I’ve written a lot before about some of the issues I’ve had over the years when it comes to Street Fighter 4 – and these days I’d add that I really don’t like the later-discovered flaws in the engine like plinking, and I have an insane hatred of near universal defensive option selects like ‘crouch-tech’. The current incarnation, Ultra Street Fighter 4, pretty much has most of the general SF4 problems intact sadly, although the character balance feels a little better to me, I can’t honestly say that for sure as I’ve not researched enough. Plus as always, it remains to be seen regarding balance, depending on how long this game gets play at high levels to truly test it… Anyway, putting all that aside, it’s still the most fun I can have playing an official fighting game title online right now (for more of why, read Competitive Gaming 456), and so, inspired by a photo of a friend’s mug on facebook – yes a literal mug, not her face – bearing the slogan “Do more of what makes you happy”, as well as finding a little more spare time for gaming in my life right now, I’ve taken up the mantle and set off on the unruly internet waves of Steam “to go to meet the mighty!” at USF4.
As I’m a pretty casual player when it comes to SF4, due to my aforementioned issues preventing me from being interested in really trying to get good at it, instead I’ve been coming up with varying ways of playing the game that I find fun and to give me little extra goals and challenges along the way. For weeks I was playing vs the CPU and playing online with every single character on the roster in order to unlock all the costume colours, taunts, get some experience with all the characters, and to get some Steam achievements… sadly many of which it turns out are bugged and therefore inaccessible to me, even though I’ve fulfilled all of the requirements for a bunch of additional Cheevos now. Meh. Undeterred, as I’d “completed” this task, I moved on to my next one; seeing how good I could get with various characters that interest me. Because of the failings in how USF4’s ranking system works, the only way I can really do this is to do the opposite and exclusively play a single character online at a time. To try to keep from inadvertently de-ranking and “boosting” my win rate when I switched to characters I was better with, which I was already suffering from due to switching characters all the time, ideally I wanted to start this off with the character I was interested in, but also thought I’d be the weakest with. The choice was clear:
And now, thanks to the great new Youtube upload feature in USF4, you can follow me on the path of saikyo-ryu!
Rather than any serious analysis, I’m mostly blatantly showing off here of course 😛 … But I’m finding it helps to get into character when I’m playing as Dan! 😀
This first match is one of the more lopsided matches I had. As the comments from a friend on the video says, I really should’ve got a perfect, but I prioritised getting in some extra taunts instead, for a truer example of the ‘greatest style’ 😛
Once I’d figured out he was the usual overly-aggressive jump-in and reversal Ken style, I didn’t have too many problems.
You’ll note as always during Miami Dolphins season, I’m fighting in the closest colour costume I can get to the Dolphins kit in Street Fighter 🙂
Next up was one of two matches I played against an Evil Ryu player with an extremely high BP score…
Evil Ryu is not evil enough to face up against the Greatest Dragon! I also figured out he was extremely bad at teching throws which gave me a huge edge once I realised it.
Next up is match that was flagged for upload to the server’s Replay channel against Cammy, who is actually a horrific matchup for Dan in my limited experience, not that it will matter… I love the extra stress of knowing your match is going to get uploaded to the Replay channel!
I actually had another fun match against this same player later, and he spent a lot of the match taunting back at me at full screen as we each tried to out-bait and out-taunt each other 😀
This Ryu player was really quite good, despite his low PP and BP scores, I’d say this was my toughest and best win out of the ones I’ve uploaded here. He didn’t have any obvious weaknesses in his game at all, other than not being able to defeat the almighty Dan. But his higher skill yet lower ranking just highlights the rather egregious flaws in the SF4 ranking system.
Finally a revenge match against a Blanka player who’d beaten me earlier. At our lower skill levels at least, I’m finding this is a pretty interesting matchup for Dan.
Ore wa saikyo-ryu da!!
Footnote mini Japanese Dan lesson for those confused and those who care: Dan calls his self-taught martial art “saikyo-ryu” which is generally translated as ‘Greatest Style’, although it could be more literally translated as ‘Greatest Dragon’ especially in a different context. “Kore ga saikyo-ryu da!” is one of Dan’s win quotes which means ‘This is the greatest style” ie: he’s saying how he’s just demonstrated his style is the greatest. “Ore wa saikyo-ryu da!” sounds very similar but means “I am the greatest style!” (or I am the greatest dragon) 😛 For more awesome Dan facts head over to here. Gadou-ken!
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