Spider Muttons Productions © 2010 are back with the third episode of the Don’t be a Scrub Podcast. This time we’ve decided to focus more on the community side of things, and who better to interview than the president of Couchwarriors himself, Loki!

This man and by extension, Couchwarriors, has done so much for the Melbourne community. I personally am very grateful for the time he has put into organising the CW ranbats that I’ve enjoyed so much throughout the year. We hope that this and the next interview will give everybody a greater understanding of the creation and history of Couchwarriors.

This time the interview was done by Spidercarnage/Igor at Chris’ house on 01/11/10. Thank you Loki for taking the time to do this interview with us and hope you guys enjoy it!

P.S. Special thanks to Syntax_AU who taught me how to use global hotkeys in VLC, and improving my transcribing speed by 200%. Thanks man!

Don’t be a Scrub Podcast Episode 3: Loki

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DBAS Podcast Ep. 3 96 kb/s version

Spider/Igor: Hi everyone, we’re actually at Chris’s place, not Chris’s Club House today. And this is gonna be interview number three with Loki. So welcome.

Loki: Thanks.

1. How did you get into Street Fighter?

Well I grew up in a country town, Shepparton. So I didn’t have a lot of chances to play [SF] growing up. Occasionally there would be like an old Street Fighter II cabinet, just whatever version, like Hyper Fighting, Championship version, whatever was there. And I played a little bit of that, I played a little bit of X-men vs. Street Fighter as a kid, but there was absolutely no scene. There was almost no one even playing the game ever when I came in[to the arcade].

It wasn’t something I could get into until later. It wasn’t actually until I moved to Melbourne for Uni, that I started to play stuff. I met Zan at college, and he was playing Guilty Gear at the time. He got into Guilty Gear through Batasan, Sat and those guys. And I started playing at the arcade there at Therapy at Latrobe and they had a 3^rd Strike cabinet.

And I started playing 3^rd Strike there and I started playing Akuma. I thought; I like the look of him. But…I’m still shit with Akuma; I was never good with him. And eventually I changed over to Dudley, and that’s when I really started to like the game, and I started to get…I got a home version of it and I started inviting people around and we started events.

Pretty much the same as we’re doing here [at Couchwarriors] but at our house that Zan and I were both living in at the time. And that over time gradually evolved into Couchwarriors.

2. I often see you play 3S at CW. Which game do you prefer to play SSF4 or 3S?

It’s hard to… (Sighs). 3^rd Strike is such a broken game but it’s so fun. I think I’ll always have a soft spot for 3^rd Strike just because I got into it…it was my first relatively competitive game. I was never fantastic at it, but I always really enjoyed [it].

It’s always kind of a shame that I got into it when most people weren’t really playing it anymore. The scene was already kind of dying.

I dunno, I think in general I like SF4 better. Now. Nick will hate me for saying that but… if there was a scene still playing 3^rd Strike I would still be playing 3^rd Strike too.

And who did you use in 3^rd Strike, predominately.

Most of the time I was playing Dudley. I’ve changed to Chun now actually. I’m tier whoring now.

The reason for that is I started playing Dudley in SSF4 when it first came out. And he’s such a different character…on the surface he looks the same. But all the combo starters are different. You can’t use crouching light punch in 3^rd Strike because it doesn’t link into anything, it’s terrible. I realised that I completely destroyed my game with 3^rd Strike Dudley, so I can’t play him anymore. I just can’t do it.

So I switched over to Chun, so that’s what I’m playing now. But I dabbled in a lot of characters. I was playing Alex for a little while. I liked Necro. I liked Ken. Most of the characters are fun in that game, everyone has something cool.

Just that some characters are pretty broken.

I’m the same way with Dee Jay in Super Turbo. I played Dee Jay in ST and in SF4 it’s completely different beasts.

3. Which game do you play more nowadays? Assuming it’s SSF4?

Yeah definitely. I don’t really practice 3^rd Strike anymore, and that’s kind of half the reason I play Chun.

