When you think about it, this is kind of a weird place to end up, isn't it? The combo video community is about as far as you can get from the general fighting game community, which is about as far as you can get from the mainstream gaming community, which used to be about as far as you could get from the word "acceptable" in "socially acceptable hobby."
So i'm a little interested in hearing everyone's stories. I'll tell mine too but not if i'm gonna be the only one rambling at length about myself.
The Saga of Me
Re: The Saga of Me
I'm not sure which parts you want people to talk about? How they got into games or how they got into combo videos. My combovideo legacy began when I started noticing there was a lot of stuff people didnt try with top tier characters. Since people only wanted to win i noticed everything was scripted so I tried messing with odd combos. Eventually I moved up into low tier characters and thats where I began to see how crazy MvC2 was. There isnt really much history I guess. *shrug*
-
fullmetalross
- Posts: 360
- Joined: Fri Dec 15, 2006 8:12 am
Re: The Saga of Me
I was born. I grew up. While growing up I owned a Sega Genesis. My parents one day bought me.... Super Street Fighter 2, this wasn't my friends crappy Street Fighter 2, I had more characters new moves and all sorts of amazing things. I played it all the time. Everyday, for hours on end, I ran tournaments using the included tournament mode, and of course I always won. It was funny because the only move I could do consistently was fireball. I never charged enough for charge moves and I couldn't do dragon punches. I actually used to have to play it on a standard sega controller, it had 3 buttons and to switch you had to press select. I used to try and do cr.short, select, cr.jab, fireball it was awesome. For years afterwards I would be playing fighting games, I never had any competition so of course I sucked, but I kept playing, eventually discovering emulation. I followed emulation pretty well, I had all the games, and when KOF 99 came out I actually found a cracked rom for it on some japanese sight, while most of the community at large was still talking about how to effectively dump the game.
As my interest in KOF games grew I started watching all the videos, especially the persona stuff for Garou and KOF. I remember watching this video and my mind was blown. I had no clue any of that stuff was possible in garou. I couldn't even figure out how he was doing some of it! I remember watching it a million times, and then booting up my emulator and trying over and over again to do all the different combos, since I was doing them on a microsoft sidewinder gamepad, I had some trouble getting almost anything down. But I did learn a few small things, though at this time I had no friends because I had just moved to a new state so I stayed in and played games in solitude, not really improving, just watching any combo video I could find at the time. As I continued on my interest sort of waned, I was a console scrub who never had anyone to play against, so I moved on, I still had a bunch of fighting games, I even had an old Agetec Green Goblin, but I rarely did anything other than try and beat the game, get all the endings, unlock all the colors. Then something amazing happened, I went to college.
At my college tucked away in a corner of the basement, was an old dingy bowling alley. I remember walking by there one day and peering through the window, and what did I see? A game I had never owned or played before Capcom Vs Snk 1 and not only was there 1 person there playing it already, there were 2! They were actually playing against each other, for fun! It was something I hadn't seen since I was a young kid with my Genesis. I walked in and watched them play a few rounds, and I was continually blown away, with each new hit a combo sprang to life. Not just normals into more normals, there were combos into specials, combos into supers, people were throwing and then combing after the throw! It was great! So I stepped up, put my quarter on and proceeded to get my ass handed to me. Luckily I am stubborn. Very stubborn. I got more money, put more quarters in, and lost over and over and over again. I remember as I was learning to play the game I lost to the best player in our arcade probably 30 times in a row. He kept telling me to stop playing, it wasn't worth it, but I never quit, and I eventually beat him a game.
Needless to say I was hooked, and I remembered all my old resources for information on fighting games, so I waided around the internet looking for strategies, execution advice anything I could find, and I found SRK. Within its hallowed halls not much was said about cvs 1 aside from an old jChen article and a few combo videos, but it was enough, I read the articles through and through, listened to all their advice I watched the basic systems videos, I even remember finding an old combo by some guy named Art. He did so many supers with guile I didn't think it was possible. From this little info I actually was able to start dissecting the game. Combined with an amazing systems faq by Jchen himself I started doing combos no one had ever seen before, things I had taken from Jchens guide and applied to my game, I even invented my own combos, like the time I invented the best king anti-air of all time, cr.fp xx rh suprise rose, I did it once by accident just because I liked to cancel my anti-airs into things, it anti-aired dhalsim and then combo'd and the guy next to me just started freaking out, what a feeling!
