Edit: Added Burnout’s behind the scenes footage

I wanted to get there early to test out some UMVC3, but I got held up by something. I can’t remember. It was either laundry or Dark Souls. Anyway…

I get my ass over to Box Hill and walk into the Hive for the last time. I say hi to everyone, and watch people play a few games. Funnily enough, I originally thought I would be extremely excited to sit down and have a few games of UMVC3.

But when I actually got there, all I wanted to do was to get my hands on the game and have some long hours alone with it in training mode. The thought of sitting down and just playing without the training room time just didn’t appeal to me very much. Huh.

I did have a couple of conversations with some of the guys who have had extensive time with the game, like Loki who told me all about Nemesis and a few other characters.

Eventually I sat down to have a few games to warm up for the UMVC3 tournament, and boy was I salty.

Because you know, when you sit down with a new game, you expect to discover new shiny things your character can do, or some kind of new technology to apply.

You don’t expect to discover additional freaking nerfs.

See, when I heard about the TAC whiff glitch being taken out, I was like, fine. I’ll just do runners stance cancel relaunch with She-Hulk instead. When I heard the increased pushback of torpedo would make midscreen runners stance relaunch impossible I was pretty disappointed. But at least I can still use Spencer assist to get a relaunch, I told myself.

So I tested it out, and as you know, you can’t call assists in Marvel 3 when doing a special move.

So to use Spencer’s assist to bring him down again after OTG torpedo, you do runners stance, run (call Spencer assist), and do torpedo.

See, the runner’s stance and torpedo were considered special moves, so if you input the assist then, nothing would come out. You need to do it during the run itself.

So I tried it out, pressing Spencer assist during the run. And nothing came out.

At first I thought I was just fucking it up, but I realised that it just wasn’t coming out.

They must’ve changed the property of the run so that you can no longer call assist during it. WTF???

So now not only did I lose my two regular relaunch methods with She-Hulk, I can’t even use my assist to get a relaunch?

…

And I discovered even more joyous changes to She-Hulk during tournament. For example, doing the super in the corner makes you reverse direction and come at the opponent the other way during the second hit. You have to reverse your qcf S command to hit the opponent for the second hit, and that threw me off a few times in tournament. It felt like a totally unnecessary change to me.

I then realised that also means when you do the super with the opponent in the corner, you basically knock him OUT of the corner. WTF????????

So now I lose my post-super corner oki with She-Hulk too? (The majority of her resets and mix-ups work best with the opponent in the corner, post-Super/OTG torpedo.) Wowee….huzzah…. yay, Capcom.

I managed to test that the command grab raw tag trick still worked though. But bleah. I had a bad taste in my mouth from all the discovered nerfs and I knew then and there that this would be the last time I would ever play She-Hulk in tournament.

But Jenny still did pretty good for me. I got 4^th or 5^th in the UMVC3 tournament, I think. (I won 2 games in top 8, not sure what my actual final placing is.)

With the craptastic UMVC3 She-Hulk, and me being limited to my day 1 no relaunch BnB. Woo!

To be honest, there were a few factors contributing to my fraudulent placing. A lot of the players were trying the new characters in tournament, whereas I stuck to my old team.  A few top players like Toxy, Shadowfox and SGMike didn’t show up. And I had a lot of luck on my side.

Another important small detail to my placing was that there was a setup left on the side during top 8, and I quickly used the time to tinker with my Taskmaster BnB to make it work. To keep it really simple, I would try to do cM H f+H jM jM f+H jM jM jS b+H S sjM sjM sjf+H sjM sjM sjS otg H arrows diagonal super.

But I noticed that Task’s normals float the opponent quite a bit higher. Ironically this makes connecting the Shield skills after the ground double spidey swing way, way easier (This was the most troublesome part of the combo for me in vanilla Marvel 3). But I kept dropping the final sj M M S in UMVC3 partly because the opponent’s body gets knocked too high. But I tinkered around and found out that replacing the second sjM after the launcher with a sj H fixed the problem, knocking the opponent down so that the rest of the combo would consistently hit.

And knowing that I had a combo that actually worked now was really good, not only for my match execution, but also for my overall confidence.

I eventually lost to Marco, an actual Marvel player, but I had a fighting chance in the end.  At the very end he did Wesker counter super and I tried to command grab him with Spencer. I guess I must be too used to She-Hulk’s grab instead because I did the H one which is the anti-air grab with Spencer. So it whiffed and then he killed me. Doh.

I wasn’t salty to lose to Marco at all despite my big fimble because I know he’s really good at Marvel, and that I really suck at Marvel. To be frank, getting as far as I did is kind of miraculous.

I even beat Kyle in tournament. As I’ve mentioned before, Kyle’s team rapes the shit out of mine.

And I could sense in his beady little eyes, as he swept me over with a dismissive gaze while sitting down, that he was really confident in beating me (as he should be.) And I could also hear Ali trolling me on the mic during our match as well.

But somehow I won.

I got really lucky with a happy birthday, and in quite a few other instances.

Marvel. You random-ass, scrubtastic, anything can happen, disgusting game. Where frauds and sinners are born every damn day.

I have this weird theory that all the trolling I get on the mic, all the margarine and sarcastic Muttonfiend comments…all this reverse karma built up over time. And gifted me this fraudulent victory.

To which I say, up yours Ali!

I did okay in AE as well. We did Swiss, and I found out that I made top 8 again when playing Carnage in casuals. I beat Alex C for the first time in my life during swiss too.

I felt so terrified when playing him- Alex plays Cammy like its MVC3 Wolverine or something. Non-stop dive kicks to the face, just relentless, overpowering pressure.

I just blocked and prayed and tried to weather the storm and concentrate on punishing when I got the opportunity.  It was so close- but I punished one of his errors hard to take it. I think I’ve never held down back into the corner of the gate as hard as I did before until I played Alex.

I also lost to Burnout and Sol in swiss…Sol used Fei Long against me and made quick work of me. And I keep losing to Kevin and his Oni recently. Rargh.

In top 8 I beat Tai’s Cody and lost to Dave’s (Bosslogic’s) Bison.

I played pretty well against Tai, and I felt pretty good about my loss to Dave.

The last time I played Dave in tournament, he crushed me on stream. I didn’t touch him at all.

But when I played him this time, I lost the first game but I surprised myself by coming back strong to win the second game. And it was anybody’s round until I decided I would try to punish his Devil’s reverse with Super.

See I know that Dave knows that I can punish his Devil’s reverse with low forward xx special. So he would try to bait it by flying in and pulling back just out of low forward range. So I knew he was going to pull back and not actually try to hit me with it. I figured I would call his bluff and just super him.

But I must’ve did it too late, or mistimed it somehow, but he landed and blocked it in time. It was always going to be pretty hard for me after that with no meter, and I lost the round and set.

But I least I gave him a game and had a chance to win at the end. Which is a big improvement over the last time we played. So I’m pretty happy with that.

So Couchwarriors is done for another year. It’s been a few years now, and who knows what 2012 will bring. At least I ended the season on a personal high note with a good double top 8 placing. I hope the good result will carry onto next year and I finally stop going 0-2!