Because I kinda understand the basic game with her even though I’m completely out of practice. I can kind of scrape a few wins out just by playing simple.

4. You have been maining Dudley in SSF4?

I was. I’m thinking of changing to Cammy. I’ve been kind of going back and forth for a while. In the month leading up to BAM I was really kind of contemplating which character I was gonna play. So I ended up playing Dudley in singles. And I think I’m still a little bit better with Dudley despite my execution’s dropped off because I haven’t been playing him.

But I played Cammy in teams. I got completely destroyed. But I don’t know. If Cammy was staying the same in Arcade Edition, I would say for sure that I was switching over to Cammy. But at this point, I’m kind of only doing it in theory, I think. I enjoy Cammy, and I think she’s the better character. But as to whether or not she’ll be broken in Arcade Edition I’m not sure yet. So there’s a chance I could go back to Dudley, there’s a chance I could go to someone else. I’m not sure. I’m kind of in a little bit of a limbo at the moment.

5. What do you think are some of Dudley’s hardest matchups or Cammy’s for that matter?

Umm… I think Dudley on paper doesn’t really have any really terrible matchups. Everything’s kind of 6:4. But he doesn’t have any really beneficial matchups either.

Everything is kind of the same slugfest but…in practice against a good Guile, a good…anyone who can zone you, even like Honda or someone. Someone who it’s hard to get damage in on. It’s really like pulling teeth.

Playing online with Dudley is kind of half the reason what made me half give up on him. Because it’s all playing against Ryu and Guile… and even Dee Jay’s a pain in the arse of a match.

If you can’t focus something, you just get zoned so badly. And it’s just so boring. Cammy doesn’t quite have that same problem. She’s got like…ways to get through projectiles that actually hit. And stuff like that. So yeah, I don’t know. It seems a lot better. It just seems less…depressing I guess.

6. Can you tell us quickly the story of how CW started and who was involved?

We were playing at Uni, myself and Zan and a few guys who actually didn’t really become part of Couch Warriors. We started out playing a lot of 3^rd Strike, we were playing some Guilty Gear, stuff like that. None of us were that great.

We were getting to the point that we wanted to get into it and the scene didn’t really exist like it does now. I mean it was at a time where some people were still playing…

When was this approximately?

This was 2007, yeah I think about the end of 2007. And at the time people were still playing 3^rd Strike in the arcades. This was before anyone ever knew about SF4. Hong was around for a while; he started running a few random tournaments at Bluehouse. Hong is now living in Hong Kong I believe, but he was one of the prolific Melbourne 3^rd Strike players as well as Akira in there. And Lok and Heet and those guys that were actually good [at 3^rd Strike]. So we got a little chance to play with them, but there wasn’t much of a scene.

Once every few weeks we got to play. And we thought we should start something. At the time we were involved in doing some things with Uni. And we thought we’d hire out a room, we’ll start playing, and we’ll get some people to play.

So we started doing something at Latrobe. We actually started with a Latrobe games club that year, and that kinda didn’t really work out too well. And there weren’t too many people at Latrobe that played, and the people who did play weren’t very good.

At the end of that year we went, no we gotta do something a little bit bigger. So we started Couchwarriors. And we had a little bit of experience because we’ve been running Manifest games tournaments and stuff like that. We kinda knew what we were doing, but we wanted to be able to do our own thing.

So we started doing our little ranbat events and some people came along. We were still doing at Latrobe for a couple years but it wasn’t really until vanilla Street Fighter IV came out that we got an influx of players and excitement and people started playing, and that’s kind of when we were able to do the stuff that we always wanted to do. And that’s kinda led into BAM.

