Northwest VF (Pacific NW, North America)

Good games to Femto, who came over last night for a marathon VF session of pure murder with El Blaze. What a beast!

 

Unfortunately, I dunno when/if I'm going to pick up another 360. The only thing I was consistently playing on it was VF, but since FS is coming on both PS3 and 360 that bumps the priority on that down quite a bit. I'll still be around on other people's accounts though, especially leading up to Evo. Practicing with you and Femto will definitely be a priority, as well, especially since I'm signed up for the side tourney @ Evo.

BTW, sign-ups are limited to US residents only, so I'm thinking that's going to really open up the field to a lot more NY and CA players taking top spots. NW has to really put in work if we want to do well and represent ourselves!

 

Yo! Washington state player down in portland/vancouver area... ummm where is the closest VF arcade cabinet here?? i think i heard there was a FS cabinet up in Seattle.

 

There were two cabs at PAX last year but those were only for promotional use and now reside at the SOA offices.. There are two ver.B cabs at Seattle GW but no one touches those.

 

Heads up to Portland/Vancouver/Salem area VFers: There will be a VF session at Best Bout Gaming tonight!

The venue opens at 7pm, but I plan to be there around 8pm. I will probably be eating at the foodcarts near Best Bout (1 block away on 50th and division) around 7pm.

Should be a lot of fun tonight. I don't think we'll be on the stream, but we might be. If we are, it'll be here. If there's a likely time we'll be on the stream, I'm guessing somewhere around 10:30pm PST or maybe 11pm PST.

 

Last night's session was awesome! I will write a report about it later.

But I wanted to let everyone here know that I will be attending Northwest Majors (near Seattle) next week!

I'm really looking forward to it! Maybe after hours, some of us can form a mini-VF gathering for Northwest players or something!

 

Ugh. I can't make NWM4 because I need to be in town for my sister's graduation party, and I should be working and saving up money for evo anyway..but it's still lame that I won't be able to attend what's likely the last hurrah for VF5 Ver.C in the Northwest. Have fun guys.

 

Northwest Majors will be streaming the Final Showdown station as well as some fun organized competition at that station throughout the event!

Final Showdown will have its own dedicated livestream starting at 1pm Pacific Standard Time!

Again, I'll be there and I'm excited to be playing a lot of Final Showdown this weekend!

 

See you guys there!

 

Good stuff to everyone this weekend at NWM. Super sad I couldn't make it up, but was glad to catch what I could of the stream. Fun finals commentary by both Zass and FrankDaDank (dunno if he's on here). Hope I can play some of you Seattle peeps at some point, but it seems like PDX is going to have mostly PS3 players and Seattle will have 360. We'll have to figure an online cross-play night or something, LOL.

 

What makes you say mostly ps3 for Portland? Myself and Chanchai will have the game for both systems, and best bout has way more 360s than PS3s. Portland only likes ps3 for mk, far as I can tell.

 

You will have it for both plus myself, Shinryujin, Tacho, Hellsap, FMRoss all only have PS3. SamY and Simon are maybes, though Simon has both and not sure about SamY but I know he has PS3. Anthony was another player talking about getting into, though not sure what system he has.

All in all, a lot of the older generation of players have PS3s and some of those guys played VF from way way back. Hopefully they come out to tournaments and leave Team NAH (Shinryujin). Jetay I know will hold it down on 360 and a lot of the newer players seem all 360 so the split may be smaller than I think. But whole package being $15 cheaper on PS3 for 2 weeks... Who really knows haha.

 

I had an awesome time at Northwest Majors this past weekend!

Everyone was great to me over the weekend, especially AJ, Slash, Jetay, Femto, and Zass--thanks so much guys! The VF sessions and tournament were great (I won a Qanba Eitharc Fusion stick, which has been working awesome!).

We now have a Northwest Virtua Fighter Group on Facebook. Feel free to join us!
http://www.facebook.com/groups/northwestvf/

For people who are able to make it into Portland this Friday, we are having a big session at Best Bout Gaming starting at 7:00pm!

We already have a lot of people confirmed to be there, and specifically to play Virtua Fighter! I intend to have 3 setups going there, 2 for matches/rotation and 1 for more targeted training and practice. Again, if you're anywhere near Portland (so even as far down as Salem or even Eugene and as high up as Battleground or maybe beyond), you should make it to Best Bout this Friday!

Also, Yutori-Throw Escape is a big deal now in VF. It's getting people to more immediate levels of play much quicker! Here is how it works:

If you hold a throw escape command, you will break the throw that command breaks even if you've been holding it the whole match. This is Yutori-Throw Escape.

