Monthly Archive

You might remember that I was dissatisfied, to say the least, with my recent purchase of dual Classic Controller Pro’s. Well, I have gone in an entirely new direction and ordered a Mad Catz TvC fightstick. This represents a gigantic investment for me. Not the purchase cost of the controller, but the time investment needed to become proficient (or even basically competent) with arcade-style controls.

I have well over 1000x more experience with dpads and classic console controllers than with a joystick and arcade controls. A console controller feels second nature to me, while arcade controls feel anything but. I am basically taking a huge leap of faith here based on the fact that the fighting community swears by these types of controls. There is no question that my game will take a HUGE hit in the short-term. Estimates I’ve read project ~4 months of frequent gaming before you start to become accustomed to the new controls. 4 months… Damn that’s a long time. By the way, this works for any wii game, it’s not limited to TvC.

In meta-video game news: All this arcade talk inspired me to take another look at my (currently nonfunctional, but it used to be) Double Dragon arcade machine. The issue was it was completely dead (meaning, no power of any kind). I don’t know anything about electronics really, but I tried rearranging some power wires around haphazardly (let this be a lesson to you, kids). I was able to change its status from no power at all, to a clear “on” sound followed by a low humming noise, but no video or sound. I’m not sure if that means the change was a success and there is a secondary problem as well or if that low humming noise is the sound of improperly wired electronics frying. In either case, I made no further progress and gave up at that point. Perhaps I should try reading up a bit on the issue.

It’s about time I came back with a progress update. I think I was stalling a bit, hoping to have some more impressive news, but things have improved slowly but surely. I have taken my advice of spending some time in training and prioritizing combos as my main objective at this point in my game. This post will imply play with Ippatsuman, unless otherwise noted.

1. Execution

This has improved greatly, and considering that it was my #1 sub-priority, I’m pretty happy about that. Long, punishing combos are the centerpiece of my Ippatsuman strategy (I will further discuss overall strategy another time) and I have become highly aware of this fact. A combo is nearly always the best move when the opportunity presents itself, and my gameplay has come to reflect this.

2. Effectiveness

This is now my biggest priority, I will go into more details after this list.

3. Aerial Raves

This is basically a subset of the previous point. Again, I will go into more detail momentarily, but long story short: I have improved a lot here. I rarely miss launches anymore and semi-rarely miss the jump afterwards. However, I usually don’t fully complete the AR before finishing.

4. Consistency

I will spare you the details on this issue. Once again, we have serious improvement, although not perfection. This is now a very minor point for me.

5. Equal Opportunity

It wasn’t fair in my last post to say that this only affects Morrigan, it affects a few players, her more than most. This has improved slightly without really trying. It’s still really not a pressing issue for me. I believe that once Ippatsuman’s combos are nailed down, translating it into other characters should be fairly easy.

Ippatsuman’s combo (that I’m writing so much about) goes like this:

[Standard Combo]->Launch->Jump(AA,BB)->Jump(B)->DP->(wait)->Hyper Grab

Because the very last part of the chain is an unscaled Hyper Grab, the difference between pulling off the full combo and pulling off 90% of it is very significant. At this point, I generally have little trouble pulling this off until the second jump. After that, the DP after it is difficult as well, and the Hyper at the end is more difficult still. So I have a pretty strong beginning, but very rarely complete the sequence and that has a huge impact on the effectiveness. The most troubling part is that despite all my improvement, I have actually regressed a bit in the end part of the combo and I’m not sure why. Even in training mode, I have a lot of trouble with this. The fact of the matter is, I’m not really sure what is breaking down when I go for that second jump and I think this is something that really just needs to be perfected in training mode. At least my recent improvements are quite encouraging. Once I can get the full combo under wraps, it’s going to greatly improve my overall game and I’ll be able to move onto some more interesting topics to write about :)