Eventually I started beating everyone at least some of the time, and my group of friends who played expanded, and within them I found people to introduce me to other games, and I we bounced ideas about things to in game off each other, plus I lurked SRK nonstop trying to pick things up. CVS stayed my favorite game, though I moved up to CVS 2 because it was newer and there were tourney's for it in my area, and as I was wondered around the internet I ran into Majestros and his combos, after that the rest is pretty boring, I came up with some setups, asked Maj a million questions, became the guy to ask system minutia to in my area (though I can't remember everything) eventually Maj started this great place and hopefully one day I'll make a full length video of my own. Thats about it.
As my interest in KOF games grew I started watching all the videos, especially the persona stuff for Garou and KOF. I remember watching this video and my mind was blown. I had no clue any of that stuff was possible in garou. I couldn't even figure out how he was doing some of it! I remember watching it a million times, and then booting up my emulator and trying over and over again to do all the different combos, since I was doing them on a microsoft sidewinder gamepad, I had some trouble getting almost anything down. But I did learn a few small things, though at this time I had no friends because I had just moved to a new state so I stayed in and played games in solitude, not really improving, just watching any combo video I could find at the time. As I continued on my interest sort of waned, I was a console scrub who never had anyone to play against, so I moved on, I still had a bunch of fighting games, I even had an old Agetec Green Goblin, but I rarely did anything other than try and beat the game, get all the endings, unlock all the colors. Then something amazing happened, I went to college.
At my college tucked away in a corner of the basement, was an old dingy bowling alley. I remember walking by there one day and peering through the window, and what did I see? A game I had never owned or played before Capcom Vs Snk 1 and not only was there 1 person there playing it already, there were 2! They were actually playing against each other, for fun! It was something I hadn't seen since I was a young kid with my Genesis. I walked in and watched them play a few rounds, and I was continually blown away, with each new hit a combo sprang to life. Not just normals into more normals, there were combos into specials, combos into supers, people were throwing and then combing after the throw! It was great! So I stepped up, put my quarter on and proceeded to get my ass handed to me. Luckily I am stubborn. Very stubborn. I got more money, put more quarters in, and lost over and over and over again. I remember as I was learning to play the game I lost to the best player in our arcade probably 30 times in a row. He kept telling me to stop playing, it wasn't worth it, but I never quit, and I eventually beat him a game.
Needless to say I was hooked, and I remembered all my old resources for information on fighting games, so I waided around the internet looking for strategies, execution advice anything I could find, and I found SRK. Within its hallowed halls not much was said about cvs 1 aside from an old jChen article and a few combo videos, but it was enough, I read the articles through and through, listened to all their advice I watched the basic systems videos, I even remember finding an old combo by some guy named Art. He did so many supers with guile I didn't think it was possible. From this little info I actually was able to start dissecting the game. Combined with an amazing systems faq by Jchen himself I started doing combos no one had ever seen before, things I had taken from Jchens guide and applied to my game, I even invented my own combos, like the time I invented the best king anti-air of all time, cr.fp xx rh suprise rose, I did it once by accident just because I liked to cancel my anti-airs into things, it anti-aired dhalsim and then combo'd and the guy next to me just started freaking out, what a feeling!
Eventually I started beating everyone at least some of the time, and my group of friends who played expanded, and within them I found people to introduce me to other games, and I we bounced ideas about things to in game off each other, plus I lurked SRK nonstop trying to pick things up. CVS stayed my favorite game, though I moved up to CVS 2 because it was newer and there were tourney's for it in my area, and as I was wondered around the internet I ran into Majestros and his combos, after that the rest is pretty boring, I came up with some setups, asked Maj a million questions, became the guy to ask system minutia to in my area (though I can't remember everything) eventually Maj started this great place and hopefully one day I'll make a full length video of my own. Thats about it.
Last edited by fullmetalross on Tue Nov 04, 2008 6:37 am, edited 3 times in total.
Re: The Saga of Me
I'm sort of the same as Mags. No real story.
I have only ever had two reasons. Either A) because I didn't have competition in a game that I'm interested in, and so I picked it apart out of either boredom or the need to appease my burning interests in some way. Or B) when some one asks me a direct/specific question that peaks my interest enough for me to be very thorough with an answer.
