Gamerbee at Shadowloo Showdown impressions

WARNING I ramble a bit and I can't be bothered with spelling and grammar, also keep in mind that events like these are colored by your feelings at the time and can look a bit different when you watch them back

GAMERBEE REPORT

I remember when people used to post up long reports on VFDC back in the VF3 days every time they would go to a tournament. I miss those days so here’s a small attempt at kick starting an old tradition again .

First a little background on the VF scene in Melbourne Australia.

The Melbourne scene has always been limited to a group of somewhere between 5-10 players and our friendly neighbourhood admin Myke making guest appearances every other year. With the release of VF5 on console probably being the peak period with the highest number of decently skilled players playing once or twice a week.

After Street Fighter 4 was released and with no new console version of Virtua Fighter all of the players that I knew from VF 4-5 stopped playing. I tried to get into Street Fighter 4 myself but I just didn’t enjoy the core mechanics and I felt the game relied too heavily on set play and reactions as well as option selects which have no counter to them and just serve to take away all the options that I thought would open the game up (invincible backdash, focus attack, reversals etc).

A local group called Couch Warriors starting running VF5 tourneys around May 09 with pretty much all new players or people that hadn’t played VF5 seriously before. This event is run once a month and so the amount of time I get to play now is limited to that. At this point with so many new players I thought it was a good opportunity to learn new characters and gain some new insight into the game until a new version came around.

Shadowloo Showdown went down this weekend and while primarily a Street Fighter tournament it did have a VF5 tourney on the Sunday featuring Gamerbee from Taiwan.

I play in local tournaments every month and have played VF since the first one came out . I have played competitively since VF3. I’ve played a few great players in my time such as our own home grown hero Iron Myke. I also spent a number of months in Singapore and had the opportunity of playing people like Tetra and Danny13.We used to get a number of randomly awesome international student VF players in our local arcade during the VF3 and 4 era as well.

I feel like I’m at a place now where I know more about VF5 than I ever have about any game before but my opportunities to play are much less and so I find myself struggling to implement my knowledge when I do play.

My biggest problem is that I tend to underperform in tournaments and tend to spend too much time looking for patterns in other peoples play rather than dictating the match. Also tournament nerves take a heavy toll as well as struggling with a joystick sliding out of your lap resulting in botched execution and sweaty palms not helping matters.

My weekend started by watching Gamerbee play SSF4 on the stream whlle I was at home practicing VF5. For those that didn’t see, Gamerbee won Super Streetfighter 4 singles taking out both Tokido and Mago with some incredible clutch decision making.

I knew that he was a top Taiwanese VF4 player and had only recently become known for SSF4 so I assumed he was pro at VF5 as well due to the large space of time between VF4 and becoming known just this year in SSF4.

I had practiced my characters to death and I had endlessly trained all my option selects in training leading up to this moment. I had practiced all the obvious stuff as well as options to beat delayed throws. I knew that my main weakness as a player was not really having a strong reverse nitaku game.

When I was in Singapore I noticed that a lot of the top players are really good at reverse nitaku which makes you scared to use delayed attacks and throws. I was hoping to implement this into my game, as if you rely too much on defensive options people won’t have any fear of you and will feel like they have all day to make a decision about what to do. I think knowing when to intelligently attack at disadvantage is a really crucial still in VF.

Fast forward to Sunday and I arrive at the tournament venue about an hour or so prior to the starting time. Berserk (Daniel) and Kenny (El Twelve) were already there Jeff (Renzuo) was also there and he played some casuals despite refusing to enter the tournament.Mooseking was also there but apparently later on didn't want to play his tourney match and was disqualified.

I had narrowed down the characters I was going to use to Lei Fei, Vannessa, Goh, Aoi, Pai or Wolf. I had started practicing Lei Fei but wasn’t sure if I had the experience to make him work in a tournament setting yet but casuals seemed to be working out fine.

We end up with a bracket of 8 and we call Gamerbee over to get some practice in. He goes into training mode and goes straight to Akira, he was doing perfect single palm elbow after a couple of tries so I figure he can’t be that rusty. He was initially having problems doing the knee on a downed opponent against the wall so I suggested he might like to use modified Shrm instead, he tried it and went ohhh then went straight back to practicing knee lol .

I had to go find some people to get their match going and when I came back Gamerbee was playing against Johnny from Sydney, the best SF4 player in Australia and also brother to Nin who was Myke’s training partner when Nin lived in Sydney.

I noticed Gamerbee was doing stumble throw then trying to do single palm, double palm combo from VF4 I was rofl . I tried to tell him to do double palm instead but I don’t think he heard. Also by this time he was able to do perfect modified double palm staple combo’s and his knee was at 90% or so.

