Shadowloo Showdown 2013 is just under a month away! Man, this year has gone past so fast. It seems like it was only yesterday that I was in Sydney for OHN and balls-deep in the organisational slog of BAM5.
To be honest for SS this year I haven’t been overly hype for some reason, but it’s probably because of my increasingly myopic focus in the games that I play. I watch a lot less FGC stuff now, and even when I watch a stream archive I tend to fast forward to the players I’m interested in- which basically are only the players that play the same characters as I do 😛
Hence my running joke with Somniac of never watching a stream- unless a Ryu player cracks top 8 😛
Anyway after Sunday’s US qualifiers I am now decidedly HYPE because of CLOCKW0RK!!! (Fanboi alert.)
The original Doom/Ammy player himself. Well, he plays Doom/Vergil now but who cares it’s still CLACKKWERKKK.
This seems like a recurring apology, but I haven’t been updating this space as much this year for sure, I didn’t even write a long-winded OHN or BAM recap like I usually do.
So! While I’m not going to write a full OHN recap, to make up for it, I thought I would post a funny story.
(Disclaimer: This is not meant as any disrespect to George aka Afterdeath, who I fully respect as a person, Final Fantasy enthusiast, and top player, the latter of which I am most decidedly NOT.)
Anyway, the story is less about the match, and more about the funniness. I can’t even remember most of the specifics of the match anyway.
So. We started out playing, and right away I get a hit with my Spencer. See, a lot of teams give my team trouble, specifically teams that sport assists such as Plasma Beam or Akuma Tatsu assist which beat out my Cold Star assist clean and leave my Spencer stranded on an island. Now George’s main assist for his Wesker, Vergil, Strider team was Vajira, and while that is a really deadly assist, particularly against my Doom, it also allows me to call my Amaterasu assist without any fear of it getting beat out, which allows me to quickly get into my comfort zone and set up my offense.
Also, for some strange reason, George decided to start Vergil against me, instead of point Wesker, which I really struggle against because of Wesker’s great ground normals. And while I don’t claim to be especially good against Vergil, I at least am decently familiar with the match thanks to my OHN training buddies Toxy and Daichi.
Now before the match I was sort of going through strategy in my head. Hmm Vergil…have to snap him in…then what about Strider? I was kind of undecided on what to do.
But then the match started and I saw Vergil up first- my mind lit up in burning blood red letters when I got the hit: “Oh I hit VERGIL?!?! Oh boy… I HAVE TO KILL THAT MOTHERFUCKER.” And I went into my muscle memory Spencer TOD combos and any semblance of match strategy or thoughts of snapback went out the window.
I would hit his Vergil, kill him, and then in comes Wesker- and as most of Melbourne knows, I have an irrational hatred of Wesker, even though he’s not top tier in UMVC3 anymore. So whenever I hit Wesker, the same bloodlust would burn through my brain and yeah well…I simply forgot about snapping in Strider!
Most of the matches went the same way, (I can’t remember the score it was either 3-1 or 3-0), I would hit Vergil, kill him, hit Wesker, kill him, Strider would come in and go HAM with level 3 X-factor and Ouroborous, and I would blockblockblock, lose a couple of characters and invariably X-factor fraud-guard-cancel it out for the victory. I remember in the neutral game I wasn’t doing anything too fancy, I would make him block Cold Star and do basic stuff such as low L, dash up and low L again and it seemed to hit him a lot. Maybe he was expecting more advanced mix-ups, like the sort you might get from an actual top player perhaps??
After I won I shook George’s hand, and he looked pretty down. I felt kinda sorry for him because I imagine being in his position as a top player in Sydney, it must suck to lose to a scrub like me and Spencer even came over to him with a consoling shoulder pat. Suddenly, I felt some pressure on my shoulder, so I turned around and…
It seems that during my match with George, Stef was actually playing Tom on stage. (As told to me later by my good buddy Andrew aka Vitriol). So everyone was watching that match intently, it was super tense and super hype, and nobody really noticed I was playing on the side setups.
I think towards the end of Stef’s match, Andrew noticed me playing and said to everyone “Hey guys…I think Muttons is actually a few games up on Afterdeath!”
Everyone must’ve done a double take but because Stef was playing Tom and it was the crucial last match, they quickly diverted their attention back to the stage. And after Stef had clutched it out they all got really hype as you would expect, banding around Stef to give him some love. And then Andrew noticed again: “Hey guys, I think Muttons… is actually on the verge of winning?!?”
Everyone quickly crowded around behind me (I was totally oblivious to what was happening because of the headphones I had on, which probably was a major reason I did relatively well at OHN, especially for my standards) and when I got on set point, everyone started to get hype and cheer and get noisy… but then everybody hilariously started shushing each other up: “Shhhh…Shhhh…Shut up, shut up, everybody shut up!”
This is because of my famous tendency to crack under pressure, especially when there is a large crowd behind me actually cheering FOR me. I usually feel immense pressure to win, and historically I’ve always played much worse and gone on to lose pathetically.