In a way, I guess you could sum up my reasoning for doing anything fighting game related in three simple letters: OCD
I've never done a video for 3S because I've always had local competition in it up until the time that I lost interest in the game. And it took a long time for me to make any videos for IaMP because the netplay competition was adequate enough to keep me content. And nothing for Jojo's because once again the times I was interested in it I've had competition either offline or online. All the videos I have made have only ever been motivated due to chance circumstances.
I have questions of my own, but I'll save them for later.
I have only ever had two reasons. Either A) because I didn't have competition in a game that I'm interested in, and so I picked it apart out of either boredom or the need to appease my burning interests in some way. Or B) when some one asks me a direct/specific question that peaks my interest enough for me to be very thorough with an answer.
In a way, I guess you could sum up my reasoning for doing anything fighting game related in three simple letters: OCD
I've never done a video for 3S because I've always had local competition in it up until the time that I lost interest in the game. And it took a long time for me to make any videos for IaMP because the netplay competition was adequate enough to keep me content. And nothing for Jojo's because once again the times I was interested in it I've had competition either offline or online. All the videos I have made have only ever been motivated due to chance circumstances.
I have questions of my own, but I'll save them for later.
Looks like Jolly Ranchers & Baskin's Sherbet.
Re: The Saga of Me
Well, i can tell you that i never expected to end up making a seventeen minute Guile video premiered at Evolution, that's for damn sure. Believe it or not, i can trace every step that led me here. So i thought it might be cool to have everyone share their roadmaps as well.
For me it started with SF2: Special Champion Edition on Sega Genesis, learning everything from scratch and eventually playing to beat the computer without losing a round. Continued playing fighting games on and off, with the same single-player mindset all the way through high school - mostly whatever Capcom games they had at the store on the way home, along with a little KoF96/97 and Tekken 2/3.
I've always loved Capcom artwork, both in-game sprites and concept art that would show up in magazines and strategy guides. Whenever i got burnt out on fighting games, it was always the full sets of character artwork they used to premiere in gaming magazines that got me hyped for the next game.
College changed everything because MvC2 and CvS1 both came out in my freshman year. Since there was only one of each machine in the UCI arcade, it was impossible to play alone, so i started learning how to play against people, then started to enjoy competition, which led me to SRK, which led me to SHGL. Suddenly the player community replaced the game itself as the primary reason i loved Street Fighter.
I liked combo videos from the instant i became aware of their existence and got a chance to watch one. However, the very first thing i read on SRK was the Domination 101 article series by s-kill, who explained that combo video people are "often weaker on certain fundamentals" and "focus on showboating," becoming "that much less centered on the bottom line." Which, in all honesty, is true. So even though people like jchensor and NKI were my heroes for showing us how cool these games can really be, i believed Seth's argument that everything is secondary to becoming unbeatable.
By the time CvS2 came around, i already knew almost everyone in the SoCal community. Out of the blue, tragic (who i didn't really know that well) invited me to his place to help him work on an early CvS2 video. Until i saw him capture a combo with my own eyes, it never occurred to me that making combo videos was something that humans could do. Yeah, i dunno, i must have thought it was a super power or something. But suddenly it all made sense and seemed completely feasible.
Not long after that, i started recording clips on a VHS tape so i could drive over to MrWizard's house and ask him to capture them for me since i couldn't afford a capture card myself. Even then, my intention was never to become a combo video maker, because i was still way more interested in becoming as good as CaliPower, ChoiBoy, and the legendary Mike Watson, whom i never met until way later cuz he was taking a break from arcades.
My first video was a CvS2 Chun Li Strategy Guide posted on the now-defunct Clockw0rk.com, and my second video was a CvS2 Randomness compilation which contained a few combos but was mainly an attempt to get more people to give CvS2 a chance. MvC2 was the big game at the time, and CvS2 seemed rather dry in comparison. It wasn't until my third video that i tried my hand at combos, focusing on Guile cuz i'd basically become known as SHGL's Guile player at that point. Plus he was a perfect fit for the kinds of combo ideas that interested me the most in CvS2.
