Here is how to up your game in fighting games:
Stop being terrible.
Hope that helps.
Upping Your Game
March 18th, 2012 by Jamison T. RumpetsThe Penny Arcade Report
February 21st, 2012 by Jamison T. RumpetsHey, it’s a new post!
I felt like it was necessary for me to make a post showcasing The Penny Arcade Report and why it is much cooler than you. You’re probably going over all the reasons that you’re incredibly cool, but I have to burst your cool bubble and show you why the Penny Arcade Report is one of the best things to happen to video game journalism in a long time.
I’ve had a big problem with the state of video game journalism for a long time. Being a former video game journalist myself (albeit not a very notable one), I know what it’s like to try and write news articles for a website. It’s very obviously different than writing for my personal blog.
Firstly, you have much less freedom when writing for a website. That’s sort of a natural realization though, isn’t it? The site has a certain image it’s trying to present, and if nine of the ten articles I’ve written are showcasing which video games have cocks hidden in them they are going to have trouble with me. Websites define how good an article is based on how many views, or “hits”, it gets. What type of articles does this produce? Well to be extremely blunt, it produces utter shit.
Ben Kuchera maps this out much more eloquently than me however. I’m not a weaver of words such as Ben or Tycho of Penny Arcade, but I try my best. Kuchera puts it as such:
“The super-blogs push content out at a furious pace, but the open secret is only a few interesting things happen each day in the world of video games. Everyone runs two or three interesting stories per day, and the rest is filler. The continual, relentless publication of stories that don’t say anything of worth, re-write an existing article, or exist only to grab page views with a few sexy images can be numbing. This is why so many people don’t take video game news seriously: there just isn’t enough out there to fill out a schedule that demands a story every twenty or thirty minutes.”
Wasn’t that a nice quote? He doesn’t even use any naughty words like I do! Truly this showcases the difference between a professional and an idiot, such as myself.
Back to the original topic which I brought up though (Remember what it was? It’s up there, where I said you have no freedom!). There’s a lot of rigidity involved in video game journalism. Articles end up being bland, mediocre, uneventful, and sometimes even completely nonsensical. Factual inaccuracies make frequent appearances in articles nowadays. This leads me to my second point.
Since articles are being shit out at an alarming rate, then the magic of “The Editorial” ends up becoming a dream rather than a reality. As a child, I have fond memories of reading video game magazines. The most notable in my memories would undoubtedly be the classic “EGM” (Electronic Gaming Monthly). It was my dream to write for this magazine, and it’s unfortunate but now that dream can never come true. EGM has since been out of print for several years now and it has everything to do with the internet.
Why have a subscription to a magazine that gives you month old news when you can get instant “gratification” from the internet news? I understand why magazines basically died out; even magazines like Game Informer need the endless bickering of a GameStop employee to shove their subscriptions down your throat.
Is that a good thing though? Obviously in magazines you had to wade through endless pages of advertisements, but what you got in return (at least in my opinion) were articles that seemed like they had actual content. Articles with some meat on their bones. Not every article was a winner, and of course even magazine journalism had its faults; however, I felt more comfortable reading those articles than the drivel that ends up on gaming websites nowadays.
Seeing an article with an outrageous headline to draw readers in isn’t gaming news. It isn’t even entertainment. It’s a poor attempt at drawing in readers that will eventually become enraged at the article as a whole. At that point, however, it’s too late. The person clicked on it, so the people running it count it as a win. “These types of articles interest people, look at all these hits!” The data ends up being read over the general response from the “crowd” as it were.
Gamers complain about all these types of articles, yet this is the norm; this is the standard of living we have become accustomed to. We read an article and go, “That article had no content,” then we are right back to the news feed to say the same thing about the 20 other articles being released. One could say it is an exercise in masochism how much gamers put up with this shit, but the reality is that there isn’t really an alternative. It ends up being “read this bad article” or “read no article.”
Why am I telling you this though? Chances are you aren’t a video game journalist, you’re a “consumer” such as myself. You’re one of the many readers who’s been victim to this type of poor writing and structure. You already know all this information. So what’s the point of me telling you, right? It’s sort of like me beckoning you over on the street and unveiling to you that yes, people tend to cry when they are sad.