7. What role do you see CW playing in the Melbourne community?

Kind of our goal in the beginning is we…we didn’t want to be “a group in the scene” kinda thing. We didn’t want to be just some guys who ran an event that you could go if you kind of wanted to. We kind of wanted to get to a point where Couchwarriors was indistinguishable from the Melbourne community. It wasn’t that we were doing our own thing and if people wanted to come they could, it was that we wanted to do what the community wanted to do.

We wanted to help the community in the basest sense and just; they want to do this, they want to play this, we’ll run that, we’ll help out. We wanted to help the existing scenes that were there, we’ve got the Smash players, we’ve got the 3^rd Strike players, the BlazBlue players. All those guys, we wanted to be able to nurture all those guys and provide something that allows them to do something that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do.

Was [CW] always about fighting games?

It wasn’t initially supposed to be really locked to that. That was what we were interested in at the time. So, actually at the first Couchwarriors events, we had like Wii Sports setups on the thing, and people would play bits and pieces. And we had DDR there, and some things. It was just whatever people were bringing along. It was just kind of…we considered at some point getting in with some guys at Latrobe who were doing Halo events and some stuff, but it didn’t work out that way. The fighting game community was [what we were] most close with, and there were some people was wanted to keep some links and stuff so everything else kind of tapered off. It was never the intention, but I don’t mind the way it has turned out.

To tell you the truth, I’m surprised at how many Smash players there are when I actually came to the first one.

It’s a very fluctuating community, Australia has always had a relatively decent Smash scene and they were strong before we started Couchwarriors. But Zan was involved with them in some sense… I’ve never played Smash really to any vague extent where I’ve been okay with it.

But Zan used to play in Melee and that’s how he knew about them and he’d come along to an event run at Melbourne Uni before that. So that’s how we kind of got involved with them and we wanted to support that scene because we knew they had a bunch of guys, but due to their setup and the equipment that they had, all that kind of stuff, they didn’t really have any kind of central organisation apart from a couple guys that’ll run the tournament and stuff.

So I mean, it’s good to know…but they’ve always done their own thing. They’ve always been kind of been a little bit of a separate community. They come and go.

8. How did you go about gathering sponsors for BAM/CW? Was it difficult?

Yeah, we’ve always kind of operated with very few sponsors. It’s kind of something that we’ve just worked our way up to; we knew that as a relatively niche group early on we weren’t really going to be able to approach a lot of people with much. We couldn’t say we’ve got 80 people that will turn out or whatever, but you know it’s hard for sponsors and especially hard for a lot of companies to be able to justify that in their budgeting, all that kinda thing.

We knew that it was gonna be a matter of getting to a point where if we were big enough and we could offer [certain numbers] that we could get some kind of support. We went into the first BAM with relatively low support. We didn’t have any prizes or anything but we were offered some sponsors and stuff. We had ties with THQ and stuff at the time. We’d approach some people and again there wasn’t anything they could do for us at that point. But we knew that if we were successful with [BAM] then we’d be able to get something for next year. And that’s kind of what happened. We kept those ties, and because we’d been able to prove that we’d been able to provide this and be successful that we managed to get some support from THQ and Madman and from all those companies that have helped us out. THQ through Capcom.

It’s something that we hopefully will get more and more of.

What’s the deal with THQ and Capcom? Are they like the sister company out here?

THQ are the distributor for Capcom games in Australia because Capcom doesn’t have an office in Australia. THQ are a publisher of their own and they own development companies, but the THQ in Australia is more of a distribution office. They have ties with Capcom because they distribute Capcom games in Australia but they’re not directly linked as a company.

Okay cool. Learn something new every day.

9. Initially for BAM there was an announcement that we would have a playable copy of MvC3, but in the last minute that was pulled, what happened?

It’s tricky to say. A lot of what I’ll say is more speculation on my part. Because I wasn’t inside THQ to see [what was happening], it’s more of what I’ve been told. We approached THQ through a contact that we had from doing the TvC launch, Tatsunoko versus Capcom launch earlier in the year about having Marvel at [BAM].

