There have been great changes in my life recently.

In addition to getting back to my daily Bluehouse lunchtime regime, I now have a lot more time to practice almost every day, which I’m mostly devoting to Marvel practice. I get almost three or four hour after work to sit down by myself to work on things like this:

I have also been able to break my longstanding domestic rule: One Street Fighter event per week only.

How have I been able to do all this?

Well basically… my girlfriend got a job!

All I have to do is close down my console by 1030 and act innocent and pretend I was just sitting on the couch twiddling my thumbs. I even get free sushi for supper some nights.

I know, I’m an ass.

But I’m glad she got a job. And not just for those reasons!

It’s only a happy accident that I get to play…fine I’m sure no one believes me at this point.

At least I don’t have to kneel devoutly in the corner every night and pray that the new “silenced” sanwa buttons and JLFs will come out on the market soon!

And it’s kind of a good thing. I really feel my Ryu has become really shit after my short break from AE, so putting more training room and arcade time should get me feeling comfortable again soon.

In the meantime every Ryu in Melbourne has been salting me in the mirror. First Jkwang beat me in the Ryu mirror at CCH. Which I hate you with all my heart and soul for Jake. Then Chris Dang beat me up some more later on at CCH. And Alex and Kilok have beating me all day in the arcades. And then Phil at the GC ranbat…well I’ll get to that later.

Well one thing of note from CCH is that I found out where our banner came from.

It was made by Boomy, I thought it was godlike at the time he made it and immediately started using it.

And after I looked at the other site, I initially thought the coincidences were hilarious. I know, I’m a horrible person.

But I realised with the subject matter, and it being an official organisation… we should probably make a new banner.

So I was discussing with Mike (Toxy) and I was saying the new banner should be a big picture of the M.F. founder, aka Chris Dang.

Perhaps he would be all golden and bronze like a statue, with that big smile of his on his face. Then a rainbow will arch over his head, and the words Chris’ Club House would flutter happily over that. We could have doves flanking him and slogans like hope, empowerment, Melbourne Forever floating at the bottom…

You get the idea.

Well Chris overheard it!

So when I starting posting things in the CCH thread Chris was very quick to put his hand up for a new banner.

From http://forum.ozhadou.net/index.php?topic=7187.15

Chris:

“before i unveil my banner concept let me explain my thinking….

2011 saw the introduction of mvc3, umvc3, 3 iterations of sfiv and kof as well.

at first i thought it would split and/or dilute the community but mutton has done a wonderful and dedicated job in ensuring regular meetups for everyone and stuck through the tough times

muttons and the rest of the melbourne community has made it better and more professional with the likes of shadowloo bros and bugsimus stream master.

chris’ club house sounds amateurish and dated.

muttons found some balls as evidence in his recent blog

and… i haven’t seen a girl at one of these in ages!

so i now unveil my concept banner for the meetups….

mmh has the same ring about it as cch. rolls of the tongue and we may even get a sponsor out of it if you’re not sure what i’m talking about http://maps.google.com.au/maps?ix=hca&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=mannhaus+abbotsford

of course it’s tongue in cheek and could do with some polishing by our very own bosslogic. if it offends anyone tell me and i’ll take it down immediately

btw the left is umvc3 and the right is sfiv. why? because sfiv > umvc3 ”

I should have known something was up. Chris, being the humble and modest guy that he is, has always tried to get away from the name Chris’ Club House. (It was originally called Collingwood Club House, but we all started calling it Chris’ Club House because, well, he’s the M.F. founder.)

Nice one Chris, I love the troll indeed.

Another thing I realise that I suck at money collecting. Ali in addition to running the brackets at CCH tournaments, would always collect the venue/tournament fees. He really does a lot of work for the event.

But since we’ve changed CCH to a casuals night, seeing as there as basically two or three tournaments a week in Melbourne, and changed the venue fee to $2 (people who bring sticks, games, consoles get in for free), I’ve had to do money collection by myself these days.

