ComboVid

After winning last week’s screenshot caption contest, yungxcve nominated this match between sako’s Cammy and Daigo’s Ryu (starting at the 1:08:45 mark). In his words, “Sako’s my favorite offensive mastermind while Daigo’s an overall mastermind of Street Fighter.”

players: Daigo (Ryu-U1) vs sako (Cammy-U1)

observations:
It’s pretty funny watching Daigo spend the entire round walking backward and throwing fireballs, then air Hurricane Kicking his way out of the corner to walk back some more. In fact in the third round (starting at 1:10:43) the real battle doesn’t even begin until 30 seconds have gone off the clock. Cammy needs ultra to make Ryu stop throwing fireballs, and Daigo forces sako to pay that tax up front. Then sako spends the rest of the match just a couple of pixels outside Ryu’s c.MK range. Check out how many of Daigo’s c.MK’s barely whiff. That’s really the key to sako’s success, so pay attention to all the different setups for avoiding and punishing that move. Too bad turtle Daigo knows how to save meter.

Continue reading →

Dogface’s Wolverine is always fun to watch in X-Men vs Street Fighter, but the main reason i’m posting this is because of a weird fireball interaction between Ryu and Charlie.

players: Dogface (Ryu/Wolverine) vs RoTeNdO (Magneto/Charlie)

highlights:
At 1:01, Ryu’s Shinku Hadoken trades with Charlie’s Sonic Break, but the beam eradicates the five remaining Sonic Booms in one or two frames. Is there an upper limit to the number of objects that the beam can hit at once? Charlie doesn’t get hit, interestingly enough, but he was kind of far away. Maybe the beam’s hitbox expands horizontally during startup instead of appearing instantly across the entire field?

Continue reading →

Was this the most exciting Tatsunoko vs Capcom match ever recorded? I remember it was nominated for Match of the Year on SRK a while back, but lost to SF4 Sakura i believe.

players: Kubo (Karas/Ryu) vs Gian (ChunLi/Ryu)

observations:
That whole last “round” is unbelievable. Can you even call that a comeback? 1P had over 95% life, 2P had under 5% life, and yet it still comes down to one clean hit. I’d say “Ryu is strong” normally, but extreme Ryu on Ryu violence makes it tough to do that.

Continue reading →

For those who don’t know, Jeff “LAAkuma” Schaefer was one of the best Hyper Fighting players in SoCal during the game’s arcade prime. I guess he got together with watts and Gerald sometime last year, and spliced together this footage from their play session.

players: Jeff “LAAkuma” Schaefer (Blanka) vs Mike Watson and Gerald Abraham

observations:
There’s so much about this video i’ll never understand. Why is that terrible Creed song playing in the background? Who is the mysterious figure that appears at 1:33? What happened to Guile at 0:39?? At any rate, this video demonstrates some of HF Blanka’s nastier tricks, including Schaefer’s famous repeat vertical jumping tactic at 0:30. It’s really hard to deal with that without taking massive risks. And check out that Electricity trade with Dhalsim’s limbs at 0:50. It evens the damage and basically turns the whole match around by cornering Dhalsim!

Continue reading →