And initially I didn’t really expect that we’d be able to get it. I thought like, they’re probably not going to be able to provide it. But you know, I’ll [make an offer] and kind of as a note at the end of the comments saying, can you give us any kind of support this year, I did a big write up, and at the end of it I kinda went, hey if you’ve got Marvel 3 we’ll have it!

And I was really surprised, the next five minutes later he gave a reply back saying, yeah we should be able to do that. And I was like, wow, fantastic! That’s not what I expected at all!

The problem was after that a few months went by, and I was chasing it up, I was sending emails. But we didn’t really get any more details, we weren’t sure, it was coming up to [BAM]. And eventually I managed to get in contact with them and I got passed on because the person that was in charge of Marvel for THQ had changed during that period. And the problem was the guy that I was speaking to is actually one of the higher-ups there. And he’s very busy; he travels around a lot.

It was tricky to get in touch with him. So this was a couple of months from BAM, and I got in touch with the new guy. And everything was still going ahead as far as we were concerned, and as far as they were concerned, they thought that everything was still going ahead. But it was at that point he was just about to go over to the UK to go to Capcom’s Europe office to actually speak about it and get a copy of the [Marvel 3] code, that kind of thing.

And we kept chasing it up. I kept speaking to him on a weekly basis. It eventually got to a point to where he didn’t have a copy of the code but Capcom was still theoretically working with the proposal that we’re going to give them something.

It just got to a point where it just kind of stalemated. It was a couple of weeks out and we still didn’t have a copy. And I had a really bad feeling about what was going to happen. A few weeks out I think; if it’s going to be here or not, we’re going to have to make a decision at this point.  It just didn’t look like it was going to get through that approval process in time. I’m not sure internally what happened to cause that, whether… I wouldn’t have expected it. It was always a surprise, because I would’ve thought; the way that Capcom has been showing Marvel at this point has only been through Capcom employees and only in really sanctioned kind of situations and there’s been these kinds of guys all the time.

And I was surprised that they were going to let a distributor show it. I mean, I don’t know whether it was a matter of that or something else, but it just…I guess it just didn’t seem like an opportunity that needed to be rushed through. And it just didn’t happen in time unfortunately.

But we’ve still got a good relationship with THQ and we’ve still got a good chance to do something for Marvel before it comes out or when it comes out; it just didn’t happen in time for BAM unfortunately.

See, initially I thought when you said Marvel 3 was going to be here, I thought we’re going to be having Seth Killian coming out here and showing us [the game].

That would’ve been cool! I don’t know what their plan was internally for that to happen. All we knew really was that it was gonna be there, and they were going to be able to provide some prizes. And we got some prizes in the end; we got the limited Marvel shirts and things like that. We got the PS3 and that kinda thing. But the game code just wasn’t something that they could sign off on in time.

That’s okay. Next time, I guess.

Yeah! It’s a shame, but I mean…everyone was disappointed but that’s just the way that it rolls unfortunately.

BAM still turned out awesome as it did anyway.

I’m happy with the event apart from it…to be honest it was kind of a load off because it was kind of just crammed into the schedule on Sunday and [we] kinda tried to make it fit. So it actually freed up a lot of time for me. So I was happy at least with that outcome!

10. What does the future hold for CW/BAM?

It’s hard to say. We’ve always just rolled with whatever the community wanted to do. At this point, we’ll see. There’s a lot of stuff that we did this year that still surprised me. We had a successful stream. We had almost 300 people. If Smash had the same turnout that they did last year we would’ve had 300 people. We got 275 people at BAM in the end.

That’s pretty good for a country of basically 20 million people and a player size of…

Yeah especially for our player base it’s pretty impressive. I think it’s still more than OHN gets. OHN doesn’t have Smash but they have Tekken. It balances out to some extent, but I think…I might be wrong, someone can slap me down in the comments on this but I have a feeling that we’re the biggest at this point.