I could lie and say that I have some sort of naive optimism that video game journalist will read this blog (which currently averages about 1 reader a month, usually myself) and change their ways. I could do that, or I could say that there are people making an effort to fix this type of shoddy journalism.
I mentioned it at the beginning of my post, Penny Arcade brought on board Ben Kuchera (the guy I quoted above) to present to you The Penny Arcade Report. They brought him on board awhile ago, but I suppose you could say that The Penny Arcade Report started up extremely recently, as early as yesterday or today.
What type of things can we expect from this endeavor? Well, if what they say is any truth at all (and I trust Penny Arcade’s backing, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the odds are high that it will be) then we will be seeing journalism that is respectable. Interesting articles about gaming? On the regular? How could this be possible?
So what is this blog post about anyway? Is it an advertisement? “Sure seems like it” you might be saying. You could be right, honestly. I’m trying my best to put this new thing out in the open. I don’t really see video game websites advertising this type of things to be honest. It’d be like if a new restaurant came out claiming to be way better than Red Robin and then Red Robin said, “That place is fucking banging check that shit out! Way better than us!” It just wouldn’t happen.
I want to see video game news that isn’t complete horse shit. I want to see articles with intelligent points and proper research done. I want to see news that gets my brain working. I’m tired of what video game journalism has turned into. I used to really want to be a video game journalist when I was younger perhaps out of some naive image I built up in my head. As I grew older, however, I soon realized that the field I wanted to join was turning into what it is now. There’s almost no part of me that wishes to be a part of video game journalism now, which is a shame because part of me thinks I would do okay in that field.
However, if journalists step their shit up and take a look at the type of things Penny Arcade is producing via The Penny Arcade Report I may be able to have that dream yet again. Is this about me? Not even a little bit, but everyone is a little selfish.
Best of luck to Ben Kuchera and The Penny Arcade Report. This is the first sign of hopefully better news; I’m hoping others will follow suit in whatever way they can.
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Follow Jamison Trumpets on Twitter. @JamisonTrumpets
Like this article? Let me know! E-mail me at jamisontrumpets@gmail.com
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Ocean Marketing - The Epitome of PR
December 27th, 2011 by Jamison T. RumpetsBefore you read this blog post, read this news post over at Penny Arcade.
It’s nice to know people still care about customer service.
There’s a lot of things that don’t make much sense about Ocean Marketing’s PR campaign to make themselves (or himself as it may be) seem like the douchiest people (person) on the planet, but the vague name-dropping mechanism is the weirdest part for me.
Actually, I should scratch that. The entire ordeal is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. When I worked at McDonalds and a customer treated me like a pile of shit, which is to say that when I worked at McDonalds any day period, I did not interrupt their angry ramblings to inform them that I, in fact, know the Ghost of Hammurabi so therefore you should shut your damn whore mouth and buy my product.
I understand that the people you know can get you to high places and possibly get your sweet-ass business started, but when it comes to maintaining and running your business I’m pretty sure those people are not willing to support your utter failure. To test the entire gaming community by saying “Come on. I dare you. You don’t have the stones to not buy my shit” you must either have millions stored in your bank or just be the dumbest person alive.
I’m banking on this guy being the latter. I think someone tried to make him see the light as he attempted to employ Fisher Price’s My First Apology by asking Mike Krahulik (aka Gabe) from Penny Arcade to “see where he’s coming from.”
I’m pretty sure we all saw where you were coming from. You just came back from a two week long trip from Douchetopia and you still haven’t been able to shake off their native customs of being absolute douchebags. That happened to me too when I went to Aruba. All of a sudden I wanted to overcharge people for mundane piece of shit items. I can empathize.
My point? It doesn’t matter how many people you know, because when you shit all over your customers they aren’t going to buy your shit. Dave is an anomaly in that he is still willing to not ask for an immediate refund. He really wants his product, which is a damn shame because that means money has been wasted supporting the devil.
