This one took me a long-ass time to piece together. Stayed in the office till pretty late the whole week. I wonder if I can keep up this production schedule 😛 Ah well I will try my best.

The SFV launch tourney went awesome too. 80 plus people…it was like a BAM bracket. It was good to see a lot of old faces back, and some new faces as well. Hopefully it will gather momentum and we can get numbers akin to the heyday of SFIV. And then we’ll have numbers together with Smash to warrant using CW for our monthly ranbats 😛 (The logistical nightmare of doing it every month at CW though…)

I have been finally playing more SFV these days, I’ve gotten some free time due to an unexpected development in my personal life. While I’m still getting used to the game, I’m definitely enjoying the learning process. Learning my new normals, the new matchups, the new oki setups…it all has been a ton of fun. I’ve even started playing online again, which was extremely rare for me in the last four-five years of SFIV.

Also because I only have a short ethernet cable and my modem resides in my kitchen, check out my lazy-ass SFV setup 😛

My little SFV nook 😛

Things have changed big-time at CCH too. Over the last few months at CCH, there was a bit of diversity. We would have some classic, maybe a marvel setup. Some Guilty Gear perhaps. A Third Strike setup. And of course Igor with his ST supergun setup.

But once V hit? It was SFV setups wall to wall haha. Reminded me of the Vanilla days. I still hear lots of dissent and grumbling about the game from a lot of players, but I think everyone is just happy to have something new to play.

Personally I started out not liking the range of this normals in this game, but after getting used to Ryu’s fireball (different frame data with different buttons which is different to IV, and also having more recovery than IV) I think his footsie fireball is quite strong in this game with the removal of Focus as an universal anti-footsie and therefore anti-footsie fireball tool. There are downsides however with the reduced pushback, for example eating EX Legs from Chun Li after she blocks cMK Hadoken. So I have to get used to things like that.

It’s fun going through sites like SRK and Reddit and grabbing useful information.

Take for example, a precisely calculated list of the range of Ryu’s normals.

b.hk – 1.840 (second hit)
cr.hk – 1.771
st.hk – 1.697 (standing only)
f.hp – 1.434
st.mk – 1.416
st.hp – 1.296
st.lk – 1.290
cr.mk – 1.270
cr.mp – 1.200
st.mp – 1.150

The longest ranged normal? You wouldn’t have guessed it but it’s the second hit of Back Roundhouse. Also, check out how stumpy cMK is compared to some of his other normals. I guess Capcom really wants to encourage hitting a more diverse hitting of buttons in the mid-range when it comes to Ryu. I won’t lie though, I miss the old cMK like a motherf…

Getting used to things like being able to rush-down Zangief (yay!) Fishing for counterhit Crush Counters with Stand HK and whiffing on crouchers, or even questioning the merits of anti-air Medium DP vs anti-air stand light punch into dash under reset (I so far favour DP. Old habits die hard :P)

I’m slowly getting the hang of Ryu in this game. I’m a slow and unnatural learner. But I’m really looking forward to playing multiple characters in this game. So far I like Chun Li, Cammy, and Mika/Laura. My first big roadblock in this game, the character that I really have a hard time fighting against with Ryu is – Nash.

Which character beats Nash? Should I pick a character to cover my bad matchups or go with what the heart wants? (A jiggly grappler.)

This is the fun part. Strategising and schemin’.