So I don’t know, it’s come a long way fast. It’s kind of built up slowly over a couple of years, and it’s really come a long way the last couple of years. So I’ve got no idea really at this point, whether…it can always go in different directions with the people that are involved now. I mean there are more people involved now than just Zan and us…

I heard that there was a committee for BAM.

There’s always been a committee for Couchwarriors. But the way we did it with BAM this year was a little bit more diplomatic. We wanted to make sure that the people were nominated for each of the games they were in charge of. And I kind of did this the previous year but I was in charge of a couple of games so it kinda blurred the lines a little bit.

Whereas this year Andy was in charge of Super Street Fighter 4, and Sat was in charge of BlazBlue etc and all those kinds of things it kind of separated the core organisation out from more game organisation and stuff. So we kind of ended up with a committee of interested people and stuff.

And I think to some extent we have that with Couchwarriors as well; it’s just less official. Anyway…I just want to stress that Couchwarriors is trying to really kind of support the community in whatever way possible. So if people want to take the community in a different direction, it’s really just a matter of approaching [us] with a good idea, that’s all.

So Starcraft 2?

(Laughs). We’ll see, we’ll see. Naw, I don’t think so. I don’t think that will work. But…I’m not sure. Where do you think that we could go with it? What would you suggest?

It’s a difficult question when you really think about it. Hm… See I think as it is now, the community itself has gotten to a point where with Vanilla [SF4] and fighting games coming back up, I think a lot of people are getting back into it. It’s never going to be as strong as it was in the 90s with the arcades and so forth. I think… well it depends. If we look at the competitive side of things, I think the scene itself needs a bit more work on that side of things. But from the casual perspective, I think Couchwarriors is really awesome. Because you get a lot of people who come to Couchwarriors who don’t come to Chris’ Club House, who don’t come to Deakin, or any of the other events. Both for Smash and for Super [SF4]. But I think on the competitive side, I don’t know. You’ve spoken about this on the Ozhadou forums as well. About getting some sort of a training regime, teaching people, and maybe getting people more into the hardcore aspects of the game and the competitive side, rather than just trying to do flashy combos and whatnot.

Well I’ve been really happy with the way the scene’s grown in that way. Going from just being you go to the arcade or you go to Couchwarriors or whatever to having these different events that you’ve been running at Deakin and the events that run at Chris’s Club House. And even just kind of gatherings like this, it’s good that the community is starting to really support itself in that way as well.

It’s a really good sign, especially with the Box Hill arcade meetups, that’s gonna start coming back in December when arcade edition comes out and we’ve just recently spoke to the manager of Mana Bar in Melbourne who’s opened up…

I haven’t told anyone about this yet so you’ve got an exclusive. They’re opening up either December or January this year and we’ve gonna look at opportunities at doing some get togethers and some meetups and stuff there because there’ll be all the equipment pretty much all gonna be there and it’s just a matter of [whether] that’s something that we can do [regularly].

It’s a pretty wide ranging community in terms of events and opportunities and stuff like that for people to play at the moment. So I’m really happy that we’ve kind of being able to nurture that back to life.

So where it goes from here is really up to the community.

11. For anyone out there thinking of starting something like CW in their local community what tips/advice would you offer?

It’s not that hard. I mean I heard someone speaking of similar thing on a podcast years ago and it’s really all you need is three guys. You need some people to play and you need some equipment and that’s pretty much it.

And that’s how Zan and I started. We just started playing at home, we had a couple of guys and we had some friends and it kind of grew from there. So I mean, if you’re somewhere where there’s not much of a community it’s really just a matter of starting to do something and it’ll kinda build on itself.

Like a snowball effect?

Yeah. I think it’s important really to stress that you can’t force something like this. You can’t force the community together. You’ve gotta kind of provide something and people need to latch on and go along with it themselves.  Couchwarriors would never have succeeded if we just started saying, look we’re running this big event, you should come along and play.