Dreamhack, SRK, and Why People’s Opinions Are Stupid
November 29th, 2011 by Jamison T. RumpetsSome would say that I like to browse the internet. This is not entirely incorrect, but one of the main sites that I browse/peruse would definitely be the fighting game community’s center hub of Shoryuken.com also known as SRK. Recently, SRK has had an influx of new writers adding new content for them. They had a hiring and I guess these are the people they chose for the job.
They should reconsider their position on these new writers.
Despite this blog post’s title, I am not opposed to people having opinions. Opinions are great. They stir up debate and (occasionally) create fodder for some really dope ass conversations. I am fully in support of such products. Where opinions become bullshit is when people’s opinions are fucking retarded.
You may be saying, “You can’t say that about opinions! They are opinions, everyone is entitled to them!” You would be right except for the part where you are wrong. Everyone is entitled, nay privileged, to having a butt. People use their butt for many things, primarily they use it to defecate. The majority of people, and I use the word majority with the deepest expression of sadness on my face, use their butt to insert things into it. I’m not taking a shot at homosexuals, I’m saying that people take the time to put shit (not literally, because actually shit is the only thing that should exist in a butt) up their butt that has no business being up there.
My point is that people are entitled to their opinions, but that doesn’t mean that their opinion makes any fucking sense. Which brings me to the point of my article. Recently on SRK, there was a post concerning DreamHack, a huge competitive gaming exposition. Since SRK is a fighting game website (primarily), the post concerns the fact that in the middle of the Starcraft II semi-finals, they ran the Super Street Fighter 4 AE Grand Finals.
The tone of the SRK post is mostly disbelief that people watching could be so upset at such an event. The SRK article quotes a tweet made by an irate Starcraft II fan which states the following:
@terranfromtheyear5000: When you watch the Superbowl, They don’t play have [sic] the MLB World Series at half time do they? I want SC2, that is all.
The article quotes this tweet more in jest than anything, as if to say, “Check out this tweet made by a complete retard. This guy is wrong. The issue here is that this guy is absolutely correct.
Please don’t misunderstand, I love fighting games and I enjoy Starcraft II a lot as well. I think both games are incredible spectator sports as well as incredible games to play competitively as well. I think the issue stems in the ridiculous time slot the Grand Finals of SSF4:AE existed in. It was clearly placed there as if to say, “Hey guys check out this game! We’re relevant please look at me. 
”
While I definitely agree that Starcraft II is astronomically more popular than fighting games as a whole, I don’t think that fighting games have to resort to ridiculous ploys such as that to attract fans and viewers. In fact, these types of shenanigans just make the fighting game community look bad as a whole. It makes it look like the guy who desperately seeks attention at all possible moments of the day. We all know that guy, he’s the person who in the middle of a party will do a headstand or start break dancing to get enormous amounts of awkward attention. Most people are in agreement that we fucking hate that guy.
Fighting games don’t have to resort to doing headstands at awkward moments during gaming expositions, they are already growing at an exponential rate. I only joined the fighting game community in late 2007 (basically right before Street Fighter IV came out) and the fighting game community has nothing but quadrupled, if not quintupled since my entrance. I can’t take credit for all of it (or any of it for that matter), but fighting games are not so deep in the mud as far as interest and hype that we have to sandwich our Grand Finals in between other games’ semi-finals.
Yet the whole SRK article consists of nothing but snotty “pishaw” attitudes and quoting “sensible people in the Starcraft community” to try and push its absolutely fucking retarded point. All the while they quote djWHEAT, who is not specifically someone in the Starcraft community. djWHEAT has been engrossed in the fighting came community for a long time, he’s just not as knowledgeable about fighting games as he is about Starcraft.
While I agree that e-sports are e-sports, and therefore Starcraft players shouldn’t complain about the existence of other games the biggest issue is the time slot in which the game was placed in. I could make the same analogy that the guy in the twitter post made, but he’s absolutely correct. If I’m watching Scrubs, I don’t want to watch ER sandwiched in the middle of my Scrubs episode. If I’m watching basketball, I sure as hell better not see any fucking hockey anywhere or I will go apeshit.
The time slots for these games should have been placed separately. Period. End. Starcraft from X o’clock to Y o’clock and Street Fighter from Z o’clock to A o’clock. Stop trying to support headstands fighting game community, I know we’re better than that.