Some two weeks later, Clockw0rk.com closed down without warning. When it became clear that it wouldn't be returning, i decided i had worked way too hard on my videos to let them disappear from the internet. Like i said, everyone knew me as the Guile player, so i just used him as the theme for Sonic Hurricane. Plus by then i'd gotten to see a TZW video and of course it blew me away. Guile seemed to be his favorite character too, so it seemed like a good choice. At the very least, copying colors from Guile's sprite saved me a hell of a lot of time picking my own color scheme. Having my own website was obviously a big part of becoming known in the SRK community at large, although these days it's probably even easier with a u2b account.
The next big milestone was SHGL closing down. I got 2nd place at the last weekly CvS2 tournament ever held there, losing to CaliPower. He was nice enough to try to let me win, but Wizard said he'd disqualify us both. Anyway, Camelot Golfland sucked, Regency had too many false starts, and FFA was too far so i started playing fewer and fewer matches - spending more and more time in Training Mode. No arcade has ever been as cool, consistent, or convenient as Southern Hills Golfland.
Another major turning point was the combination of jchensor's Ode to the 2-Hit Combo project and helping Wizard with the BradyGames SFAC Guide. Before driving out to Wizard's house that day, i had never tried to do any advanced ST combos. Even back in high school, all of the stores and pizza parlors near me skipped from SSF2 to SFA, so ST was like some mythical alien thing to me. Yet nearly every combo i needed to do, i was able to pull off in only a couple of tries. After that weekend, i felt totally comfortable wandering way outside the boundaries of CvS2.
Some more stuff happened - some good, some bad, some bullshit. Slowly, my combo maker friends began to outnumber my tournament player friends. Of course i didn't realize it until much later because SRK masks that, making you think you're directly in touch with everyone when in reality you're usually only reading and responding to a handful of people.
Finally, after years of performing combos manually, i decided it was time to try program pads and emulator tools. Everything changed. Ideas i'd only dreamt of performing suddenly become possible, and lots of new doors opened up. Not surprisingly, getting better a programming combos has made me that much less patient with manual execution. Having made so many combo videos with regular Sega Dreamcast pads, i don't feel the need to prove myself in that regard.
I still love playing competitive matches, especially in ST. But knowing what i can create with a few hours and a program pad, it's gotten that much harder to justify spending an hour on the road driving to an arcade to play against random strangers and losing to gimmicks that would've never caught me a couple of years ago. Competitive play is all-or-nothing so being a little rusty can be very frustrating.
And of course, there's this forum, which has only drawn me closer to the Training Mode side of the fighting game spectrum. It's fair to say that i'd never even think of orchestrating MvSF screenshots if it wasn't for sh/f. Thanks guys!
For me it started with SF2: Special Champion Edition on Sega Genesis, learning everything from scratch and eventually playing to beat the computer without losing a round. Continued playing fighting games on and off, with the same single-player mindset all the way through high school - mostly whatever Capcom games they had at the store on the way home, along with a little KoF96/97 and Tekken 2/3.
I've always loved Capcom artwork, both in-game sprites and concept art that would show up in magazines and strategy guides. Whenever i got burnt out on fighting games, it was always the full sets of character artwork they used to premiere in gaming magazines that got me hyped for the next game.
College changed everything because MvC2 and CvS1 both came out in my freshman year. Since there was only one of each machine in the UCI arcade, it was impossible to play alone, so i started learning how to play against people, then started to enjoy competition, which led me to SRK, which led me to SHGL. Suddenly the player community replaced the game itself as the primary reason i loved Street Fighter.
I liked combo videos from the instant i became aware of their existence and got a chance to watch one. However, the very first thing i read on SRK was the Domination 101 article series by s-kill, who explained that combo video people are "often weaker on certain fundamentals" and "focus on showboating," becoming "that much less centered on the bottom line." Which, in all honesty, is true. So even though people like jchensor and NKI were my heroes for showing us how cool these games can really be, i believed Seth's argument that everything is secondary to becoming unbeatable.
By the time CvS2 came around, i already knew almost everyone in the SoCal community. Out of the blue, tragic (who i didn't really know that well) invited me to his place to help him work on an early CvS2 video. Until i saw him capture a combo with my own eyes, it never occurred to me that making combo videos was something that humans could do. Yeah, i dunno, i must have thought it was a super power or something. But suddenly it all made sense and seemed completely feasible.
