fighting games

Street Fight Concepts That Made Me a Better Basketball Player – Part 2: Punishing Mistakes

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This is an on-going series where I discuss the thinking involved in Street Fighter that I’ve applied to basketball. If you want to see earlier entries in the series, hit the link: Part 1: Spacing

PUNISHING MISTAKES

One of the most common mistakes in Street Fighter is a poorly-timed projectile attack. For instance, if I’m Ryu, and you properly react to my fireball, you can jump over the fireball and kick me in the face before I can do anything to defend myself. In Street Fighter, when your opponent makes a mistake, you want to punish them for their mistakes by hitting them with the most powerful attacks as possible.

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Street Fighter Concepts That Made Me a Better Basketball Player – Part 1: Spacing

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For many years, I’ve been an avid basketball player. I’ve played in a few leagues, on a few school teams and participated in a few basketball camps. I am by no means the next LeBron James, but I had the skills to make some noise on almost any given local court. Over the last few years though, finding the time to hit the court has been extremely difficult. During my basketball downtime though, I got really into Street Fighter IV on a serious level. I began to really pay attention to the concepts behind the game and how to use them to my advantage.

This year, my life has really settled down and I now regularly play basketball again. While I’ve had to work hard to get back into game shape (I lost 20 lbs and counting since I started playing again in April), and I’ll never have the raw physical talent that I did in my prime, I do have something now that I didn’t have before: Street Fighter knowledge.

Oddly, I’ve been able to apply much of the thinking involved in playing Street Fighter into my thinking of basketball. Has it made me a better player? I think it has. I’m not saying that Kobe Bryant should dust off his E. Honda to get better, but having that parallel helps me see basketball in a different way, allowing me to play the game smarter. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to apply these concepts in a one-on-one basketball situation, because adding in more players will make this more difficult to explain than it should be. I have at least four parts to this series ready to go, with more possibly in the future.

I don’t need to set this up any more. Here is part one of Street Fighter concepts that made me a better basketball player.
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Impressions on Blades of Fury for the iPhone

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However you perceive their creative business practices, Gameloft have built their entire business around creating mobile knock-offs of the games you love. To be fair, they do make a few great original games, but their bread is mainly buttered on based on popular console games.

This game falls into the latter category. Blades of Fury might as well be Soulcalibur on the iPhone.

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Get Hype! EVO 2010 Starts Today!

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Last year was a monumental one for everyone involved in the Evolution fighting game tournament. Besides it being the debut of the massively-popular Street Fighter IV, it broke records for participants, attendance and for the first time ever, it was all viewable live to anyone with an Internet connection. EVO was no longer just the one YouTube clip of Daigo parrying all of Justin Wong’s super combo hits. Hundreds of thousands of people tuned in throughout the weekend to watch Daigo and company play out the fighting game magic. I was glued to my computer that entire weekend; watching arguably the best fighting game action I’d ever seen in my life. That tournament even went as far as inspiring me to level up my own skills.
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Pick Up Post: Jam TE

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My birthday just passed yesterday. While I’m past the point of gift-hording from everyone I know, my girlfriend was wonderful enough to spoil me on my special day. I got a few CDs, a 13-month subscription to XBOX Live and the piece of awesome picture above that you can read about if you hit the link.

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Pick Up Post: Indestructable

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After a year of damn-near uncontrollable anticipation, the sequel to my 2009 game of the year is now in my house. I was actually so excited for this, I was at Walmart at 7:00 AM buying this game, even though I wouldn’t get to play it till after work. After putting in about 20 hours this week into it (and waking up this morning with an arthritic right hand due to all the fighting action) I can positively say this game is good. In fact, it’s SUPER (sorry).

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Daigo Vs. Justin At the Super Street Fighter IV Launch Party

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Last night, I was feeling a bit under the weather and I passed out the moment I got home. As a Street Fighter IV enthusiast, this kind of worked in my favour as I woke up just in time to catch the Super Street Fighter IV launch party taking place in the west coast.

The main event was a must-watch for those who follow the scene, as it featured two of the top Street Fighter IV players, whose rivalry has led to arguably the best Street Fighter matches of all-time. When they did battle last night, they went back and forth and finished with probably the craziest ending possible. Click through to watch the final round!
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Metacritic and My Video Game Collection

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Hate it or love it, review aggregators are becoming an increasingly important service for consumers of just about anything. In the video game space, people like them because it gives them a quick and quantifiable way of knowing what games are good and what games suck. The counterpoint to those people are those who don’t feel that aggregates tell the whole story and put an emphasis on a number rather than the context from which that number is derived from.

I’m not here to choose sides. Out of boredom and curiosity, I decided to take my XBOX 360 and Wii game collection, full retail games only, compile all of their Metacritic scores and see what the results say about my game stash. I must preface that this is far from scientific and that my collection has changed since I compiled these numbers.

With that said, lets hit the results.

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Pick Up Post: I Got The Magic Stick

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After months of deliberation, I have finally decided to purchase an arcade joystick. With the release of Super Street Fighter IV happening in a few days (and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 having just been announced), I figured now would be the right time to finally give this arcade joystick thing a shot. As a long-time pad player who has always struggled with joysticks in the arcade, this is a bit of a risky investment. The market for joysticks varies wildly, as the prices can go as low as $30 and as high as $200 for products that do the exact same thing. All of the joysticks also vary wildly in features, build quality and the ability to fix/mod the joystick yourself.

As much as I would like to immediately jump to the top-of-the-line MadCatz TE stick, I’m not ready to invest $200 on a controller that I may never find as comfortable as a regular controller. With everything taken into consideration, I ended up putting down the money on this arcade joystick.

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Game Design Talk: Soul Calibur IV and the Apprentice

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Within minutes of first playing Soul Calibur IV, the game has already figured out how to infuriate me. I’m not even close to being a good player at any Soul Calibur game, but I did play enough Soul Calibur II to beat the game on normal difficulty with every character. Having been out of practice, I decided to get reacquainted with the systems by starting out in Arcade mode.

Up until the second last level, I was doing just fine. But it was then that I was pit against the Apprentice.

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