I hope your month of love was a good one. Despite me having to dial down the daily content (and the time I spend gaming) due to real life, it’s still awesome to see so many people hit this site on a monthly basis. I’ll still keep writing as often as possible.
This month’s top 5 posts are an interesting mix of evergreen posts that never seem to go away and older posts finding new life due to current events. Click through to see what was the hotness in February.
Being good at fighting games is hard. Due to my recent success at Super Street Fighter IV, I’ve sort of taken that fact for granted. However, I got better at Street Fighter through hundreds of hours of practice, tournament experience and absorbing anything and everything I could online in regards to making myself a better player. Before I went through all of that, I spent dozens of hours playing the game online; losing almost every single one of those matches.
Though I was able to coast through the bottom tier of ranked Marvel vs. Capcom 3 matches, my winning percentage has taken a serious dip. I know enough about the game to recognize that I’m losing to people who suck at the game, but I don’t have the skills and know-how myself to beat them. Am I willing to put in the time and effort to not suck?
Over the last few weeks, the traffic to my arcade fighstick posts have skyrocketed. With Marvel vs. Capcom 3 hitting store shelves, it appears as though you’re all looking for as much fightstick information as possible before you spend your hard-earned cash on a new fighting game weapon of choice.
As a public service to you (and as something I would find fun to write), I’ve put together a newbie buyer’s guide that covers my knowledge of arcade fightsticks. This post features some general things you should know, mini-reviews to a few of the major fightsticks on the market and links to my older posts where I go into more detail on each product. I’m by no means a fightstick connoisseur, but I do own a bunch of them and spend a ton of time using them.
If you’d like to learn more, click through to the rest of this post!
As much as I love the Street Fighter IV series, it has done little to open me up to other fighting games in the last few years. Granted, I’ve bought every major fighting game since, but none of them could ever stuck with me. I’d play them for a few hours and go back to Street Fighter without hesitation.
After a handful of matches in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, I was concerned that this game would suffer the same fate. As with prior vs. Capcom games, the pacing, team mechanics and execution demands felt completely alien to me. But after a few hours, some training mode time, and some online wins (!) it got me thinking that maybe things will be different this time.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve played a console hockey game. I’m not into the sport enough to keep up with the yearly releases, but I still have fond memories of playing NHL 94 and Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey. Coming into NHL 11, I was understandably intimidated. Video game hockey has evolved quite a bit, which makes jumping in with my primitive video game hockey skills scary.
When it comes to the Street Fighter IV series, Akuma has been my main man. I’ve played over 300 hours of that game using him as my guy. I know the ins and outs to make him work, and all of the weaknesses others can exploit to beat him. I worked my way up to one of the top 300 Akuma players on XBOX Live in North America. He was even my go-to character when I won my first tournament match at Fan Expo.
Since that tournament though, I’ve been exploring my options. I’ve been dabbling with other characters. After a lot of practice and soul searching, I think it’s time I had a change of heart.
Welcome to episode 3 of Jett Vs., a series of blog posts where I post one of my Super Street Fighter IV match videos and analyze it for your viewing and reading pleasure.
If for some reason you’ve been hotly anticipating the day when I’d post a video of myself losing, you’re in luck. Not only do I take an L, but I go down in flames.
I was an epic fail at Marvel vs. Capcom 2. When that game first came out, i was in the midst of my 14-year fighting game moratorium. I did play it here and there at the arcade, but my primitive Street Fighter II skills did not translate well into a game involving teams, air dashes and crazy super moves. Of the few fighting games I did actually play during my moratorium, it was this one that made me say I had no reason to come back to the genre, because I’m way too behind the curve to catch up.
In 2009, the game came out on XBOX Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. I gave it a second chance, now that I was a little older and definitely wiser in regards to fighting games. Even with my Street Fighter IV experience, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was still rocket science to me and probably always will be.
With all that going against it, why then am I excited for its long-awaited sequel, Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds?
I really like Blur’s Career Mode in concept. It’s designed in a way to make sure that you’re never stuck on one thing. You always have multiple races you can choose from and different goals to work towards in order to unlock the next series of races or the next rival race. Even when you lose races, you can still earn fans or new cars.
But what happens when you get stuck on every available option? This is what’s happened to me in Blur. I’m not very far into the career mode at all, but I’ve already hit the wall. Maybe more determined (or skilled) players would fight through it, but I’m going to have to disappoint Vin Diesel on this one.
Steff is a huge fan of the Saw series. The first entries to the series are some of her favourite horror movies of all-time. Because of that connection, she’s wanted to play this game for quite some time. It’s not easy to find new nowadays, but I was able to pick it up for her duringone of my random trips to Blockbuster. After spending some time with her in Jigsaw’s asylum, did this survival horror game scare the heck out of us? Or will we turn Jigsaw down next time he asks us to play a game?
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