Want to see Jamison Trumpets play fighting games? He goes by the handle DanielRGT when playing, check him sometimes on Monday’s at Option-Select’s Mixup Monday Stream.
Important Fan Update
September 6th, 2011 by Jamison T. RumpetsVaginas rule.
FLASH UPDATE: Kevin thinks so too.
Words an English Teacher Should Know (But Doesn’t)
May 27th, 2011 by Jamison T. RumpetsI have a friend who is a middle school English teacher. I’ve known him for several years now and there are things about him that never cease to amaze me about him. The one thing that amazes me the most, however, would have to be his keen and almost encyclopedic knowledge of Webster’s Dictionary of the English language, except that I would like to ask that you respectfully replace “Webster’s Dictionary of the English language” with a song entitled “Slaves Built the Pyramids.”
I don’t claim to be some sort of English savant that hangs out with English every Saturday to play poker or some shit, but I do consider myself at the very least above-average at the incredible craft that is English. When one encounters an English teacher, the natural reaction would be to most likely humble yourself in the English department of your life. The main thought that comes to mind is, “This guy’s an actual English teacher, if I try to flaunt my fancy-pants English around he may trump me with the use of intimidating words and these semicolons I hear so much about.”
Thanks to my friend the English teacher (who for the sake of anonymity we will call “Buddy” from now on), I have never encountered that situation. It wasn’t until after I had met and talked with Buddy that it was revealed that he was an English teacher, which admittedly confused me. Talking with someone you can usually get a good feeling about their understanding and grasp of the English language, and my immediate reaction when talking to Buddy is that he was kind of a “bro”. So when the information that he was a middle school English teacher was revealed to me, I was immediately suspect.
“There’s no way,” I thought to myself. Now, I wish that the end of this long story was me being proved wrong and he actually has a shrine to Mark Twain in his closet, but alas life is not like in the movies. Everyday I am only reaffirmed of my initial thought when dealing with Buddy. Don’t get me wrong, Buddy is a nice person and that’s all well and good, but Buddy chose a strange profession for one still attempting to excavate past the meaning of high school level vocabulary and writing.
As such, I felt it only right to present you (the reader) with some of my findings. I shall update this list weekly (or bi-weekly depending on if Buddy’s having a good vocabulary week) with words that I think a middle school English teacher should know but quite frankly does not. This isn’t meant to be a big list trying to make fun of Buddy, except that just kidding it totally is.
The List
- Solace - As Buddy put it when he had to look it up when I used it in a text message to attempt to demean him in some way, solace means “something that gives comfort.” It’s a very basic word that I knew, when sending a text message using the word, Buddy would have no clue what it would mean. After spending many years being friends with Buddy, it’s almost guaranteed which parts of the dictionary will confuse him the most. The X session probably just looks like mayhem to him, or possibly an MS Escher painting. Actually, Buddy almost guaranteed has no clue who MC Escher is.
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- Parthenon - Admittedly, the Parthenon isn’t really a vocabulary word as much as it is a place. The reason it’s listed here, however, is that Buddy is much older than I am. I’m currently 21 and Buddy is about 26. Not everyone knows exactly what role the Parthenon played in history, but goddamnit if you’re a 26 year old middle school English teacher I would hope that you would know how to recognize and pronounce the word. Buddy pronounced it “Parthemom”, which brings to mind the question what does Buddy think a parthemom is? It’s got the suffix -mom, which might imply maternal aspects to this building. This might be the club house for moms who like to…parthe…things? Maybe parthe has to do with partitions? It kinda sounds like part, as in to part like the Red Sea. Yes, this makes sense. This is what it is.
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- Intercourse - Get your mind out of the gutter sonny, I’m talking about the literal definition here. Admittedly, this may have less to do with Buddy’s grasp of the English language and more a result of the society we live in today. I would be more inclined to believe this statement if it weren’t for the fact that Buddy is an English teacher. Intercourse literally means “dealings or communication between individuals, groups, countries, etc.” When two people talk with each other, they are having intercourse. This is something I learned my freshman year of high school; this is something that Buddy never learned. This goes back to Buddy’s “brotastic” personality. Buddy’s world revolves around making inappropriate sex jokes and farting every 5 seconds, so it’s not odd that when he hears the word “intercourse” he immediately wants to start talking about his sexual escapades. Except that Buddy is a middle school English teacher. Welp.
