I've wanted to be good at Street Fighter IV for a while. For once here is a game where a large number of my friends who do not normally play games have taken an interest and made a purchase. The problem is that I am really no good at the game. This is even worse for someone like me as I'm pretty damn good when it comes to my main-stay shooter titles, I'm not used to losing so badly. After a while of waiting the SE Fightstick became available and since I have bought one, only to have my ass handed to me once again by a friend of mine online. This may be something I will just have to accept and move on from, but for some reason I feel compelled to persevere for a little while longer.

Customising my Fightstick and sorting out some artwork was always something I was going to do regardless. Just something about making something your own really appeals to me. For those in the UK reading this, there are two sites I have come across to get your Sanwa pushbuttons and joysticks and that's http://www.gremlinsolutions.co.uk/ and http://www.arcadeshop.de the latter has some colours not available on Lizard Lick, such as white, green, red, yellow and blue buttons with black rims. I'm almost getting these purely on an aesthetic basis and I have a question for those of you that do play SFIV and have installed Sanwa parts: do these things actually make a difference to your game? One thing I find hard to do is pull off super moves under duress, I just keep fucking it up. Does an 8-way joystick help at all? Also, how does a Sanwa compare to the standard joystick?

I may well do a video guide for this easy mod process so watch this space. Any excuse to use my DV camera, or in this case, Wacom tablet that hardly sees any action.

I must say the Fightstick has lead to an improvement, especially for someone using a 360 pad. Even if my being devoid of Street Fighter skills continues and I give up, I remember being pretty good at Tekken and we have a sequel round the corner, so this stick won't go to waste. Speaking of other fighters I have always preferred the Dead or Alive series over any other for it's countering system. That was a game where I could hand out an asskicking or two. All said, the fighting genre is not my forte, maybe I should stick to headshots and kill-streaks.

Anyone else out there buy Street Fighter IV on the back of the hype train only to find a game you weren't any good at?

And a noob question: what does the Turbo function do?

Change of subject:

I'm going to New York next month, is there anything in particular one could recommend? I like art, drinking, clubbing, live music and I'm 21. I hear the Sullivan Room is supposed to be good? I have a passion for strawberry milkshakes... if that helps.

Track of the Week #7

I'm not blogging that frequently so it's not like this is going week by week. And I'm not wasting my time blogging about a single track that you probably won't like.

I really do like CSS, their lead singer Lovefoxxx (what a cool name [no it's not her real name silly]) can't sing to save her life, but they've been a great deal of fun the two times I've seen them (and she's kinda hot). Just yesterday I stumbled upon a cover they did of Blondie's One Way or Another versus The Undertone's Teenage Kicks.


There are a number of tracks I have in my head right now but I'll keep it to one per blog post.

A few things I noticed:

These are just a few things I noticed while writing this -

Consoles and console accessories should be included in the Wiki (imo), not because they might be in a game like Katamari, but because it's information people like to know and it has everything to do with videogames. A page on the SE Fightstick would save me asking about Turbo.

If you are embedding video the real-time editor doesn't show you what the embed will actually look like. Say for example you are embedding a Youtube vid and you have the code configured for it to play in HD and at a particular size, it would be nice to just get a regular preview option to see what the post will really look like. It would also be handy for just testing out some code without having to post it and go back to edit or delete if it isn't right.

Also when you delete a blog post, it remains on your wall and simply links to a 404.

At the moment there is no option to remove a caption from an image.

It would be nice if there were a way so that if you stray from the page on which you've written a whole paragraph, you can hit back and the text will still be there.

The option to retroactively attach a blog post to the forums within a time limit of say a day would be nice.

Other things:

The password manager in Firefox doesn't seem to work with logging in (3.5b4)

The abbreviations for some games should be enough to find them in searches. For example cod=call of duty, graw=ghost recon advanced warfighter, dmc, mgs, doa etc. etc. etc.

It would be nice to be able to pause the download of the Bombcast in iTunes.

Bombcast page archiving was a good idea I read.

When someone sends you a friend request it would be nice to accept that request straight from the PM rather than having to click one step further to the requests page.