It’s the path of most resistance. People go, oh I don’t know if I want to do this. I dunno. Who are these guys? I’ve never played against these guys before, they’re not great. All this kinda thing.

It makes it tricky. And we had that problem for the first few years where we had some people coming along but they weren’t necessarily the best in the community and those kinds of things because there was this kind of perceived separation. I think that’s kind of normal, but you’ve just gotta let it kind of just do your thing and it will grow to the point where if people want to support the community then they’ll support that.

And  I’ve been really happy that we’ve kind of grown into something that the top players are supporting  and actually become this integral part of the community whereas if we tried to force that and tried to push for that situation in the beginning it wouldn’t have ever worked.

I was just going to say that the range of players in Couchwarriors do go from top player to beginner. And I think it’s a great environment to actually learn in.

That’s always been a goal for us. We don’t want to be [just] the guys pushing the pro scene or something like that, we want to support everyone. Hopefully everyone will grow together because of that.

12. If you could change/improve one thing in the Melbourne/Australian community what would it be?

Ummm…

Please don’t say internet!

Yeah my mind went to that but I realised that’s not something that we have control over. It’s hard really because it’s so much…I think it’s attitude.

I think so much of it is people’s attitude towards everything.

And I’m not saying [it] in a bad way but a lot of people kind of… they enjoy the game and so forth and they come along and they play. But no one’s really pushing each other in a lot of ways.

And I think as a community we would grow if we were a bit more competitive in that way. To some extent it’s a little bit too friendly sometimes?

Which is fine, but you’ve got to make a distinction between playing friendly games and being friends and playing competitive games?

Because [if] you’re playing casuals all the time, people don’t really learn anything, they come and they’ll play a few matches, they win some, they lose some. It becomes a little bit of a brawl and no one really kind of gets anything at the end of the day.

And that’s perfectly fine. I’m guilty of that as well, I don’t have as much time to play as I’d like to. And I like to play for fun as well. I like to play casuals and do silly stuff.

But for us to grow as a community if we were to become a more respected community then that’s something that we need to focus on is just having an attitude that this time’s for casuals but this time’s for serious play. This time’s for learning stuff and… I think people don’t realise how fun it can be if they’re playing at that top level.

Would you say that it’s because we play on console a lot so there’s no money involved? So people take it a lot more relaxed a little?

I think that is an element of it. I think subconsciously people play more [seriously] at the arcade. I know I get more nervous at the arcade, playing against people at the arcade. It’s just something about that atmosphere and I think that’s why when the Box Hill events were running at the same time that Couchwarriors events were and they will be again- I think that was seen as a more serious competition because it was on arcade and because you paid some money and stuff.

And yeah you pay money to go to Couchwarriors and whatever, but you kind of pay it anyway. I don’t think that’s the largest part of the problem. But I think it adds to it.

I was listening to one of the… I think the Iplaywinner podcast recently with Marn (Mutton’s edit: It was actually on Wakeup SRK) he was saying that that does come into it a little bit, and someone was suggesting if you were playing casuals or whatever,  having like a box of money next to the TV, put some money in or whatever and suddenly it becomes a bit more serious.

Now you want to learn that setup. Now you don’t want to miss that combo the next time or whatever. I don’t know.

It probably sound harsh, I’m not trying to rip on people who are playing for fun. I think everyone should be playing for fun but I think there definitely is a lot of opportunity being wasted when you don’t really care about the outcome of the match.

See the way I look at it is…I’m a very competitive person. I always play to win. But I actually have fun when I learn something new and I get beat down.

Yeah! I just played fifty matches against Akira and I think I won two…

You won two? I didn’t win any!

At the start. At the start before he started to work stuff out. I won couple of matches with Dudley and maybe I won like one match with Cammy.

It’s more a matter of like… But doing that, I put focus of a lot of the down points of my game and stuff and you don’t have to win to learn something that could be competitive or whatever. Sometimes, I think losing is the best way to learn.