Expect this list to grow exponentially (Buddy knows this word) as I find more words that Buddy should yet doesn’t know. It’ll be like a science experiment, except that my thesis has already been proven so I’m continuing it for the absolute shit of it.
Comments are back!
May 16th, 2011 by Jamison T. RumpetsWe did a reverse-china and are allowing you to speak your mind. Go hogwild.
FM Radio vs Satellite Radio vs My Goddamn iPod
December 4th, 2010 by Jamison T. RumpetsSince I’ve been home for so long in Miami, I have had to drive everywhere for the past year or so. Miami isn’t really a convenient place to walk anywhere, and taking the public transportation here is the same as:
A) Asking a stranger on the street to steal your money
B) Asking a stranger on the street to stab you
C) Asking a stranger on the street to stab you and steal your money, not necessarily in that order
Like any normal person, being stabbed and mugged is not in my to-do list for the day (at least not on a Monday) so I generally like to avoid that outcome. So I end up driving everywhere to do the things I want to do. The nice thing about driving is that you don’t have to deal with strangers, but the annoying part is that if you aren’t driving somebody it’s pretty boring. This is where music plays a key factor in an enjoyable driving experience.
It is of my opinion that if I own an iPod, then I shouldn’t have to listen to my stupid radio. Originally, I used to have one of those radio-wave iPod things for my car that would transmit my iPod to a radio station that I could tune into and enjoy immensely, but thanks to the ever prominent scientific law that states, “anything you touch must either erupt into flames or be grinded into dust over time by the universe.” This time the device decided to be grinded into dust, and is no longer with us on this planet (or rather it still is, it’s just in many pieces).
So lately I have been stuck listening to the radio. It’s not necessarily a bad thing really; occasionally the radio plays songs I really enjoy. If I’m very lucky they will play them in succession and by the time I am out of the car my day is already on a high note. Unfortunately, much like the ever fluctuating stock market, radio stations in Miami are constantly changing.
When I was growing up, I only knew of about 5 or 6 main stations that people enjoyed. They were the following:
1) Pop Channel. Your generic piece of shit pop channel that plays generic piece of shit pop
2) Classic Rock Channel. Your generic classic rock channel that plays the same old classics, a lot.
3) Oldies. Your piece of shit disco channel that plays really bad music (i.e. disco)
4) Spanish Channel. Your piece of foreign shit channel that plays songs where you have no clue what the singer is saying, but there sure are a lot of trumpets in these songs.
5) Rap Channel. Your generic piece of shit rap channel that doesn’t play music, because rap isn’t music.
6) Alternative Rock Channel. Your generic piece of shit ROCK CHANNEL that plays rock songs that are ass.
7) Bonus Smooth Jazz channel. Only played to set the mood before trying to bed someone.
While I wasn’t too fond of the radio, at least there was some variety in the things you could listen to. There was essentially a station for everyone; life was simple and people lived happy lives.
Now, however, thanks to the wonderful world that is Miami we have had a hostile takeover in radio stations. We still have the pop channel and the classic rock channel, but basically every other radio station that I grew up with has turned into something completely different. First of all, the oldies channel one day with no warning whatsoever decided that rap was a much better genre to play instead. This must have surprised many people who tuned in the next morning to suddenly hear songs about “dat ass” rather than songs about souls and trains and shit.
Just recently in fact, the station that used to play rock music just recently underwent a hostile takeover by a gang of mothers and they have decided that what once was a place for distortion and shitty rock solos is now a place for holiday themed christmas music appropriate for all ages. The idea is that rock music is the devil and that if you listen to rock music your head will explode because of the pure evil that seeps into it. This is, of course, a ridiculous notion since there’s only like a 5% death rate by head explosion due to rock demons these days. Unfortunately, the mothers won the station though and have begun playing music geared towards their market group: mothers who hate loud noises and like shitty Christmas jingles.
