Posts Tagged ‘BlazBlue’

Fighting Games, Life, and Video Games.

Thursday, March 20th, 2014

I haven’t updated here in forever, have I? I guess now is as good as a time as any.

I entered in the local BlazBlue tournament in January. There weren’t that many entrants, but I am happy I came in third place. I’m sure I could have performed a whole lot better if I really focused on working on new combos. The combos I have seem to be holding me through pretty well, but I feel like I’m genuinely limiting my ability if I don’t learn anything new. Those combos that are in muscle memory are pretty well rooted in muscle memory. I think I just need to do something more than what I already have.

Another thing I really need is matchup experience. I have a lot of experience playing against Tyler’s Kokonoe. I have a bit of experience playing against Estevan’s Valkenhayn. I understand how a lot of the other characters work. I have about as much matchup experience as I do from playing online in previous iterations of BlazBlue. When I rolled in to the tournament, I’ve only seen Azrael in play from videos and Score Attack. Not a whole lot of experience otherwise. I locked up pretty good playing against Chavelo’s Azrael. I feel like I would’ve done better if I had more matchup experience, but hindsight is always 20/20.

The Atomic Mesa household hasn’t been streaming a whole lot lately. We did try something different in the past few months, though: we streamed a Vanguard card game tournament. It was a lot of fun, even though we were lacking in streaming gear at the time. The players thought it was an amazing idea, and they all really wanted to play for the stream. We had advertising on the Cardfight! Vanguard Facebook, and we actually had people in the chat discussing what was going on in the game. It was pretty successful! It was a unique experience for us, and I think we’ll be better prepared for stuff like that in the future.

Tyler has been really busy building and modding fight sticks lately. He recently built a custom Melty Blood stick for himself that came out quite amazing. He designed the art himself, put the stick together, and he even put LEDs into the stick. He went through the effort of programming the LEDs, and it paid off. The stick is quite amazing.

Besides the stick he built, he is also building me my waifu (Kuroneko) stick! He has put in so much effort making it perfect, and I am blown away with what he’s done so far. He’s put the entire thing together save for the wiring (we’re still waiting on the wiring harness to come in). I’ll have to post pictures of it once it’s finished–the work he’s done has exceeded my expectations and then some.

I think I would be doing more with things, but having two jobs has been taking up a lot of my time. I work eight hours a day for my main job, then I go home and get things done around the house, then I go and squeeze in however many hours of work for my second job (depending on how much stuff they have for me at the time). I barely have enough time to squish in gaming, much less a social life. Oh, and add going to the gym on a regular basis in there, and… free time? What’s that? I don’t understand what free time is anymore. I like being busy, sure, but maybe this is a bit much.

On the bright side, I have really been using my handwritten journals lately. I haven’t missed a day since I started seriously writing in the daily ones in January. I’ve almost filled my general journal, too. I’m trying to write more, even if it is about stupid stuff. I feel rusty (since all I really work on is formatting and editing these days), but I think I will eventually get a handle on things again.

Welp. I think that was a good start. Now to actually see if I can keep up on this thing…

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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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Another Day of P4A Training

Thursday, August 16th, 2012

I have been greatly amused by the fact that playing Persona 4 Arena (P4A) is helping me get better at BlazBlue but not vice versa. I ended up playing Tyler and Shota at P4A last night, and while I feel I have a few more things down in the game, I just don’t think anything has improved when it comes to how I’m playing. I essentially forgot a lot of the basic setups that I learned (which I had to relearn while I was playing matches). And, while playing Tyler and Shota, The only thing I noticed that I improved on while playing against my friends was that my zoning with both Yukiko and Elizabeth had gotten a little better. I still only have a general idea of how both Yukiko and Elizabeth play, so I still wasn’t able to follow up any attacks that I managed to land. Oh well. I’ll probably poke at BlazBlue a little more before heading straight back into P4A training. I know I’ve invested so much time and effort into BlazBlue that the mechanics are just so natural to me, but I really should cut back so that I can focus on getting better at this new game. I know that the newest iteration of BlazBlue will probably come out next year, but that’s a long ways away to keep nursing at a game that is, for the most part, dead.

How sad. Especially since I was finally starting to get kinda decent at the game, too.

One thing I noticed while playing a couple of matches online in BlazBlue is that I am incredibly bad of utilizing anti-air attacks. I know that they’re there, and I know which attacks I can end up using if I need to defend against getting rushed down from the air. Nevertheless, my reflexes keep having me hit other buttons, which usually ends up with me getting my ass handed to me on a platter. I think I just need to break this habit. If I see an opponent trying to air dash at me to get in my defenses (especially since I play as zoning characters), I need to make it a reflex to hit with an anti-air (or block, good grief).