But yeah, it’s just that kind of thing. If people want to get better then they will, if they don’t want to they won’t. But as a community we grow if everyone gets better.

13. How did you actually do at BAM? Did you have any goals?

I did terribly at BAM. I won one match in every tournament that I played in apart from teams. And that’s as far as I got!

The problem with being a tournament organiser and kind of my problem in general is that it cuts out a lot of the time that you could be practising or you could playing. I literally almost didn’t play in the two months leading up to BAM.

I was spending so much time doing all the organising and running around and stuff that I just didn’t want to play at the end of the day. When I got home I was so… I’d been dealing with Couchwarriors stuff and even at work I was doing it in my spare time and stuff like that. And by the end of the day I didn’t want to go home and play.

So I was terribly out of practice. And I kind of always am. So it probably sounds silly for me to say people should be taking things more seriously when I really don’t practice that much and I really don’t play that much.

But it’s kind of the reality of my life. I’m married; I work full time and stuff. I don’t have quite as much time as some other people do to play. If I had heaps of time to play, I would definitely be playing a lot more. But yeah, to answer the question in Super I won one match, I lost two.

I lost my two matches to Kientan…oh no not Kientan, Benson. Benson, I played Benson’s Honda.

That’s a tough match.

That’s a tough match for Dudley. He definitely outplayed me with that. I beat another Honda though; the guy that I beat was a Honda. I can’t remember who else I lost to…oh I lost to Sat.

Sat’s Ibuki. I’ve never played against Sat’s Ibuki before, it’s really good actually!

He just didn’t drop anything which is depressing to me because he doesn’t even play the game!

He doesn’t even play it most of the time, and it’s so different than any other Ibuki I’ve played against. I’ve played against Vuong’s (Lucia) Ibuki and some other players. But I didn’t play against Sat’s, and he just took me apart.

Did you get caught in the vortex or?

I think like Akira was saying before; I just pressed too many buttons. I kept thinking there were gaps, and there were gaps when you play against people who don’t know what they’re doing.

And that’s how I… I don’t think I’ve ever lost to an Ibuki online in random ranked matches because they were all…they’re all terrible!

Compared to playing against a good one, it’s such a different story!

It’s an eye-opening experience.

It’s interesting. I’m sure it’s not unwinnable, but I didn’t know how to play the match. In Blazblue, I won a game I probably shouldn’t have. I started playing Valkenhayn, who’s the new character who came out like three days before BAM.

I had no idea how to play him! I’m only slightly better with him now. But I probably shouldn’t  have won that match but I kind of scrubbed it out and I probably should have won another one but I didn’t and then I went out.

But yeah, I tried to play Cammy in teams and that was pretty terrible. I didn’t really have kind of goal in terms of winning anything. I beat someone in Third Strike actually and I almost beat someone that I probably shouldn’t have. And then actually Akira crushed me in Third Strike.

Yeah his Urien unblockables were…

Yeah I was still kind of okay with it for like the first round, and then he realised I was shit. And then he beat me.

I don’t know, I didn’t really have any goals because of that. I knew I hadn’t practiced, I didn’t expect to win anything. I wanted to win at least one match though. I was kind of happy with that because I probably…that was just base instinct.

I was kind of just playing that without being able to bread [and butter] combos with that without being able to do anything that kinda… I just kind of played and won something. I should’ve been a lot more prepared.

I’m kind of hoping that I’ll have a chance to prepare before something like OHN or something like that. I’m hoping I’ll be able to do a lot better.

14. You sort of touched on this for my next question, you said you were married and you have a full-time job. How do you find balancing all of that along with Couchwarriors?

It’s not so bad with Couchwarriors [having] monthly events. To some extent now, we’ve gotten it to a point where they more or less run themselves. So it takes a lot of my time on the day and I don’t really get to play casuals on the day. But before that, I can play a bunch more.