So I found it pretty hilarious that totally unbeknownst to me, there had been this big crowd of Melbourne dudes behind me all this time, all excited about the potential upset but trying their best not to make a sound and shushing each other because they didn’t want me to fimble! LOL.
So as I turned around after shaking George’s hand I got this huge shock and kind of jumped up in my chair in surprise as everyone was behind me! And they grabbed me and happily rocked me around for a little bit.
I think no one was more surprised by the result than me, but I did find the story that Andrew told me pretty damn funny.
I later went on to lose to Tom in losers’ finals of our pool (he had put me in losers’ in the first round) and I had another classic choke, I had him down to one character with a good chance at match point, I had Doom and Ammy and enough meter stocked, and all I needed to do was hit A1+A2, just two buttons at the same time. And then I mishit it, getting a Cold Star call instead, and Tom came in swinging, getting that happy birthday as I facepalmed in abject misery.
Actually in that match, I had a crowd around me too, and they actually threw me off this time! They were all yelling really loudly at me to do Veil of Mist super, but because I couldn’t make out what they were saying because of the headphones, I was actually expending some mental energy wondering just what the F they were actually saying, probably to my detriment.
Ah well. OHN was still great fun, and at least I got a good funny story out of it. GGs George and everybody I played at OHN, and I hope to see everybody down for SS!
I liked the poster so much I put it up in my office, right next to my “old man staring at a twenty year old’s ass” poster than I had to cover partially with a Simpson’s poster. (Don’tgetfireddon’tgetfired.)
One of the things I’ve been busy with is updating the SS2k13 Special Guests page.
Like a fucking idiot I messed up the online rego deadline and didn’t get it up in time zzz. But please criticise/comment, let me know what I did wrong and what I can improve on.
Being a Scrub 
Grindin’ sets: Darkace and Phil aka Def-P Shadowlogic 24th June 2013
More sets!
I have been specifically practicing how to focus dash through Chun’s Hazanshu on reaction as the last time I played Darkace I noticed he liked to Hazanshu at point blank range a lot. He would even do them a lot on wake up and hit me! Which really frustrated me a lot. So we played a set at the HQ during SEAM2013 weekend, and I got to see if I had made any progress in the Chun match.
I’m not happy. Not only did I fail to focus through a single Hazanshu on reaction, I also still am not consistent with the spacing in the Chun Li match. You can see there’s a certain far range that you can walk back and outpoke her standing mp with my cmk, I have to stick to that range and not get caught in no-man’s land all the time. Also, I failed to DP crossup light kicks and that command crossup. I noticed two dominant bad traits I have from my sets at HQ today. The first I can see from the Darkace set: inability to adapt to opponent’s patterns.
Darkace has a lot of patterns that I should be punishing extremely, extremely hard, instead of letting him get away with it constantly. Things like: he always, always Hazanshus after a low forward. I should just immediately focus after the low focus and punish him with a focus through, cmp cmp cmk tatsu. Weirdly enough, I was punishing some of his patterns: after an anti-air DP where he recovers to far for me to me to successfully meaty, he usually goes for a backdash. And I caught it with a ume-tatsu multiple times. I clearly can recognise and punish some patterns, why can’t I do it for all his patterns and habits?!? Bah.
After that I played Pyro and he was trolling me with Ryu. But somehow the set wasn’t recorded 😦 I must not have pressed the red button on the LGP, damnit. Oh well, at least I recorded the set after that against another prime Melbourne Ryu, my good buddy Phil aka Def-P aka God of Men amongst Asian Women.
So my second bad dominant trait can by summed up by Genki’s description of my game: “I think your fundamentals are actually strong, but you always choke at the end.”
And this is true. I give in to temptation and throw that last fireball which lets people jump in for the win. There was one round that I was particularly disgusted with myself when instead of being patient I tried to ume-tatsu through a fireball and Phil just DPed it for the KO. Very uncharacteristic of me to do that in the clutch, but it’s just another example of me making bad decisions when the game is on the line.
Another bad trend I notice is that I am not spending my meter when I have Ultra to kill!! Why am I doing FADC combos in the corner that do big damage but do not kill when I can just EX Tatsu in Ultra for the win instead?? Arghhhhh.
I also am still not DPing crossups in the neutral game, and my tech game was really bad in this set. I have to watch the whole thing again, but from memory I recall not being very happy with my footsie game. I think I let him whiff a lot of low forwards unpunished.
Phil, what do you think?
P.S. We ran off quickly after the last game to watch Stef vs. Wong. Overall our boys did really well in Marvel, it was awesome to watch and cheer for them live at HQ. Big thanks to Bugs, Chris Ho and Burnout for organising it. Farpenoodle had the most awesome stream layout, Zhi was funny as hell, and the tournament was hype-ass. Kudos to Yongde aka Cameraman and the whole Tough Cookie staff.
And lastly to all our boys who went over there- good shit guys!!!
BONUS SECTION: Commentary by Jeff and Kilok
I thought, who better to ask about the Chun vs. Ryu match other than my two sifu: Jeff aka Renzuo aka Basemaster aka God Chun Li of Melbourne and Kilok aka the Warrior aka Best Ryu in Bluehouse.
Enjoy!
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