Unfortunately, the stations that haven’t changed (such as the Classic Rock Channel, which is my channel of choice) ends up becoming annoying as well. You turn it on and hear a song you like and say to yourself, “Yea, this song is really great!” Then you realize that the song they just played is one of the 20 songs they are willing to play on that radio station. Every 20 or so songs, the same Bon Jovi song will come up and after that the same shitty song declaring how one should pour sugar on me is played. It’s annoying when you loathe these songs with a passion.
Then there’s satellite radio to deal with. Satellite radio is pretty cool for some people because there are so many stations to choose from. They can choose from 80s music to 70s music and they can keep going back decades until the music being played is simply the sounds of rocks being hit together to form a caveman symphony.
This becomes a problem, however, when the choices become too detailed or too hard to decipher. When the title of the channel is called “Vinyl”, I have a hard time deciphering what the FUCK that means without having to listen for a song or two to see the genre. The words suddenly have no meaning to me anymore, and they could literally put any placeholder word to replace them and I wouldn’t know the difference. In addition, if I am driving I don’t really want to take my eyes off of the road to navigate the hundreds of channels available to me on top of trying to decipher their hieroglyphics. It’s a bit hard to explain to the officer that the reason you rear ended the person in front of you is because you were having trouble understanding what the fuck Vinyl means.
The ultimate end-all of music in the car ends up being your own personal music device. With the iPod, I choose what I want to hear and not some shitty DJ who is always annoying and enthused about shit I don’t care about (example: farts). The only downside to this is that if you are in a car with people all of a sudden, your taste in music is suddenly exposed. If you’re on a date with a girl and you turn on your iPod to shuffle and it pops up “YMCA” which you put as a joke, your date is immediately ruined unless you can come up with a godlike save to explain your interest in gay music (Protip: you can’t).
Sorry For the Downtime
November 28th, 2010 by Jamison T. RumpetsI apologize to all of my readers about the downtime of my posts. It’s been a hectic year (in the way that everything is not hectic and I don’t physically own any of my own belongings) but I’m going to soon get the ball rolling a gain with some great new content (blogs, videos, games [gaymes]).
Keep your eye out during the holiday season for Jamison Trumpets everyone.
Fighting Game Corner: Newer Player Rant
September 17th, 2010 by Jamison T. RumpetsIf you’ve hopped onto this train known as the “Street Fighter 4 & Friends Express” in the past year or so, you’re probably new to the whole fighting game scene. Don’t worry, I used to be new to the scene too at one point (This was back in the mysterious era known as 2008); however, the scene was considerably different back then.
To begin with, the newer players weren’t quite as (for lack of a better phrase) fucking annoying as some happen to be right now. It’s to be expected, I guess, that when a newer game comes out and the scene rapidly expands there will be some annoying people along the way. It’s not like all the new players are annoying, just the very outspoken ones are.
A lot of their obnoxiousocity (a word I invented to spite you, personally) comes from the fact that they really don’t know any better. What constitutes a broken character? What move is “too good”? What does a character really need to get better as opposed to what you personally wish for your character to have? It’s questions like these that a lot of new players, honestly, don’t know how to answer while thinking logically.
The largest example is when Street Fighter 4 first came out. In the first Street Fighter 4 (Author’s Note: For those who don’t know, there are 2 versions. Street Fighter 4 and Super Street Fighter 4. I will shorten these from now on as “SF4″ and “SSF4″ or just “Super”), Sagat was a very powerful character. A lot of what made him so good was his fantastic fireball zoning, his high damage output, his corner pressure, and his fantastic anti-airs (which correlates directly to his zoning). To some, he was easily considered the best character in the game, and you would have been hard pressed to find somebody who would have disagreed.
To veterans and better players, Sagat was very good but he was in no way unbeatable. To me, Sagat was only as powerful as the player controlling him. Of course, I ended up losing to Sagats all the time. After all, he’s a lot more powerful than the character I chose to play (Sakura)! To beginner players, however, their frustrations took over and they deemed anyone who played Sagat as “gay”, “no-skill”, or a “tier whore.” There were even some lower-end tournaments (very local, and very small) that ended up banning the use of Sagat, simply because they felt he was “far too powerful.” Other tournaments and events banned the use of characters such as Gouken or Seth, two very mediocre characters that have to actually work very hard to acquire their win. Why were these characters banned? Quite simply, the organizers found one thing to be far too “overpowered”, didn’t want to deal with it, and banned it on the spot.