I find that I initially remember to do it at first in the first few hours of CCH. Then as people start flowing in dribs and drabs I omit or simply forget to ask people. And I’m not blaming people for not paying, people simply forget. I understand since I do it myself. Also, it takes a bit of assertiveness to constantly go up to people and ask for money. I will work on that and get better at it.

I notice Ali had a good idea with a Shadowloo money box for donations at CCH. But I noticed most people just walked right past it because well, it was just a black box, and easily missed.

So I figured maybe a money box that was perhaps in a more recognizable shape would work a little better for a CCH venue fee collection box. Something that would catch people’s eyes and then maybe I could put a sign next to it saying “$2 venue fee (bring gear, get in for free)” next to it.

So I went hunting for a weird money box/piggy bank/coin slot box.

I wanted to find something that was maybe Street Fighter related. Maybe a sexy Chun Li model with a coin slot on her behin…never mind. Or something like that.

I didn’t look around too long, but in the end I ended up with a Doraemon.

I wonder how effective Mr. Doraemon will be. Will test it out next CCH!

But back to GC.

First things first: Chris Ho is a BOSS.

The last few GC ranbats, Chris Ho has been driving around the night before collecting everybody’s consoles and monitors. Now I live in East Melbourne. Ali lives in Lalor. Bugs lives in Dandenong. Burnout I think lives near Chadstone? You get the idea of how much driving Chris has to do.

I asked him how many hours he had to drive to grab everybody’s gear. And he said four hours plus!

That’s crazy!

Not only do you have to consider the time taken, what about the money spent on petrol…

I asked him why don’t we simply bring our gear to GC on Thursday, and he said he prefers to have all the setups laid out beforehand.

I appreciate him wanting to be prepared and have everything ready the night before, but goddamn that’s some dedication.

Take yesterday’s GC event for example.

Chris and Ali and crew went up to Sydney on Wednesday for the Capcom event to meet Seth Killian.

(Damnit I really wanted to meet Seth Killian.)

And they just flew back on Thursday morning. So the night before Chris told me to bring my gear to work. And just hours after getting of a plane from Sydney, he rocks up directly to my office in the city around two something  to take my console/stick from me!

Goddamn, that’s some dedication.

Soon I get off work, and make my way to Crown.

I get there and see Shadowfox, Andrew, Ali, Street Pussy, Pyro and Chris already there. I shake some hands and…time to get some casuals in!

What I notice right away is that I was playing pretty well that day. But Andrew always likes to tell me; Muttons you play so good in casuals. Then in tournament I smash you! What’s wrong with you?

I don’t know Andrew. I do know I definitely play shittier in tournament. I get tense, nervous, fimble a lot, focus on footsies too much and not anti-air jump-ins…all my bad habits that I’ve worked on conquering in casuals return in full force in a tournament match.

I still need to find my right “arousal level”. I read an article about football players, how some players perform their best at low arousal level and others at a high arousal level. And when they get taken out of their comfort zone, bad things happen.

Case in point; Zidane, the best player of his generation, generally played his best at a low arousal level, but he blew up and headbutted Materazzi in a World Cup final when he was taken out of his zone.

When I’m trying to focus, I can be too tense and have tunnel vision. When I’m too loose, I lose some sharpness and clarity. It’s something I’ve been trying to work on for a long time, but I remain hopeful in getting there someday.

Or it could be that that I am simply not that good a player.

I went two and three at GC. It was triple elimination, one game best of five rounds for some reason.

I beat Nick (Killbox), lost to Rossco (Zerokill), beat JSupreme, lost to Pyro…and finally lost the mirror match to Phil on stream. Salt!!!!

The match with Rossco was close, but I got caught by Ultra though fireball in the end.

Pyro…just destroyed me. I haven’t watched the match again but I remember being very tight and fimbling a lot, and getting outfootsied and jumped in a lot.

Pyro played very differently from Zero. Zero was more typical walk back jab jab dash punch Boxer, so some of my anti-dash punch buffers were working okay.

