Ahhh, I’ve had a lot of new stuff brewing lately, so this is gonna be another disjointed “catching up” post that jumps around from subject to subject.

  • First off, I got my MadCatz Round 2 TE stick about a week ago. Being that I’m no joystick connoisseur, I was very interested to get this, the Cadillac of arcade controls, to compare against my TvC stick, which is regarded as high quality, but not quite as high. The main difference I notice is that the buttons on the TE stick are super sensitive. In fact, quite often I’m accidentally pressing 2 buttons at once, while I mean to just press one while resting my finger on the other. The other thing I notice is that the joystick seems to require slightly smaller movements to register. I’d have to agree that the TE feels better, but the differences are pretty small. The other great thing about the TE is that it’s USB, which means it doubles as pretty much the best commercially available mame controller as well. And what the hell is up with mame not supporting CPS 3? All that aside, the stick is taking some getting used to, even having gotten fairly used to the TvC stick. Quarter-circle motions are still kinda difficult for me (lol), and double-QC’s are still quite difficult.

  • I was barely playing SSF4 before I got the stick. The game is awesome! The only problem I have with it is the ultra moves. They’re stupid. They’re the blue shells of street fighter.

  • Three days in a row, I played against three separate friends who are into video games, but not really fighters. It was fun to share my passion with them, but of course it wasn’t much of a game. There’s pretty much no level of taking it easy that makes it a fair fight other than just plainly not trying to win. Don’t get me wrong, if they had even like 3 hours of practice it might’ve been a different story, but against a rank newbie, it’s just not a real game. It’s like: here, I’ll start out with 50% health. And not use ultras. Or supers. Or specials. Here, I’ll just walk around a bit and try to block, try some stuff.

  • Last night I signed up for Xtortion Live (Gamertag: BlueC1oud). Even though I think monthly payments for online gaming is pretty much gouging, let’s face it, I want my online fighting. I’m also kinda pissed cause my 360 came with 3 months of free membership and I have no idea where I put that coupon. Anyway, at least it really is a nice experience. Similar to TvC, it’s only when I get online that I really become interested in the game. Playing AI is ok for a bit, but quickly becomes stale. After I signed up I played for about 6 hours straight until 3am :). Compared to TvC, there’s much less lag and much more opponents, so overall it’s a great experience. Although TvC does have a few online aspects that are nice. For instance, I can’t understand why SSF4 doesn’t offer you to rematch your ranked battles, nor do I understand why it sends you back several menu screens after your 1 battle is done. Finally, I get “Unable to join session.” on about 80% of my connection tries, which is apparently a firewall issue that I’ll have to work on. Still, overall it’s pure awesomeness and I’m sure I’ll be playing lots of SSF4 in the near future.

  • I doubt any of you noticed, but last night someone left a couple of nasty comments on my blog. That’s cause last night I outed him as a chronic ragequitter on some TvC forums. I really don’t mind that RQ’ers hurt my ratio a bit while improving their own, it just bothers me to think of how lame and overall shitty some of the people that I’m playing with remotely are. But anyway, at least it brought him to the site and he probably learned a thing or two.