I still have yet to start looking into combos for the characters that I’ve been playing as the most (Teddie, Yukiko, Elizabeth). I’m not sure why I haven’t done this yet. Even if I don’t learn the most complicated of combos, I really just need to capitalize on the attacks that I do manage to pull off. In BlazBlue, it always felt so rewarding to have different options to capitalize off of when I’d get in one random hit. My friend Ryyudo mentioned to me, when I played a gauntlet of matches with him, that I was really good at getting in surprise hits, but I just never seemed to follow through after I’d get them. If I were able to capitalize off of the random hits I could get in with pretty much anything, I would increase my damage output and probably win more matches. Sure, this is a very obvious conclusion to draw, but I think this hindrance is definitely contributing to me losing a lot of my matches. I pretty much get so close in beating my opponent, but if I make just a little extra push, I think I could wreck more people consistently.

Tyler is definitely getting better at the game, though. He is doing a lot of the things that I haven’t been doing, such as consistently following up on whatever hit he happens to get in. He’s got his main and his very likely sub chosen, while I’m still at an impasse with three characters. Some days I feel better playing as Teddie. Other days I’m better with Yukiko. And I’m not able to put in enough effort to get better with one character. I’m feeling spread pretty thin, relying on primarily gimmicks and crossed fingers to get me through my matches.

Tyler and I have been training against Shota for the explicit fact that Shota’s pretty decent at using Mitsuru. Shota has played as charge characters in Street Fighter, not to mention he’s pretty good at fighters in general. And, well, Mitsuru is just scary. She’s fast, she hits hard, she has insane reach, and all of that is even without using her Persona. Shota was pretty much pounding both me and Tyler into a pulp without even really having a grasp of the game and most of the moves. He’s good enough at fighters to know when to attack, how to block, and how to capitalize on opponent mistakes.

It was brutal.

Nevertheless, I think it was good that Tyler and I played him as much as we did. Even though all Mitsurus won’t play the same, at least we’ll both have a better idea of how to avoid different types of attacks from her when we see them coming. That, and we can practice our own defenses without killing our percentages online.

The moral of this story is that I need more practice… oh, and that I need to start doing that research that I claim that I’m always going to do. ._.

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What the BlazBlue?!

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012

In order to prevent myself from getting hypersaturated on Persona 4 Arena (P4A) this early, I end up spending the occasional day switching back to BlazBlue to see if my P4A endeavors are helping or hindering my overall fighting game progress. Since P4A is my main game right now, I’m really not all that concerned with my percentage in ranked matches when it comes to BlazBlue. I was also curious to see if the BlazBlue community was still alive at this point. So, last night, I hopped on Network Mode and played a couple of ranked matches.

I probably should have warmed up before hopping right into ranked matches. I managed to win the first match I played, but I ended up losing the match I played right after that. I played against the same person both games, but my movements, moves, and rhythm was so clunky for both games that it was almost embarrassing. It should have been a complete domination, but it was pretty pathetic on my end.

I played one more match after that (which I lost), but I didn’t feel so bad since the lag was so bad that there was almost a two second delay between me pressing the button and the move registering on screen. I’m amazed I even was able to deal any damage to the other person. It was pretty dismal.

I warmed up a bit after that by playing a couple games of Abyss mode. Let me tell you, if there’s one thing I love about BlazBlue and playing as Lambda-11, it is definitely the brutality of my corner combos. For the average player, my corner combos seem rather overwhelming and near impossible to get out of. Of course, as I was watching my execution, I noticed that there is a pretty convenient loophole out. But for the most part, I can get a significant chunk of damage in without so much as any effort. What I also like about my corner combos is that they’re heavy on mixups. Even though I’m doing all the motions reflexively, the motions aren’t the same every single time. Apparently somewhere along the way, I got to the point where I could evaluate my spacing and use the appropriate moves as to where the pressure stays constant. Oh! Not to mention that, if the appropriate string happens, the combo resets so that proration doesn’t do as much harm as it could. Usually these resets happen so fast that the opponent doesn’t have enough time to react before the combo starts again.

That made me happy.

My blocking is improved from when I was playing BlazBlue seriously last, too. I find myself being on the defensive a bit more often and punishing openings appropriately. This doesn’t happen as often as I’d like (I do tend to drop my blocking a bit early sometimes), but I’m starting to see the rhythm in attacks and where I can capitalize off of my opponent’s mistakes or inexperience.

For some reason, I get more stressed out playing online matches in BlazBlue than I do in P4A. I still have yet to figure out why this is the case.

After Abyss mode and another network match (which I lost to a really high-level player), I went in Challenge mode to see if I got better at BlazBlue combos.

Hey! Look at that! I was able to do one of Ragna’s aerial combos, one of Jin’s aerial combos, and one of Jin’s timing specific combos that I couldn’t do before.