Yutori-Throw Escape-Guard (or Guard-Yutori Throw Escape, and some people just simply call it Guard-Throw Escape because most people are doing this instead of the old way):

-is pressing GUARD first

-AND THEN, while holding Guard still, pressing and holding PUNCH and the direction of the throw you are worried about (back, forward, or neutral)

-and maintaining this for as long as you want to keep blocking and maintaining the throw escape.

The YTE-G (what I'll probably call it) is incredibly easy to do. So easy, that I saw more throw escapes from local players this past weekend than I saw in all of the past year!

It's helping players get to the next level of mixups and mindgames so much faster than the old VF system where you just were not sure if you were doing your throw escapes correctly. Now, you generally have no excuse if you had a good idea of when your opponent was very likely to throw you and with which throw!

As LA Akira told me on the phone: "Yutori Throw Esape is like the greatest thing to happen to VF." We meant that on a "teaching VF" perspective, but we're happy for it. In fact, we're even happy with the one throw escape limit with 3 options of throw directions.

So practice Yutori-Throw-Escape! It's in tutorial mode in the game, so there's no excuse to not practice that!

Good stuff!

 

Unfortunately Fatbear is on 360 for awhile. He sold his PS3 awhile back, but he was also without an arcade stick and he has shown his commitment to VF by getting a new arcade stick in time for Final Showdown's release date!

Be careful, his Akira is going to be scary once he wraps his head around more levels of this game! He's already mastered the new Yutori-Throw-Escape Guard and I'm going to get him into Fuzzy Guard, Anti-Fuzzy Guard, and failed evasion blocking next! (and since it's Akira, also working on punishing predictable evasion).

But what AJS says is true, a lot of the players are playing on PS3. But there's a good amount on both ^_^

Because of the awesome deal on PSN, Simon picked up the PS3 version and will also pickup the Live version ^_^

 

Interesting, did not know that about SamY.

BTW, please feel free to add my to your PSN list R_Panda. Looking forward to getting some online and offline games with you and Jannon in the near future. I looked on my friendslist last night and saw over half were playing VF5:FS, and that was before I added a bunch of VFDC people. Looks like a lot of people are giving this one a try. Very very good to see.

 

I don't know what it is, but people aren't falling for my usual Blaze bullshit, like they were in the early days of VF5O.

They seem a lot more patient, in the 10 ranked games I played online and the 10 I played in player match.

Maybe these guys played on VF50 or just started watching vids and what not? L A Akira did an awesome job explaining the system on the one stream. He didn't seem to have an idea about El Blaze though, but that's a minor nitpick.

 

I caved and bought VF for PS3 because I didn't want to wait a day lol. You guys can add me on PSN or Xbox. But I'll probably play on XBL mostly unless someone sets up some casuals on PSN beforehand. I always found that XBL has more players in general when compared to PSN.

Have been playing a good amount of online matches on XBL and there's not too much lag if it's a three bar connection.

I know BBH and some other NW players that only have XBOX are playing VF or at least trying it out.

 

Nice, add me or I'll send you request if you're FL isn't full. I played a couple times in ranked yesterday, look forward to hopefully playing you and other Oregon peeps offline.

 

Good to hear the 360 community in Portland is growing. I think nationally more people play online on 360 but Portland has a lot of PS3 players. I'll try and set up a room sometime with you Simon and we'll see how the lag is.

 

I'm going to make another Rocket Discharge post for Zass and cross post it on the FaceBook group.


Rocket Discharge:

What is it? El Blaze's run.

How do you do it?



- You only have to hold forward when doing this one. This one lets you run longer distances and past the opponent.

You can also use / if you want to runway or bounce of wall and come at them.

Attacks from RD:

- hits high and mid. Good when the opponent expects you to do one of his other attacks with longer start-ups.

- This is his old from RD. It's a drop-kick that hits mid and you can go into RD AGAIN if you hit the opponent, but if it's blocked you are going to eat a launcher.

- This is his High Unblockable attack, this can be sidestepped and crouched under.

- This his throw. Can only be ducked under and 2p. Note: I've been thrown out of this before but only in super close distances.

- mid-level knee that can hit a grounded opponent once after hitting into RD.

- Low drop kick that's super punishable on block, can be side-stepped.

- This hits TWICE AT MID-LEVEL. It causes stagger ON HIT. It stands up crouching opponents even when they are blocking. On block it's -5. However Blaze can go into....

- hits mid and can tack on few extra hits.

- Okay this one is to watch out for. Hits High and is a Full Circular. Can go into RD AGAIN on hit or block. Can be ducked as long as the intial doesn't hit. On hit it causes stagger.

- Crouch Throw. Because you can never have enough options from RD