now that I’ve been taking my zoning seriously… it’s almost like I had this moment where I thought, “why am I letting this go to waste?!” I swear, this would probably save me most of the grief that I’ve been having. Of course, I’m not entirely sure I’ll get this mechanic implemented before the tournament, but I really need to just throw them out. I can go heavy on combos with it later. I had a couple of combos where I did use it, but I don’t even know if those are even viable anymore. Blah. Well, we’ll see, I suppose.

D~C: …now I feel like a total airhead. This used to be a huge staple for me in prior games, and I just kinda forgot about it entirely, especially with my aerial combos. HOW. DID. I. FORGET. THIS. I feel like such a noob.

I’m sure there is more I can add to the list, which I’ll probably do tonight when I’m practicing. I just wanted to make some notes to myself so that I could remind myself of things to remember when I practice later tonight. 🙂

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Streaming, Video Games, Streaming Video Games…

Tuesday, January 7th, 2014

Things have been going well in the Team AtomicMESA household. Since we moved to our new place, we hadn’t really done much in the way of streaming. Guess what, though? We’re starting to get back into it on a more serious level. YAY! This is pretty exciting stuff.

Tyler has been doing a lot of research into what we need to kick up our streaming setup a couple notches. We did get ourselves a new capture card (the AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable), and we’re looking into headsets and a mixer. I definitely like the AVerMedia LGP much more than the Roxio Game Capture HD Pro that we were using before. We’re actually going to be streaming a Yu-Gi-Oh card game tournament next month, which will actually be pretty interesting. We’ve been testing our stream with the new BlazBlue: ChronoPhantasma, and it has been going pretty well. We’re also planning on streaming a DiveKick event at our house in the near future. Lots of fun stuff going on.

As mentioned above, we did get ourselves a Japanese copy of BBCP. Let’s just say that I’m… adjusting. Since the transition from Lambda to Nu, I have been suffering through relearning my combos. Sure, some of my combos still manage to work. Due to the the whole mode shift thing with Nu, I still need to adapt to this drastic change.

Pros: I’m zoning more! I tended to confuse people with the fact that I was a real heavy rushdown Lambda player (yeah, I know, it doesn’t make ANY sense). If I hit you, I would break your face in pretty good. If you hit me, well… I’m flimsy. And without any real zoning, I tended to get hit a lot more than not getting hit. With Nu’s Dia form, I was able to utilize her zoning abilities a lot more. Especially with characters like Kokonoe, I was able to keep myself safe. It’s like, I know how to USE these tools, but now they really play to my advantage. Or I just use these tools now, haha.

Cons: Those muscle memory combos aren’t always going to work if I’m in the wrong form. And that does tend to happen. And then I start getting lazy. And sloppy. And let me tell you about all these dropped combos. I’m still adjusting to the reduced hitstop. Which is not bad, let me tell you. The older BB games let me get away with sloppy inputs. This one? Not so much. I like it, though.

Besides fighting games, my world revolves around my 3DS. Which is actually kind of sad, seeing as we have both a PS4 and an Xbox One in our possession. The problem here is the lack of games for either system that we really want to play. On the 3DS, I’ve got Senran Kagura, Pokemon Y, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. Hell, on the Vita I’ve been getting back into Persona 4 Golden. Even though this is my third playthrough of P4, I’m still enjoying it as much as I have the first two times. I mean, I did beat Dead Rising 3 on the One, but come on. The other consoles are really getting most of my love.

We’ve got a local fighting game tournament coming up this upcoming Saturday. Am I gonna enter? Probably. Am I going to do well? Who knows. I haven’t been practicing as much as Tyler has been (and his combos look way more solid than mine do). I guess we’ll see, though.

Woo! Lookit that. A sufficient update. I need to do this more often.

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