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Bonus Pandora Punish!
October 31, 2011
My good friend Omari has uploaded a video of me playing SFxT he recorded from the MCM Expo this weekend.
This was day 1, so the combo’s aren’t so fancy, but I did manage to sneak in a Pandora punish to a blocked launcher!
The recovery frames on a blocked launcher are horrible, so make sure you don’t leave yourself open to a brutal Pandora punish!
Street Fighter X Tekken Gameplay Analysis coming soon…
October 31, 2011
Hi guys,
As you can see to the right of this post, I’ve uploaded two new SFxT gameplay videos, both with one thing in common… Pandora!
I’ve got more videos to come, and I’ve made a tonne of notes on various characters, moves, mechanics, and my overall thoughts whilst playing the game all weekend.
I will be conducting an in-depth analysis, and answering some of the points raised by the community, if not all of them by the end of today.
Feel free to follow me @dawgtanian via twitter, for live updates when the new blog posts/videos go live.
Update: The 2nd Pandora video displays upside down when viewed in 720p, but is the right way up when viewed in any other quality, so please adjust accordingly. I will re-encode manually and re-upload later on today.
Dawgtanian’s SFxT Pandora Technology Part 02
October 31, 2011
Dawgtanian’s SFxT Pandora Technology Part 01
October 30, 2011
Vryu vs Poongko – Grand Final RFD
October 24, 2011
Pandora isn’t useless Part II
October 16, 2011
This weekend saw a flurry of new exciting updates to Capcom’s latest video game developments. Although I’ll get round to discussing the oh so controversial topic of the ‘Gem System’, I wanted to revisit the ‘Pandora is usless’ topic with a look at the latest Street Fighter X Tekken trailer which was released this weekend.
The good news is Capcom haven’t buckled in yet to the desperate plea the majority of disgruntled gamers have been making, and have left Pandora in exactly the same state it was in before. You’re going to have to use your brain a little more in this one, so stop whining, and put on your thinking cap, because I’m about to give you another reason as to why Pandora mode is far from being useless.
Here’s a quick recap over the points I raised previously:
What makes Pandora difficult to use?
- Pandora mode is not an easy to use come-back mechanic
- Pandora cannot be canceled into from a special or normal attacks
- It is currently not possible to activate Pandora mid combo
- Pandora has a huge risk factor, you have to know exactly when to use it and have a solid strategy in order not to activate it and die 8 seconds later
So how can you use Pandora effectively?
- Activating Pandora has zero recovery frames
- You can perform a Super Art immediately after activating Pandora
eg. Ryu throws a fireball, on reaction you activate Pandora and punish his projectile with a Super Art.
So with a bit of strategy, some careful thinking ahead of your opponents moves, and some decent reactions, you’ve not got a reason to not be able to unleash a pretty damaging Pandora attack on your opponent.
So how else can we use Pandora?
At first glance of the latest trailer, it does seem that Pandora looks more useless than ever. Lili activates Pandora and as expected, she can’t do anything against a turtling Zangief. Needless to mention she dies a miserable purple death 8 seconds later.
Take a look at the following screen shots.
I wonder if there are any true block strings capable of utilising the infinite cross gauge to perform a barrage of chip damage.
Before you guys start complaining about this being a cheap mechanic, you can spend a bar of your meter to ‘cross cancel’ and counter a blocked attack. This means that if you’re going to attempt a chip-damage death using Pandora, you will have to make sure your opponent has no meter!
The entire video can be found here:
New Official Street Fighter X Tekken Webseries – X The Line Ep.01
October 14, 2011
This took me by surprise, Capcom continue to invest into the fighting game community with a professional web series titled ‘X The Line’. The first episode was released today and walks you through the format of their show which will be released every 2 weeks.
There’s a big emphasis on community engagement, so talk to them via twitter via their new official @streetfighter account, or you can find them on facebook.
Our friendly host even goes as far to describe the new up and coming ‘gem’ system as a way of customising your team with power-ups. You can hear more about that later today when we receive new info from the NYC Comicon.
It would be really nice to see both the Street Fighter and Tekken communities coming together for some friendly rivalry on this one. Which side are you on?
Ever wanted to see London from a unique point of view?
October 14, 2011
My good friends MB Films have been working on a time lapse film for over a year, and it’s now finally ready to share with the world. They offer a wonderful view of London, taking you from one season to another, as well as from day to night. If you’ve never been to London before, and want to take a look at the place I grew up in, I’d love you to all see this film.
Timeless – London Timelapse from MB Films on Vimeo.
Timeless – 2010-2011, 4mins 9seconds
This film is intended to capture the spirit and endless energy of London. We decided to shoot it in a mixture of Timelapse and slow motion. We started filming in October 2010 in Richmond upon Thames just on the western edge of the city, and then the ensuing journey took us all the way through the city and back again, ending up just a year later with a final sun rise shot in the Richmond area.