Not long after that, i started recording clips on a VHS tape so i could drive over to MrWizard's house and ask him to capture them for me since i couldn't afford a capture card myself. Even then, my intention was never to become a combo video maker, because i was still way more interested in becoming as good as CaliPower, ChoiBoy, and the legendary Mike Watson, whom i never met until way later cuz he was taking a break from arcades.
My first video was a CvS2 Chun Li Strategy Guide posted on the now-defunct Clockw0rk.com, and my second video was a CvS2 Randomness compilation which contained a few combos but was mainly an attempt to get more people to give CvS2 a chance. MvC2 was the big game at the time, and CvS2 seemed rather dry in comparison. It wasn't until my third video that i tried my hand at combos, focusing on Guile cuz i'd basically become known as SHGL's Guile player at that point. Plus he was a perfect fit for the kinds of combo ideas that interested me the most in CvS2.
Some two weeks later, Clockw0rk.com closed down without warning. When it became clear that it wouldn't be returning, i decided i had worked way too hard on my videos to let them disappear from the internet. Like i said, everyone knew me as the Guile player, so i just used him as the theme for Sonic Hurricane. Plus by then i'd gotten to see a TZW video and of course it blew me away. Guile seemed to be his favorite character too, so it seemed like a good choice. At the very least, copying colors from Guile's sprite saved me a hell of a lot of time picking my own color scheme. Having my own website was obviously a big part of becoming known in the SRK community at large, although these days it's probably even easier with a u2b account.
The next big milestone was SHGL closing down. I got 2nd place at the last weekly CvS2 tournament ever held there, losing to CaliPower. He was nice enough to try to let me win, but Wizard said he'd disqualify us both. Anyway, Camelot Golfland sucked, Regency had too many false starts, and FFA was too far so i started playing fewer and fewer matches - spending more and more time in Training Mode. No arcade has ever been as cool, consistent, or convenient as Southern Hills Golfland.
Another major turning point was the combination of jchensor's Ode to the 2-Hit Combo project and helping Wizard with the BradyGames SFAC Guide. Before driving out to Wizard's house that day, i had never tried to do any advanced ST combos. Even back in high school, all of the stores and pizza parlors near me skipped from SSF2 to SFA, so ST was like some mythical alien thing to me. Yet nearly every combo i needed to do, i was able to pull off in only a couple of tries. After that weekend, i felt totally comfortable wandering way outside the boundaries of CvS2.
Some more stuff happened - some good, some bad, some bullshit. Slowly, my combo maker friends began to outnumber my tournament player friends. Of course i didn't realize it until much later because SRK masks that, making you think you're directly in touch with everyone when in reality you're usually only reading and responding to a handful of people.
Finally, after years of performing combos manually, i decided it was time to try program pads and emulator tools. Everything changed. Ideas i'd only dreamt of performing suddenly become possible, and lots of new doors opened up. Not surprisingly, getting better a programming combos has made me that much less patient with manual execution. Having made so many combo videos with regular Sega Dreamcast pads, i don't feel the need to prove myself in that regard.
I still love playing competitive matches, especially in ST. But knowing what i can create with a few hours and a program pad, it's gotten that much harder to justify spending an hour on the road driving to an arcade to play against random strangers and losing to gimmicks that would've never caught me a couple of years ago. Competitive play is all-or-nothing so being a little rusty can be very frustrating.
And of course, there's this forum, which has only drawn me closer to the Training Mode side of the fighting game spectrum. It's fair to say that i'd never even think of orchestrating MvSF screenshots if it wasn't for sh/f. Thanks guys!
Re: The Saga of Me
I think for me it was a combination of two things:
1) Just in general, I'm quite curious and I love to understand/figure out how things work. When I first saw TZW and Skill Smith videos, my reaction wasn't just, "Whoa, that's crazy"...it was more like "Whoa, that's crazy, and I gotta know how he did that."
2) Playing competitively was out of the question because I had no local competition, so I had to make the game fun somehow.
1) Just in general, I'm quite curious and I love to understand/figure out how things work. When I first saw TZW and Skill Smith videos, my reaction wasn't just, "Whoa, that's crazy"...it was more like "Whoa, that's crazy, and I gotta know how he did that."
2) Playing competitively was out of the question because I had no local competition, so I had to make the game fun somehow.