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I <3 scrubs calling stuff cheap in fighting games. How is it cheap to keep punishing people for being stupid and repetitive? Maybe Ced's friend should *gasp* stop jumping in? Recently my favorite memories have been when new fighting games showed up at the arcade, particularly Tekken 4, Soul Calibur 2 and Tekken 5. There's just nothing quite like an excited community sinking their teeth into a new fighter. It's even better when there's a time release for new characters like there was in Tekken 4; every Monday the whole little community is there gathered to try out the new characters. And when there's something to play for, like the card system in Tekken 5, it's even better. That's why it's so sad to see arcades around me dying en masse. Five Maryland arcades had T5:DR three months ago, now three of them are closed. It sucks that we're starting to lose that arcade fighting game community that I loved so much.

I am so totally uninterested in this generation, but I'm sure I'll eventually get a PS3, because it has Metal Gear and the good fighters.

Speaking of GameFAQs, Final Fantasy vs Zelda tomorrow in the series battle. Fun! Heh.

FF9 was forgettable except for the ending, which is extremely memorable as the worst ending in videogame history. CONGRATULATION has nothing on that pile of swill when comparing all time bad endings. All plot inconsistancies explained away with 'I sang your song.'. Nice! Quina shenanigans. Quality! A never-before-seen evil tree as the final boss. Awesome! I heard rumors that T5:DR PSP could somehow be hooked up to play on a real TV relatively easily. Is there any truth to that, or is it just people at TZ holding onto false hope?

QFT. Dragon Warrior 1 let you choose the text scroll speed for fuck's sake. Not having options that were standard for 15 years is fucking horrible. Worst game ever.

Worst game ever. Great stories are worthless if the game is unplayable.

Heh I've heard urban legends about Clint from ATL magically punishing jabs with deathfists, but yeah, even if you could, it wouldn't be a counterhit. Your friends are probably doing a jab and then doing something else and you're deathfisting them out of it. And deathfist is still crazy fast in T5; it still punishes whiffed anything. Bait out a whiff on an 8 frame jab and you get a deathfist for free. Paul's better in T4 and T5 than he was in T3 because of the moves Anya mentioned, especially the JF which gives people a reason to duck against Paul that they didn't have in T3. You can't even make an argument for him as best in T3; Ogre wins that hands down. T3 waning moon = wtf. Kaz got more good moves since T2 than the Changs.

Yeah, I vaguely remember arguing with you a few years back saying MK2 was the best. Since then I've actually gone back and played MK2, and it's... not. Not having any options in movement makes for a really boring game. I still give it major props for the ambiance, the stages are great. But unfortunately, it's not fun. And fuck Kintaro, cheapest boss ever. What system is Fight for Life on? I'll totally get it, I love bad fighters. The day we scored Clayfighter 2, TMNT: Tournament Fighters and Rise of the Robots on the same day was a great, great day.

Rise of the Robots is hilarious. Player one had a special move that did more on block than any of player two's moves did on hit. I remember we spent hours trying to find a special move with player two, but could never find one. We tried like every normal 2D combination; nothing. If anyone knows the 2P special move, I'm just dying to know. Obviously the SF2 games were the best of the early 90s fighters, but the other game that's stood up pretty well to time is UMK3. That game is crazy intense when people know what they're doing. Much better than MK2. Run gets no love, but it makes the game so much faster and more fun.

You get to enter your name only if you become the new player of legend. When I played through and didn't beat the old player of legend, the game just ended. As far as I could tell, the fights other than the one against the player of legend were just against computer names. It really seems pointless, because all you can do is just go 8-0 and hope that's enough to make you the player of legend. You get all kinds of points for combos and stuff too, but that all just seemed really random. Score in fighting games is pretty much always worthless. It seems closer to 5.1 style changes than to something big like DR. Balance is better, but it's more through nerfs than buffs. Sophie just got worse; nothing really new, just worse properties on the old moves. Mitsu got a couple new moves, but neither seem very good. I hear some of the really bad chars like Raph and Talim gained a lot, but for most of the characters it just seems like balance tweaks, not a whole lot really new.

Yeah, you definitely don't get to save your character. You choose a character, challenge whichever 'player of legend' you want, fight eight battles and then that's it. There's one 'player of legend' for each character, and I think you take over as the POL if your level ends up higher than the old POL. You get like 15 levels every time you win, and then you get to build up your stats. Of course none of that matters since you have to start over every time. So yeah, total waste. Too bad, since the whole leveling system is pretty neat; if you kept your character it could have been cool. I have no idea why they decided not to let you.

Yeah, I saw it at a mall yesterday. It was 75 cents for 2/3 rounds, though, and in the same shitty old cabinet with broken sticks that SC2 had been in. Totally not worth it when you've got DR across the aisle in a cabinet with controller ports for 50 cents for 3/5 rounds. I hope they change their pricing policy soon. Tried out Mitsu and Sophie quickly, Mitsu seems the same as SC3 basically, Sophie is toned down, as expected. No one played me so I got to remember just how awful the SC3 AI is, heh. There's a conquest-style mode, but it doesn't seem as in depth as SC2 conquest and it's no fun because the AI is so bad. Overall I have to say I was kind of underwhelmed. If the Namco arcades are just going to put the upgrade in their old broken SC2 cabinets, it's not going to do me a whole lot of good. Not worth paying for when the home version is free. I really wish they would make their T5 cabinets with controller ports the standard; going back to American sticks now that I've experienced that is painful.

It looks like some US arcades are starting to get Soul Calibur 3 arcade edition in. Anyone seen it?