Almost all my Lambda combos are pretty solid, too. I rarely, if ever, mess up my aerial finishers with Lambda. I’ve also been finding other moves that I never realized combo together, too. Huh. Figures that this happens when I stop playing BlazBlue, huh?

Going back to P4A tonight. Let’s see if I can start getting better at this game…

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Day 3 of Persona 4 Arena and Revisiting BlazBlue

Friday, August 10th, 2012

I never knew I’d be so appreciative of the hundreds of hours I spent smashing out the same combos over and over again in BlazBlue. Sure, it was good practice. I always thought it would have been more beneficial if I had practiced my combos half as much and invested the other half of my time in playing matches online against real people. After all, what is a combo if you can’t execute it in a real life situation? It’s not like your opponent is going to just stand there and let you get the ideal setup for your combo. You need to learn how to optimally punish whatever hits you happen to get in, and you need to learn how to accommodate your combos based on the situation at hand. Nevertheless, I think all that practice in BlazBlue has made my life at least a bit easier when it comes to P4A.

Even though I’ve played fighting games for a lot of my life, BlazBlue was the first fighting game that I ever took as seriously as I did. I devoted hours upon hours researching combos and frame data, mashing out the same combo over and over again for hours until it was second nature, and playing online until my hands wanted to fall off. For a little while there, practicing BlazBlue almost became a full-time job, taking up at least four hours of my day, if not eight or more. I started understanding more about execution, timing, priority, and strategy. BlazBlue was also the fighting game where I transitioned from playing on the Xbox 360 controller to an arcade stick. I’m glad I did, and I don’t ever see myself going back. Anyways…

Even though I felt like I was having a hard time transitioning from BlazBlue to P4A, I can definitely appreciate all the little nuances that BlazBlue taught me. When I dived right into the challenge mode on P4A, I was amazed at how smooth my execution was when it came to the combos. The only thing that was really giving me trouble initially was button confusion with the change in layout. When trying out combos that involved slight delays in input and rather specific timing, I was able to see and feel things a lot faster than I would have if I didn’t play BlazBlue as adamantly as I did. I could tell by listening to the rhythm of my button taps if I poorly timed a combo. I could watch character animations and see if I needed to do something different to land my combos. As I kept plowing through challenges, I could see that a lot has changed since I first started taking my games seriously.

Feels good, man.

Just after three days of poking around P4A, I noticed my timing was significantly improving when it came to combos. Even though BlazBlue muscle memory was getting in the way here or there… things were just clicking really well. And that made me wonder if this was all just attributed to the P4A system or if my execution was actually getting tighter and more refined. I decided to do a test run by playing BlazBlue Continuum Shift Extend for a little while.

…let’s just say that I was pleasantly surprised.

I hopped on to Challenge mode on BlazBlue and selected Lambda-11 (my girl!). I started from the first trial, and I was happy to see that I was right–my execution is definitely improving. I went through the majority of the trials without having to attempt them more than once. And the trials that I once had to try an excruciating amount of times before I got them by sheer luck? I was immediately able to tell what I was doing wrong when I attempted them a long time before, and I was able to efficiently correct all the mistakes I made in the past. I even beat some challenges that I just couldn’t figure out for the life of me back in the day. Once I got the general method of execution down, I could reliably perform these new combos over and over again. I knew I was feeling pretty good about things, but I didn’t think that three days with P4A would have made that much of a difference.

Glad to see that things are paying off in some form or another.

I still have a long way to go; this isn’t a bad thing, though. I have to keep reminding myself that I’ve only had the game in my possession for less than a week. Of course I’m not going to be as good as I am at BlazBlue right away. Of course I’m not going to know, off the top of my head, what button combinations do what for all the characters in the game. I’m not going to know what attacks to look for from certain characters just yet. All these little nuances come from research, experience, practice, and TIME. Hell, I haven’t even decided on a character I want to focus on just yet.

I still enjoy playing as Teddie, but I’m a bit worried that I’m relying too much on a lot of the overwhelming amount of random items he employs. The game is still fresh enough to where I can get away with that from time to time, but I can’t rely on that forever. I’m also really enjoying playing as Elizabeth, too. Yukiko and Akihiko are still on my roster, as well. I guess it’s better to have four plausible mains than still having no clue. I think I just need to start doing my research and see what best suits my playing style.

Playing my roommates and my friends has been helping me get a feel for all the characters, which I think is essential for building the appropriate countermeasures later on down the road. Playing online on two different systems will help that, too, when the time comes. I’m also looking forward to doing my research when I settle down on a character or two, as well. I’m feeling pretty good about things so far. I’ve got a good start going, and now all I gotta do is keep on running with it.

I still have a over a month before the first local tournament, and I have a lot of time before EVO to really hammer things down. Sure, I have a lot of things to focus on until then that isn’t just hammering away at P4A, but I know if I set my mind to it, I can make it happen.

…it’s worth a shot. 🙂

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