Watching him at first I was disappointed. I was impressed that he was able to get his execution back so fast but really didn’t think that I could possibly lose to an Akira doing Shiniha for his main throw and not using semi circulars and catch throws at all. He just didn’t seem to be doing anything all that special to a casual observer.

Due to a bye and a dodgy tournament organizer I end up playing Gamerbee in the first match. I pick Lei Fei, planning to lame him out with crane low kick combos if things get nasty . Those two matches went by so fast they were practically a blur. We ended up in Goh’s stage which can be scary against Akira. He never once threw me after blocking a move making fuzzy guard completely useless. He got me with a delayed df+pg once and the rest were zero frame throws from mid range when I became scared of eating SDE or whiffing a move at mid range and eating double palm. He played in a supremely confident fashion throughout the entire game, he never hesitated with making quick decisions. I ended up with my back to the wall a lot and found my self playing in an extremely conservative style with my backward movement being stopped by the wall and my forward movement being stopped by 0 frame throws and ambiguous movement. Is he dashing in to SDE or is he just faking it so he can bait me to attack and double palm a whiffed attack or failed evade attempt?. On one of the few occasions I tried to OM away from the wall I just got thrown straight out of it. He escaped my delayed throws as well as my immediate throws and some of those throws were VERY delayed. He abare low punched a lot which sounds easy to beat in theory but he would never do it twice in a row he caught my ETE with single palm elbow into knee at the wall. He caught me with evade Yoho combo on my first attempt at crane low kick, and he evaded into double palm and had some really good mid range spacing into double palm. He also caught me with f+p,b I think I low punched thinking he was just doing f+p by itself and copped a double palm to the face.
I was kind of in disbelief at this point but fortunately Kenny had recorded the match for me so I could give it a look and plan what to do against him if I met him later in the tournament.

Me Daniel and Kenny went to lunch where we started formulating questions for the interview Daniel was going to do later on. I was interested to know whether Gamerbee was around during the VF3 era when Taiwan came second and third in the Max Battle tournament. We ended up going to the same place we went to eat with Myke after BAM. I wish Myke had been here but apparently he was the MC at end of year work party. That’s what he told me anyway, but I speculate that he was meeting Oprah in Sydney (if the world’s most powerful woman can’t get VF5FS green lit then nobody can )

I begin preparing a strategy for Gamerbee. I noticed when I played him he evaded a number of times especially in wake up and he also low punched a lot. I decide to play Pai sice her KG beats low punch and evade into some great setups and also is good at closing space and has great reverse nitaku with fk+g or just k+g. Also she has some nice gimmicks that can be nasty if you’re not familiar with them. In retrospect I should have learnt by now that gimmicks don’t work on a player like Gamerbee, but maybe I wasn’t yet at the stage where I was giving him due credit.

We went back and I played through all the familiar faces until there were only three matches left. Gamerbee and Kenny were in winners final with me waiting in losers final. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately in some sense) we had to wait for what seemed like one and a half hours until SSF4 teams ended so we could get VF5 on the stream. During this time me and Kenny got to work practicing the Akira vs Blaze match. I told Kenny that Gamerbee likes to abare low p and throw a lot so we practiced his up+k combos and such as well as trying to get a good anti evade game working. And maximize his throw and combo damage. After a lot of matches we were starting to get burnt out so we took a break to watch some SSF4 and try and recover a bit mentally (It was about 9ish and we’d been playing for 7 hours by this time).

While Kenny turns to watch SSF4 I go into training mode with Lei Fei against Blaze to check if d/f,d/fpg, d+pkg,p,pk, d/fpp works on blaze, it does not, good thing I checked .
Winners final starts Berserk on the mic with Loki from Couchwarriors. Kenny has a few strong rounds but does a bit too much u+pk . Does really well up close but most of the match takes place at mid range, which is where Gamerbee is in his element.

Next up me vs Kenny in losers final. I scrub it out basically whoring throws or fc,f+p it was ugly for sure but that seems to be how it goes in tournaments. I has resolved not to even bother with tiger or reverse tiger stance mixups because it probably wouldn’t be worth the risk of eating up+k.
So now It’s the final and I don’t have a video yet to refer to so I can’t describe too much about the match. Basically I lost 3-1, I ended up on Jacky’s stage this time. A lot of the things I had thought of worked, I hit him with kg a number of times against his low p against his evade. I hit him out of his evades with bkg when I was too far to kg and I got him with some good mixups with bt u/f kg. Still each setup would only work once, when I tried to use bt u/fkg a second time after sideturning with kg he just turned around with high punch instead of low punch. There was a space of time between the first and second time I tried this but he still instantly knew what to do. At the end of the last match I knew he was going to dash forward and throw me at the end but by the time I entered fkg it was to late, shiniha to the wall end of tourney for me.