The brilliant but temporary music score is by Rael Jones. He’s currently working on music for the new BBC Sherlock Holmes series and he will be delivering a final score for my film in a month or so. I can’t wait to hear it, and I would like to thank him for all his hard work.
I’d like to thank everyone else involved too; particularly my camera assistants; David Mead, Dave Calub, Laurence Beck and Johana Castro. They helped me lug around equipment and of course they kept me company during the long hours of time lapse work. They braved not only windswept bridges, endless travelling, and brushes with local law enforcement, but also marauding gangs and drunken loons in the west end.
I can’t thank my wife Johana enough. I made her stand around for hours while she was two months pregnant, and I nearly ruined our anniversary by insisting on filming some time lapse footage at the Oxo tower restaurant half way through dinner, sorry.
Technical information:
Camera: Canon 7D
Lenses: 17 – 55mm f.28, 70 – 200mm f2.8
Edited in FCP
Graded in Magic bullet looks
I used various shutter angles and intervals to achieve the best effect for any particular shot. At night I mostly wanted that streaky look, so most of it is either 1 or 2 second exposures with the lens stopped down to around f5.6. During the day I would shoot people shots at 1 second intervals which seemed to give that impression of frantic energy, particularly on a long lens.
Hope you enjoy the film.
Ed Beck, MB Films
photography – Ed Beck
camera assistants – David Mead, Dave Calub, Laurence Beck and Johana Castro
editing – Ed Beck & David Mead
music – Rael Jones
Megaman almost confirmed for UMVC3?
October 13, 2011
Has Capcom just confirmed Megaman as a possible future character for UMVC3?
The latest New York City Comicon trailers have just newly announced Nova and Phoenix Wright, two characters we all knew were going to be in the game. But if you look closely at the new stage in the background, there is a large poster which displays a lot of the cast from MVC2 that didn’t make it into the game.
Each character is marked as either ‘Slain’ or ‘Apprehended’, all except our blue buddy Megaman!
This is either a clever clue to let everyone know that the fan favourite Rockman (as he’s known in Japan) is back in the game, or a rather distasteful slap in the community’s face.
Let me know your thoughts via twitter @Dawgtanian
Making excuses for losing
October 12, 2011
So after having a week of solid games, signs of progress and leveling up my game, I attended last nights WSO tournament with the aim of taking top place. Unfortunately for me this was sadly not the case, I didn’t even make it out of groups.
To make it worse, I was a tad salty, and I had every excuse under the sun as to why I lost each match.
I wanted to discuss this briefly, as I feel the ‘passing blame’ attitude I had last night is what holds back a lot of players from getting better at the game, including myself.
No matter how difficult the match-up, you cannot blame your opponent for your loss. It’s not their fault they have a brainless reversal, or a safe escape from your mix-ups. Every time you lose a game, you have to accept it was your own doing that lead to that outcome.
You cannot change the way your opponent will play, nor can you change the tools your opponents character has, so once you’ve taken responsibility for your loss, you can start focusing on making changes to the things you do have control over.
So my excuses for losing last night were the following, followed by the real reason:
Jordan’s Viper
Excuse: Match up is too difficult, her specials are all safe, too easy to follow up into non-damage scaled ultra, ex-seismo invincibility too effective against Fuerte, barely any risk – high reward for Viper.
Reason: Didn’t space myself correctly in order to punish whiffed specials, didn’t react quick enough to cross-up burn kicks, forgot to use focus to punish burn kicks, didn’t option select ex seismo, didn’t mix-up defensive options enough.
Packs’ Cody
Excuse: Cody’s anti-airing too solid against Fuerte, normals constantly move Cody around makes it hard to land specials, footsies non-existent for Fuerte in this match up, Cody get’s huge damage off of every punish, Cody’s focus very strong in this match up.
Reason: Didn’t go for Fajita buster enough knowing he would focus or anti-air. Should have played more patiently. Let him come to me, absorb rocks. Too many stand throws, got baited too easily. Jumped too often.
WGE’s Zangief
Excuse: My setups don’t work with Gen against Zangief, kept dropping combo’s most likely due to lag from the stream setup, Zangief’s anti-air lariat too damn easy/beats everything, option selecting st.lk > ex green hand all day not taking any risk.
Reason: Should have learnt setups that DO work against Zangief or not used any at all. Setup probably wasn’t laggy at all, high volume on headphones meant I couldn’t even hear my own button presses which I now think was the real cause of me dropping combos, should have checked this before and lowered the volume slightly. If my opponent is playing safely, why am I making dangerous moves?
It really is so easy to come up with excuses as to why you lost, but this won’t help you get better. Even if some of match-ups I lost to last night are considered ‘bad’ match-ups, it’s up to me to come up with new techniques and strategies that force my opponent to re-calculate the way they’re playing the match-up.
It’s worthwhile being brutally honest with yourself, don’t fear about what people might think. Just focus on what you did wrong, and making sure you come up with something that prevents the same mistake from happening again next time round.
Back to training mode!
Dawgtanian