After doing a load of test streams myself and of course posting videos and related articles here, I had a very strange experience earlier this week, when I finished a match of SFV online and then saw that my opponent had the title “Streamer” set.
“Hmmm” I thought, and I wondered if they were actually streaming right now and had streamed the rather good match we’d just had… A quick skoot around twitch and I discovered indeed they were! So I dropped into the channel chat to offer a belated GG, which was happily reciprocated 🙂
Bleedthebones also went to the trouble of locating my match in the stream so I could watch it back from my opponent’s perspective, and very interesting it was too: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/136484958?t=10m29s
(temporary link as twitch probably won’t archive this for long I expect sadly).
Here’s a clip I made of the best highlight from our match that should be maintained though:
https://clips.twitch.tv/embed?clip=WrongPlainEmuBleedPurple&autoplay=false
Analysis: The reason I wasn’t “got” here was that mscupcakes had already followed up a slow kikoken with an attack earlier in the set that I’d tried to reflect and I’d gotten hit, so I was actually expecting and baiting that this time by using the V-Skill absorb and not the reflect version, to give me time to block the followup and hopefully end up at an advantage, or at least with a stored fireball – however I couldn’t believe my luck when she tried to follow it up with a full super, allowing me a full punish. This moment was really the turning point that allowed me to win the whole set, as with no meter I could then freely pressure Chun Li off quite a few other moves.
Another interesting thing watching our match and the stream I noticed is how mscupcakes is FAR better than me at execution of combos and special moves in general, yet I feel I could win due to my safer playstyle and perhaps overall matchup experience and fighting game fundamentals. Which is often exactly how I feel playing people at my matchmaking level at SFV. They have the edge on me in so many areas but I have to catch up with other parts of my game.
I also have no idea how someone can manage to chat and read the stream chat etc like this while also playing so well! I have to concentrate on execution and the match so hard that I find it really hard to talk along with it, or even alongside it. On top of that I’m naturally disposed to being quiet during games thanks to my foundational competitive gaming experiences all being face to face and often in the arcade – which is also part of the reason for my old reputation of being incredibly chilled out and calm during HDR matches in the Xbox 360 chat lobby days.
Footnote – I was also rather pleasantly shocked that “mscupcakes” really was an Irish woman who was doing the streaming, as indicated by their CFN details. The reason I was surprised was that I generally don’t know whether to believe the flags or appearance of gender on SFV as I’ve seen all sorts of strangeness that doesn’t add up. There’s no way, for example, that I’ve had perfect internet connection matches vs people in UAE, Japan and Pakistan – and you are free to put anything you like for your location flag anyway and then can never change it after your initial setting (which is really stupid, like so many things in the SFV UI). And of course women playing Street Fighter is exceptionally rare – although thankfully becoming more common these days. Luckily for me, as proof is in the stream, my Ranma 1/2-esque fighting game vows (made about 22 years ago now!) have not yet been required to be knowingly broken.
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