I know how ridiculous it may sound but to me Gamerbee was on the level of the other really strong players I have played in the past and in some ways even exceeded them in mental stamina and adaptability.

One of the key factors that I have noticed in all the best players is that thier rhythm is just very hard to read. A quality like this could never exist in a game like Tekken because it revolves around reaction rather than anticipation. But in VF having an unpredictable rhythm is absolutely vital against a good player. It’s like playing an instrument and screwing up one note and then having the entire song fall to pieces.

Playing against the CPU and even the vast majority of human players can never really teach you this ability; a lot of people seem to just focus on being able to flowchart their way through a match attacking immediately whenever they have the opportunity. It’s infinitely more intimidating playing against someone whose timing is seemingly random.

After the tournament Berzerk did an interview which was quite lengthy and awesome. I’m sure that will show up soon. I never did find out about Max Battle, I mentioned Max Battle and Java tea tournament but he gave me a somewhat blank expression. He did mention that he went to Japan for a 2 vs 2 exhibition Japan vs Taiwan but he had to go so I couldn’t really get any more info on that. He also said that his team got knocked out first round at SBO which I’m sure other internationals can relate to .
As a last note he mentioned that in VF the number of things you have to think and the number of commands you have to input can be very high and the difference between Australian, Taiwanese and Japanese players is how fast they are (I assume he meant how fast you can think as well as dexterity). He said he may be faster than us but the Japanese he played were faster even than him. I think he thought the speed of the game could be a turn off to some players and that Street Fighter is much more approachable because you don’t have to think too fast and have too many options. He also mentioned that he was a Lau player during VF3 era, that's seems to be a running theme with Taiwanese players .

He also mentioned that he’s in his 30s haha VF seems to be an old man magnet, I’m gonna be 30 this year myself and I don’t even wanna speculate about Myke I think I remember seeing primitive caveman like drawings on the walls of our arcade of Myke taking the souls of Melbourne VF players

After the interview we asked him some other random questions about the VF3 days etc. I vaguely remember him saying how he once stole some money from his dad to go play VF3 because it was really expensive . Hopefully the others can chime in and help me remember what else he said.

After Gamerbee left Mooseking joined us and we all stood around talking about what just transpired. It kinda brought back some of the magic of the old arcade days where you're with a bunch of friends and you're in on something that nobody else is

Mooseking mentioned that someone on the stream said something like "I don't really wanna play Gamerbee in Streetfighter but I'd like to play him in VF! his play was just so clinical".

The conversation turned to fighting game oversaturation and I had to get going.

Despite losing I had an amazing time and I’m really grateful that I’m still able to be humbled and learn more about this fantastic game. People always wonder why I still play VF despite it not having a scene and I hope this would give them some insight into that.

In the end VF is a test of how strong your mind is, not about what character you choose, what gimmicks you know, memorizing patterns that your opponents character doesn’t have the tools to deal with, turtling and being able to avoid everything on reaction, using option selects to take away all your opponents options with zero risk or even things that you would think are essential like being good at combo's and such. It’s just your mind vs your opponents mind and may the best man win.

This has only strengthened my resolve to keep playing. I hope SEGA comes through with the goods so we can get some new players to experience all the goodness than VF has to offer.

That's all for now, Berzerk will bring the interview goodness when he can and they'll be match videos at some point.

Hope people enjoy reading this as much as I used to enjoy reading reports about VF players from NY, Canada and places I'd never been before in the old days.

 

Very enjoyable writeup, thanks!

 

Good read. Thanks for sharing!

 

Nice write up my dude. Very detailed. nive to see Gamerbee getting it in VF.

 

Thanks, this was a great read.

 

if you're really good at it how would he know?

Great read. thanks! Would love to see video.

 

I have uploaded a few matches, only one with Gamerbee vs myself currently, and a warmup with Gamerbee.

There will be more when the stream recording is uploaded.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=40A70CF9D38E95BE

 

Front page worthy?

 

By the way, great to see detailed impressions/tournament report, thanks for taking the time for that, Alex

I'll have the interview with Gamerbee up as a raw vid soon. He was certainly a very personable, interesting, intelligent dude and I hope he goes far.

 

I might as well chime in here.

I managed to talk to Tokido who won Blazblue, 3rd Strike AND Tekken at the event. For those interested, Australia put up a good fight in 3rd Strike, 2 guys managing to beat Mago, and others playing close matches against Tokido. Tokido used to play during VF4, but said he only played at the very start of VF5 because VF5 was 'boring'. I was interested in what he meant by that, but when I asked him about it, he looked like he was worried about offending the VF players, so he eventually said "Not many people played VF5. During VF4 there were lots, but there were not enough players for VF5." He also said 3rd Strike, like VF, has the problem of no new blood to replace the players who have stopped playing over the years.

