Long time no see...

I was chatting with Rodney today, and he said I should post up on the boards and let people know what's been going on with me since I fell off the face of the earth years ago.

Anybody who's had a kid knows that they become the most important thing... pretty much everything else gets the volume turned down. Which is as it should be, don't get me wrong, fatherhood is awesome. Now my son's almost 8, so he's pretty much his own little man now as far as personality and interests go. He's been doing BJJ for going on 2 years, and got obsessed with Street Fighter this year. My ps3's been busted so I haven't been able to play VF with him, but just ordered a new one so we can start playing. If Sega ever recovers from their downward spiral I'm sure he'll be a force to be reckoned with by the time VF6 rolls around.

Also had some pretty crazy stuff going on professionally, went through 5 different jobs in the space of a year after being at the same place for 8 years (startups shutting down, bad timing, etc). Things are good now, been doing "big data" stuff for the past couple of years, programming scala / spark. Anyone who's interested in that kind of thing, feel free to ping me on google chat. Or for folks I know if you just want to catch up, I'd like to hear from you.

Wish I could have gone to NYGX, it got me thinking about the game again, but already had a trip scheduled for that weekend. I'm never gonna have as much time to hang out on the forums / IRC / playing online as I used to, but my son's old enough that we might start going to gatherings.

So theres at least some VF content in here, any suggestions on the best character for teaching someone to play FS? I'm thinking Taka, but he'll probably pick Lau if left to his own devices...

 

Don't let him pick Lau, Taka is a good choice!

I wasn't here when you were part of the scene, but welcome back KoD. I think there are some Texans looking for games...

 

The best character to learn with is the one you want to play as. The only problem I see with Lau is that his nitaku is weak but I'm not sure how much something like that would bother him
Taka functions fundamentally differently from other characters.

 

lau doesn't have a good YOLO move faster than 19f

 

Aren't his fastest "yolo" stuff 20 and is that actually a big thing for learning the game?

 

Hi KoD! Glad to see you resurface! Totally understand about responsibilities of fatherhood and career. I recently had more time to practice too, and while I couldn't make it to NYG (I really did try, but had interviews to deal with), I am committed to going to future gatherings / tournaments.

You helped me learn the system and improve my Jeff considerably during VF5 vanilla era. Thanks once again for that! I recently started playing Taka (he better matches my heavy-centric {LETHODICAL™} style in FS), so, I'd love to not only see your interpretation of the character, but also what you think of the controversial game system of FS.

Welcome back, and I hope to see you at a gathering sometime soon!

 

i swear that 3P+K is 19f... i'm going into training mode to check this later
anyway, IMO abare is an important part of learning VF, it has a unique place in the 'triangle' and helps demonstrate the way 'turns' work.

 

Hey adam! Thanks for the kind words, glad my various ramblings / programmable inputs helped out. I'm not surprised you picked up Taka, he seems like he'd be strong for you. Hope things are going well for you (interviews?), ping me on google chat sometime & let me know how you've been.

As far as learning characters go, I think ideal would be strong elbow, decent throw, unsafe launcher with reasonably easy to execute combos, no especially weird execution or stance. Maybe jacky with some non-iaigeri combos would be a better choice than lau... Obviously he can choose what interests him, although I'd probably steer him away from shun / lei etc.

 

Lau 3P+K is 20 and if you are going to abare through a throw it's going to work just fine all the time.
There's not really a lot of characters that don't have any kind of stance. Goh fits all of your criteria.

 

every one has some stance of some kind but if you are talking about fundamental stuff alone without too much in the way gimmicks i think jeff would be better. he also doesn't have any obvious reversal or sabaki either so he won't be reliant on them when things get tough. in tough battles against good people all he would have are basics of the game to keep him alive. eventually he can begin to use threat stance after that in incorporate that in time. lets us not forgot the knee he has in yolo situations if he wants to use it to blow up throw attempts too.

 

big launchers can be used to demonstrate the danger of not respecting frames, lau has to set up his fast launchers.

 

That's what I meant that his nitaku is weak, that's where the respect the frames stuff mostly comes in. I didn't think you'd mean that by "yolo".

 

Well, something like Jacky's 6K to blow up 2P->2P is the sort of high risk high reward option for nitaku that lau doesn't really have. 3P+K doesn't really work until +8, so until then there's 6K stagger or elbow into kokei... nothing big and high damage that really drives home WHY you have to respect frames more in VF than SF.

 

Just noticed this part of your post. My totally uneducated take on it from playing the game not-to-seriously around the time the home port came out... I thought normalizing the throw / low throw directions made sense and was a good change. SIngle guess for throw escape to go along with the reduced number of directions is also ok. Losing multiple throw escape really just de-emphasized execution, which is also fine for accessibility. I was never a big fan of clash so no big loss there.

Being able to hold down a throw escape indefinitely seemed really off to me at the time. From what I can tell looking around at current opinions, that may have had an adverse effect on character balance due to not everyone having comparable ways to deal with that defense?

 

And that's also something Jacky should not do since he actually has good safe-on-block CH launches too. 2_3P is way safer on evade too and he also has 6K+G for an almost as safe alternative.
I did say Lau's nitaku is weak and this is what I meant. He lacks that safe CH launch. The term "yolo" used in this context is kinda misleading. But if the little man wishes to play Lau do you really think this is going to be on top of his priorities instead of playing as the cool dude that he likes? I think after a short practice the concept could be brought up using other characters as examples so he understands what the fundamental weakness of Lau is so he can choose again if he wishes.

And if not Lau I'd still say that Goh fits every criteria KoD layed out. Goh is one of the very few characters with no stances what so ever, he does good damage, has good throws and aside from his sabakis his very down to basics kinda guy. The sabakis bring some seasoning on the dish which is probably not a bad thing.
EDIT: and he has pretty low execution barrier too.

 

Have him play Goh.

I too look forward to your system breakdown of FS. You helped me learn vanilla a ton!

 

Giad to see you doing alright Cody!

 

Welcome back KoD, good to hear you're doing well.

I disagree with this statement. At least with the words "nothing but". He can be played in a basic fashion but theres a huge stretch between 'basic Jacky' and 'highlevel Jacky' in my opinion. He can work as a beginning character regardless.

My advice is to not pick a beginning character that breaks the normal nitaku 'rules' with some special gimmick, or is based on too many gimmicks. The beginning player in such a case will start using those gimmicks as a crutch rather than learn the basics he needs.