Their approach to other things was fairly ignorant as well, but less on the complainy side and more on the irrational side. When it comes to fighting games, it is generally characters with halfway-decent mixups that tend to be very strong characters. This doesn’t apply to ALL characters with good mixups as having several tools is vital to being viable, but having a good mixup can do nothing but help your character.
To the people who don’t know what a mixup is, let me briefly explain. A mixup is a situation in which you force your opponent into a situation where they are forced to guess, and their guess will determine whether they blocked your combo or got hit by your combo. A basic example is with my main character, Sakura. Sakura has a move that launches her opponent into the air, and from this point she can dash under her opponent and when they land they are forced to guess in which direction to block. If they guess incorrectly, they will eat a combo; If they guess correctly, they will block the combo or have done an invincible move to hit her out of the mixup entirely. Mixups are not specific to Street Fighter, and have ranged as far back as dinosaur times (Example: The velociraptor mixed up the T-rex and did a stylish combo on him to end the round. However, the next round they both got unblockabled by an asteroid).
To experienced players, they recognize that some mixups are harder to get out of than others. Some mixups only escape is to block the attack, no one move will get you out of it. Other mixups are weaker, and can be beaten by things as simple as a backdash or jumping away. For the newer players, they want this very simple solution to escaping mixups for ALL mixups. Basically, they believe their character should have all the tools to never be mixed up. I may be exaggerating a tad by saying this, but if you read some threads about things people want for their characters you will see things like, “I want my character to be able to do this particular thing, just like that completely different character.”
A lot of the times, the wish will be for a “good wake-up option.” To briefly describe what a wake-up option is, it is an option your character has after having just been knocked down. Characters like Ryu have an uppercut which is invincible on its startup; this is a very powerful wake-up option. Other characters have considerably weaker wake-up options, but the reason for this is probably very simple. In SSF4, Cody has very limited wake-up options. To begin with, his defensive options (excluding his extremely reliable anti-air) are very limited. The reason for this, put simply, is that his offensive options are abundant. I won’t go into details, but anybody who is familiar with Cody’s gameplay will know that he is very strong offensively, and considerably weaker defensively. This is how he was made, and honestly I have no problem with this.
Newer Cody players, however, feel frustrated that their defense is so lacking. You can often find them asking for a “better wake-up option” to deal with pressure from other characters. There are simple ways to up your defense regardless of what character you are playing, in fact the mechanic is built right into the game! Every character has the ability to block, this is a universal game mechanic that nobody is exempt from. Blocking intelligently and correctly can be difficult sometimes, however, and the urge to attack someone who is currently on the offense can be unbearable at times. It’s patience that really gets you through when your opponent is being relentlessly offensive, and while you’re on the defense you can find a moment to turn the tide of the match into your favor.
Am I just going to talk about how much I hate newer players? Maybe, but if you’re a newer player who’s genuinely interested in getting better and you feel like a lot of the reasons you are losing are basic fundamentals, let me shamelessly advertise a website called Option Select. As far as Super Street Fighter 4 goes, it has tons of useful information that could help up your game tenfold. Firstly, check out Ryan Hunter’s blog portion of the website where he gives you 5 Tips for a Beginner. As well, you can find information on more fighting games than just Street Fighter 4 at Shoryuken. Lastly, if you want more information on any of the fighting game terms I used in here (such as mixup), check out the Term Glossary for tons of definitions of fighting game/super street fighter 4 related terminology.
Lastly, I apologize for a rant-post. I usually like to keep my blog posts in the realm of humor articles, but this is something that’s been bothering me for a long time. The Fighting Game Corner, for the most part, will be only “mildly” humorous as far as comparing it to my other works. I take fighting games pretty seriously, and it’s one of the things that I find most enjoyable at the moment. As such, I want to be able to write articles with at least some type of serious composure, even if I throw in a joke or two here and there. If you’re not saavy with fighting games and don’t plan to become so, the Fighting Game Corner may not be the place for you.
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