I just kind of need to push myself to play a bit more. Before BAM, it kind of destroyed me. I took on too much this year. I was just devastated after; I was just so mentally destroyed.

But yeah, I mean, it’s tricky. There is a lot of stuff I can be doing and I should be doing for Couchwarriors in general. And it does take a lot of the time that you could otherwise be playing. But it’s more than just work and home life and that kind of thing; you get to a point where you just don’t have as much time to play as you used to.

You could be playing every night but something else has to suffer for that.

I know that feeling.

15. Are there any international players that you look up to, like watching, admire?

I started watching a lot of Sako because I’ve been playing Cammy, and I really enjoy that. There’s quite a few American players that I enjoy watching as well. I mean, it’s hard to say, but I enjoy watching Marn to some extent. Just because of the drama…

Heheheh. Hey, his Dudley is quite impressive as well.

He is, a lot of the time, he does drop a lot of stuff. I think what people don’t realise is that while he’s got a lot of awesome techniques and he is probably definitely the best Dudley [in the world], he’s not doing anything that most people aren’t really doing in terms of standard game play?

It’s just kind of working for him? I think that’s the big key to playing Dudley well, it’s just making that not-so-great stuff work for him. And I just don’t have the time for it.

There’s a lot of players that I enjoy watching. It’s hard when you’re put on the spot to kind of think of everyone!

(Loki Edit: I realised I didn’t mention Mike Ross, I love watching Mike Ross matches, that guy knows how to clutch shit out, he’s fearless, and seems like a really cool dude too.)

Even just random players that uh…even just characters that I don’t play I just enjoy watching some matches. I like watching…back when I was watching a lot of Third Strike videos I actually really enjoyed watching the Family Fun arcade matches and watching like Amir and Renic and Pyrolee…

They’re quite fun, especially the commentary. They’re just playing in a more fun way than the Japanese do, I think.

I don’t know. I watch a lot of videos, and there are a lot of players that are pretty awesome. To be honest? I don’t like watching Daigo videos that much. I just… it’s just so depressing. He just plays so normal most of the time…it’s just so solid and standard that…  I don’t know. I like watching people do crazy shit and weird setups and stuff that I don’t [see]. And yeah, he does some pretty awesome stuff every now and then. But to be honest, I’d much rather watch anything with players that aren’t necessarily that good but are doing weird setups and are up and coming. Like American players and stuff like that doing weird shit, I like rooting for the underdog I guess.

I like rooting for the underdog. It’s the same thing like I don’t watch a lot of Justin Wong matches or whatever, so I don’t want to see him beat on some guy. I want to see someone just duke it out.

A.K.A. The Gamerbee sort of effect from EVO?

Yeah I guess. I like Gamerbee matches but um…he’s quickly becoming not the underdog!

Yeah! Oh well look, if they fix Adon for Arcade Edition and he doesn’t get up quicker I think it’s gonna take a fair bit from his game. So he might be back down…

He doesn’t have that much to begin with though, that’s the thing. It’s just that no one knows how to play against it. It’s not like he’s that broken to begin with.

I think he’s just a character that works really well for being crazy and random and doing weird shit that no one expects.

16. Any shoutouts or final words you’d like to say?

Um yeah, I guess. I don’t want to do a little Arturo Sanchez shoutouts to everyone kind of thing. I can’t really do that that well.

Yeah, shoutouts to the Sydney community. I know you guys had a bit of trouble this year with getting OHN for December. I’m hoping that I might be able to make the event that you guys are running instead. But if not, I’ll see you guys at OHN.

Shoutouts to all the Melbourne guys, who are starting to really support the community. I’d like to get the community to a point where if I was to step away for a while that it would still keep going strong and the same thing with all the other Couchwarriors guys and that kind of thing.

So yeah, I think it’s just a really good time for everyone. I’m glad there are so many people that are up and coming in the community so big props to all those guys.

Okay. Well, thank you very much.

No problem, thank you.