@Sooty said:

@ImmortalSaiyan said:

@Sooty: What is your team in Marvel?

Felicia/Doom/Taskmaster!

Nice. respect for the Felicia play. I don't play much and am terrible but would Like to learn C. Viper/ Dante/ Strider.

@ImmortalSaiyan said:

@Sooty: What is your team in Marvel?

Felicia/Doom/Taskmaster!

@Sooty: What is your team in Marvel?

hmnz , i have min index and middle finger on top and thumb underneath the stick , and end up using my whole hand when im trying to do double half circle ultras or annoying stuff . play some ssf4ae or even mabye some mvc3 to get a good feel of your stick before you dismiss it , and also to train your hands a bit more in the quarter circle department.

if you ever want a match on pc ssf4ae send me a pm hehe. always down fro some sparring regardless of lag (to a certain extent)

dont have any fighters on ps3 cept downloadable ones , mvc2 , sf hd remix , skullgirls .. sold my ssf4 and lets forget sfxt ever happened eheh even tho i bougth it for ps3 and pc ....

edit: oh yeh i have the hori v3 sa , dont mind my sanwa buttons , tho the modder in me wants to get some seimitsu parts anyways .

edit 2: and yeah theres some good enhanced cpu training scripts for the pc versions of sf4 and ae , basicly macro scripts for 2p training mode that are set up to punish bad pokes and other things the cpu doesnt do , would love p4a to come to pc :"/

@IrrelevantJohn said:

@Sooty said:

I'm doing the opposite - trying to get used to Vita controls for UMvC3 so I can hopefully switch between that, a pad and a stick fairly easily. (Main is always a stick)

I remember the Vita D-Pad feeling a little weird when I tried it at a kiosk. Hopefully you can get used to it.

It's a bit softer for sure, mostly I'm worried about getting used to dashing and using a shoulder button for H (heavy), the upside is the Vita dpad doesn't shred your thumb like the DualShock 3. I wish I could just plug in my stick to the thing though, that'd be sweet.

@Sooty said:

I'm doing the opposite - trying to get used to Vita controls for UMvC3 so I can hopefully switch between that, a pad and a stick fairly easily. (Main is always a stick)

I remember the Vita D-Pad feeling a little weird when I tried it at a kiosk. Hopefully you can get used to it.

@MikeFightNight: Thanks! I'm pretty happy with the art :)

I'm doing the opposite - trying to get used to Vita controls for UMvC3 so I can hopefully switch between that, a pad and a stick fairly easily. (Main is always a stick)

Practice makes perfect! I remember when I bought TE fight stick after SF IV came out. I ended up selling it soon afterwards when I realized the time it would take for me to be as proficient with it as I was with a ps3 pad was not something I was willing to invest the time in. I bought it because I had this pre conceived notion that if you wanted to be good at fighters, you need a fight stick. Really comes down to preference. Wish you all the best, slick art!

So my last entry into the Fight Stick Diaries was about buying the stick and trying it out for a couple of hours. In this entry I'm going to be talking about how I have been doing in the last month and two weeks with the stick and also talk about the arcade parts.

Over the last few weeks I have been putting in some hours everyday into playing my arcade stick so that I could get better or used to it. There are a couple of things that I have noticed while putting in the time:

1. Practicing with the CPU can only get you so far

2. Finding the right way to hold the joystick is hard

3. Hitting the right buttons takes some getting used to

I chose Persona 4 Arena as my main fighting game because it's very beginner friendly and also the community on Giant Bomb is pretty awesome and helpful. There are a couple of ways I have practiced in P4A and that includes training mode, challenge mode and versus mode against the CPU. I tend to avoid online matches since I don't really feel confident about my performance but sometimes I do friendly matches with the GB P4A crew so I can get actual human player practice.

Before I switched to an arcade stick I was playing with the DualShock 3 and was doing really well with it. After awhile I cranked up the difficulty in the game to “Hell” (which is the highest) because the game felt a little too easy. This might have been because I was playing with very skilled players on GB and started to learn some new moves and tricks from them. When I transitioned to the stick, the difficulty didn't really change much at all for me since I can beat all the characters (except for Kanji) almost 95% of the time. The only problem I really faced playing against the CPU is predictability. The CPU tends to always charge in first attacking and I can pretty much counter it most of the time and a good example of that is Chie always starting with Rampage.

Once I got used to playing against the CPU, I went to Challenge Mode but this time I started from challenge #1 with everyone again since I want to re-learn everything. Everything went smooth until after the instant kill challenge where it want's you to do longer chains of combos. So I spent the last 2 weeks doing challenges over and over until I basically reached challenge #20-21with every characters except Labyrs and S.Labrys. It was a very long and arduous process but it did help me learn every character's combos and also helped me to hit the right buttons with my fingers. It took a lot of time but I can definitely say it is pretty rewarding that I can chain combos.

There is one thing that I still can't get used to and it's finding the right way to hold the joystick. I looked up “how to hold an arcade stick properly” on YouTube and Google and tried the common ones that everyone uses but I can't seem to use any of them. Right now I settled on holding it like this in the picture below:

I find this way more comfortable than the ones I tried from YouTube but the only problem I have is doing QCF. I can pull it off when I'm in training but when it comes to a real fight I panic and flub the QCF completely and ruin the combo I've been working on. I think I just need more practice since people on the forums tell me it could take about 3 months to completely make it feel like second nature to me.

Well that's all the update I really have for now since I only played Persona 4 Arena seriously but once I get into Street Fighter 4 it's going to be a bit more different. Next time I'm going to talk about why I switched to Seimitsu push buttons and thinking about buying another arcade stick.