Berzerk and I asked Mago about VF too, but he said he doesn't play.

Gamerbee was definitely out of practice. He was playing his Akira more like VF4 Akira, but that was enough to destroy us all. Didn't use offensive move as far as I noticed, and didn't do bound combos. In fact a lot of the combos he was trying were direct from VF4. At first I thought he was dropping combos, but then I realised he was mainly trying out stuff. This was even during tournament matches, which shows the difference in skill level between him and us. It was a bit embarressing to get so thoroughly beaten by him, but a good learning experience.

As Gamerbee stated himself, he plays at a much faster pace than we do here in Melbourne. I think Myke would have been the only one with a good chance against him. Although it was obvious he hadn't played in a while, Gamerbee took in all our little tricks and just adapted to them right there and then. I was talking to Alex about how most Akiras since VF3 have a preference for either Shiniha or Inverted Body Check as a damage throw, but Gamerbee would do either so it was hard to predict.

I think I got the first round against him when we played. As I won the round, I looked over to Gamerbee who seemed to just nod to himself, like "Okay, I've figured him out." I'd been practising uP+K with El Blaze and was relying on it way too much. Gamerbee decided since I liked to abare, he'd stop low punching and throwing and just make me eat elbows all day, the same way he caught on to Alex's K+G and found a simple way to beat it. Only got 2 rounds off him in 2 games.

For myself, I'm striving to be more aggressive. All the rounds I won were those where I pressed my attack. All the rounds I got really thrashed in were the ones where I was scared to attack. I'd been practising a nice counterhit combo against wake up kicks earlier and got the timing down really nicely, but when the perfect opportunity presented itself in my match against Gamerbee, I hesitated and missed the chance. I learnt a lot of new things that day, but I'm hoping to improve my game further.

Big thanks to the Shadowloo and Couchwarriors guys for organising, and Berzerk in particular for keeping VF going, and getting us on the big screen for the final matches.

Interestingly, since the audience was there mostly for Street Fighter, there were comments like "What's Rey Mysterio doing in this game?" and "Oh, so that's the Ryu guy." People were also laughing at El Blaze, which shows Sega might have to rethink their perception of what's trendy for the masses.

Gamerbee gave us a great interview. We talked with him a little more after it was over and got a few extra tidbits. He mentioned how he did get to travel to Japan to play a special Japan vs Taiwan match during the VF3 era, but that it was for a TV show and not serious. He said that SBO was where it was serious, and that despite being the fastest player in Taiwan, every Japanese player was faster than him. He took a moment to shake his head and stare into the distance at that point, with that smile on his face that you get when you're remembering those awesome moments in your life. He started VF during VF2, as a middle schooler. Arcades in Taiwan are $10 a game, which sounds crazy at first, but that equates to about 30 cents Australian, or about the same in US dollars. Still, it was expensive for him at the time and that's where he told us the story of his stealing his Dad's money to go play. He laughed as he said he lost it all to the big grown ups in a single session.

He also talked about how he's already 31, and when he went to Evo, he was thinking about it as his last chance to do something great. We then had a joke about how we're all getting too old and slow to keep up with those young players. He said he knows his new found fame might be over in an instant. He does have plans to return to work when that happens, but he's going to enjoy it for now. A good inspiration for the rest of us oldies.

I'll have to watch that interview again to remember what else he said. I do remember though that he's already told all his mates in Taiwan, "Don't quit your day job."

 

The interview with Gamerbee is up here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c-CWKQgwzM

It's basically the raw video with a bit of setup cut off at beginning and end. It would lend itself will to insertion of match footage etc

 

Really great stuff guys.
Awesome read!!

 

Berzerk, do you mind if I post that on my site, VersusCity?

 

Great interview!

I've put it up on my facebook and I've Linked it to Neoempire.com (British fighting game website).

 

Thanks for the interview.

 

Glad you guys liked the interview. Reno, that would be great, love you to. Seidon, thanks for the plugs as well. (PS - I conducted interview but credit goes to AlexMD and El Twelve)

I'll probably submit this to SRK, which will be interesting to get more SF players to understand the multi-fighting game perspective.

Gamerbee spoke really well (not just that his English is improving, but the thought behind his words).

Would be interested in what people thought on some of his comments in the interview.

 

I was surprised at how good his english was considering I had heard he doesn't really speak the language.

His thoughts on the "growing up" of a scene was quite insightful.I don't have experience of playing people from multiple countries at any game on a competitive level so it was something I've always wondered about.

How old is he anyway? He said that it would be a bad decision for him to focus on gaming. Although I think it's a bad idea for anyone to "focus" on gaming in general, I wonder why he believed his age to be a problem.

 

31, from what I read in one of the earlier posts.