I gave up caring about the mainstream response to fighters I play because it just got too frustrating arguing with people that don't understand the games. Especially since I can never prove anything; they can always argue 'You can't know until you play me!' or some crap. And then if your argument is the least bit technical, they dismiss you as some sort of obsessive-compulsive nerd. Heaven forbid you actually understand the game you play. Eventually I was just like fuck it, whatever, how much fun I have playing Tekken isn't affected by whether some guy at EGM thinks Tekken takes skill. Not worth the effort to worry about it. Still haven't really played anyone solid with Lili yet; my home arcade has the most garbage players in the world and I've been too busy with work to travel. I can see how she'd be limited, though; I use d/f+3+4 into mixups a lot and that seems like it'd be easy to deal with once you understood the gimmicks. And yeah, her lows are pretty bad. I use throws to make up for them, but against someone who was really good at breaking throws, I'd have a lot of trouble getting them to duck.

I've always loved how people assume that if they can beat their friend/guy at work at a fighter, they know what they're talking about. There is at least a 99% chance, probably more than that, that your friends and coworkers are all bad at the fighters that they play. The reality is that you've almost certainly not seen either 2D or 3D fighters played at high level, so trying to make sweeping judgments about them is pretty silly. Speaking of Evo, is anyone going? I was a little sad to see no SC3, but I'm still planning to go. Never been to Vegas; will be a fun vacation if nothing else.

The SF3 Third Strike port on PS2/X-Box is considered to be vastly closer to arcade perfect than the Dreamcast port. No one has touched the Dreamcast version in a tourney since Anniversary Edition came out. And word on the street is that 3S is a decent 2D fighter, so wow, I guess PS2 can handle one after all! Tekken's a scrub game; it needs more infinites!

Haha that T6 trailer looks like arcade TTT or something. Why even show a build that early? All you're going to get is people saying how bad the game looks. They should have shown more prerendered Jin videos. MGS4 looks potentially amazing, that was a seriously quality preview.

New Culdcept?! Omg what system?! That system is so bought. I don't really care about the capabilities of the new consoles because we're in total diminishing returns mode right now. Most developers can't even afford to make games that push the current systems, so giving them better hardware's not going to make a difference. Games look fine now and nothing I'm seeing in these systems looks all that much better than what we've got already. It's nothing like the graphics difference of last generation. But I'll buy a PS3 because it's got all the fighters on it. I'm not excited though; this upcoming generation just feels like a burden.

I started playing Dragonov recently, and I like him too. Great spacing/poking game. Kinda feels like a Soul Calibur character, heh. d/f+4 and u/f+3 are great. u/f+3 also gets mad bonus points for looking totally ridiculous. Namco's had a quite a good run of new characters in T5 and DR. Except for Asuka they've all been different and fun. Pretty impressive.

Oh so that's why the videos look so clean. Yeah, that's a great feature. Sega certainly knows how to make arcade cabinets. I'm not gonna bother with DR for PSP. I don't have a PSP, no one I know has a PSP and it's not worth $300 to play the computer. I really hope DR comes to a real console at some point, even if it's awhile later.

Hmm, some VF5 vids up... Crazy impressive detail in the graphics and I really like the stage design and music. The gameplay still looks as rigid as ever, though. Low jab, throw and that terrible oki game are still in full effect. Can't wait to hear all the magazines talk about how 'deep' it is. Still, looking forward to it. Lau Vs Akira http://web.utk.edu/~dzau/VF/pics/VF5_Lau_akira.wmv Jacky VS Goh http://web.utk.edu/~dzau/VF/pics/SuperGold...O-NAME(Goh).wmv Brad VS Sarah http://axts10.web.infoseek.co.jp/vf5sarah/new.wmv El Blaze VS Akira http://www.kakomubi.2y.net/sn/src/up0001.wmv Lion Vs Vanessa http://www.kakomubi.2y.net/sn/src/up0004.wmv Jeff VS Kage http://www.doupe.cz/vaulty/virtuafighter/m.../VF5/up2669.wmv Namflow (Shun) vs TenshilLabu (Brad) http://www.doupe.cz/vaulty/virtuafighter/m...F5/shunbrad.wmv Namflow (Shun) vs Vanessa http://www.doupe.cz/vaulty/virtuafighter/m...shunvanessa.wmv El Blaze VS Wolf http://www.doupe.cz/vaulty/virtuafighter/m...BlazevsWolf.wmv IN GENERAL FOR VF5 VIDS GO HERE http://hosted.filefront.com/vfdc

Aaaaw. Too cute.

Scrub mentality is always fun. But sheesh, these people are nuts. Comparing jumping a fence in WoW to rape or slavery? Oooookay then...

I got a chance to play a lot of Lili today and I've pretty much fallen in love with her. Her pressure game is so much fun; you bait them with d/f+1 and 1,2 until they try to interrupt and then if you guess right you crush them for half life. Fun! I love d/f+3+4 into the mixups too, and I love the way the d/f+3+4, d+1, wr+2, d+1,2,4 juggle looks. It's too bad if hopkick really beats all d/f+3+4 options though. Hopefully the people I play won't read anti-Lili strats. Does she have a good wall ender? That'd be crazy if she did since her standard d/f+1, 1, 2, d+2,2,3 combo takes them so far. Also what's her best low? I've been using d/b+4 but it seems like more of an anti-scrub low. Does she have one that's solid? I bought a card for her today too (Valley Mall had cards, wtf). What's her coolest looking 1P item for <100K?

Must... resist... urge... to... make... fun... of... UMCP... college... radio... Besides obvious stuff like One Winged Angel and the FF6 opera, a couple that stand out for me are the old Namco fighting game intro themes. The Tekken 2 and Soul Blade intros were fantastic and had great, memorable music. It's a shame that the more recent stuff hasn't been nearly as good.