But Pyro would totally disregard his charge and walk up to me and hit buttons. Stand strong, sweeps to punish my whiffed low forward, stand fierce to beat/trade with my fireball when I got frustrated by sweeps… He beat me with a lot of buttons.

Pyro said later in the car with Somniac (who won the ranbat, congrats to him, and also congrats to Andrew for beating Somniac in tournament for the first time, something I dream of every night when I go to sleep) and me; [With Muttons], once you take away his low forward, he’s done. You can see him thinking about it, thinking about it, and then he’ll throw one or two fireballs, and that’s when you take the game away from him.”

It’s not harsh, it’s totally accurate. He read me perfectly.

It’s really interesting to play a player that would abandon his typical character play and instead go for a gameplan to specifically counter a player, not his character. And I couldn’t deal with it at all. And I am unsure what I should do next time I face Pyro, other than have a better fireball game and actually fucking anti-air.

My next match was against Phil. Maybe he wasn’t warmed up but I was doing pretty well against him in casuals. So I had a little bit of confidence going in.

But in the end he beat me in a close match 3-2. I fimbled my EX fireball FADC Ultra at the end that would’ve killed for the win, something that I wasn’t missing in casuals and something I have been specifically practicing in training room to regain my consistency. Fuck. So frustrating.

But my general feeling after the match was that he was beating me in the fireball game, and was making good reads when to jump when I threw fireballs in reaction. So how did I even take two rounds? That was my main feeling post-match.

Phil told me that he thought my knockdown game was really good, and that my jump-ins were really ambiguous. So even though he agreed he was beating me in the ground game, I was able to get good damage from my knockdowns. That being said, he did manage to uppercut one of my crossups to take one crucial round.

So my stream curse continues. From Genxa to Momochi to Anthony to Pyro to Phil, I think I am a grand twelve or fourteen to zero on stream. And I have lost three straight tournament mirrors in a row.

Pro-tip to a guaranteed win over Muttons: Pick Ryu. And make sure to play on stream!

I was so salty. But GGs guys.

http://twitch.tv/shadowloohq/b/307289066

(You can watch me get bodied here at 1:04 and 1:14. Can’t figure how to embed twitch tv here…)

The rest of the night was fun. Soul Calibur V looked really cool and I screwed around with the game a bit. I was trying to pick a main from the girls…but my obvious choice Ivy seemed a bit stiff when I tried her out. I need to do some training mode with her once I get the game before I decide.

Me and Street Pussy had a rolling good time in the create a character mode.

At first I was thinking of trolling someone by creating a Melbourne character much like Justin Wong creating a Daigo or Gootecks, but being two friendly pervs well…we made a woman.

We spent so much time choosing the costume, getting the proportion of bust/waist/hips just right, getting her eyebrows the right shade darker than her hair, taking ages trying to get the right baby pink on her panties…

It was a lot of fun. We tested several character stances to get the right “open stance” with the maximum jiggle facing the camera. As destiny would have it, we found Leixia’s stance on the third try.

Yeah baby. Who cares about the actual tournament!

Another cool idea Pyro had when I was discussing create a character with him, is that we should have a Melbourne create a character tournament!

We should create characters of ourselves, like an Ali, a Heavy Weapons, a Pyro, a Muttons.

Someone obviously has to put in the time to create the characters, but what we can do is have a CCH and put up a signup sheet two weeks beforehand, giving the character creators time to make the characters, and people signing up can then also indicate what stance/weapon they want.

Then we choose our own characters and slug it out in a good old, double elim. tournament.

What do you guys think?

Spoony, being the new “Soul Caliber V spokesman”, what do you think? Are you up for some hours in create a player mode 😛

Finally, OHN is coming soon. Well I finally got to asking my boss for leave in February. (She gave it right away without even asking me why.)

And I finally worked up the testicular fortitude to tell my girlfriend about it.

…She took it surprisingly well!

I guess I’m all good to go for some fun times in Sydney. Yeah!