Let's You and Me Fight: Shadoloo Shadow Labs

My goodness, but it’s been a while. All these video games out there, you know, and so few of them are fighting games (and anyway, I’m not sure how many more fighting games I can realistically take up before I go mad). I had a lot of other things demanding my attention, so I spent just under a week doing very little in the way of fighting at all. In spite of that, it’s been an eventful time since the last installment.

Street Fightin’

Most importantly (or at least, most importantly to me), I’m no longer winless in USFIV—I may have racked up a ridiculous amount of losses in the process, but I made the decision to switch back to Sakura and stuck with her. This paid off in a downright heart-pounding victory over a Chun-Li player, which basically left me feeling so goddamn elated that I nearly called my parents to brag before I realized they’d have no fucking clue what I was talking about (I settled for sending a series of excited texts to my brother, who was polite enough to pretend to care). The funniest part about the win was that I was close to giving up on the game altogether. A series of (frankly humiliating) defeats had left me thinking that maybe the Street Fighter series just wasn’t for me (a note I wrote down at the time posits that maybe “I’ve got some strange enjoyment out of being terrible” and laments a predilection for poor timing and panic). Shortly after that note is one written in an unsteady hand still shaking from adrenaline “Have I found my feet?”

Well, as it turns out I haven’t really found my feet that much. I did manage to string together a series of wins after the first one. This also basically ensured that I will never stop playing as Sakura, as she pulled off my first win and has continued to perform well for me, at least in terms of winning me a couple matches here and there (I think my record is something like 19-81 overall). Yesterday I discovered the match replay functionality and, figuring there wasn’t much reason not to, decided I would upload one of my matches to YouTube so you can all watch it and laugh at how cheap my wins are (I tried to find my original win but with no success—the game only keeps a set amount of matches in its memory before it deletes them, so it’s likely I’ve lost it forever).

No, I don't know why the whole thing recorded in slow motion. Yes, my wins really are that cheap.

One thing which I’ve learned, at least, is that it pays to sit back and watch your opponent—as much as I’m a fan of just charging in swinging, my better fights have come when I spend the first round playing slightly more passively, waiting to see what they favor.

I also impulsively decided to try playing Cammy, which went about as well as you’d expect (i.e. I got my ass handed to me).

Teaching my Shadow Poor Fighting Habits

Like the rest of the world, I was super-excited by the announcement of the Shadow Lab. As soon as I heard about it, I knew I’d want to make one of my own, particularly since any advances in AI (even simple-ass videogame AI) fascinate me to no end. So shortly after watching Jeff play around in it on UPF, I fired up Killer Instinct and made myself an AI me.

I got absolutely murdered by the Jago you fight initially to program your AI, incidentally. It’s appropriate, because that’s what usually happens when I fight Jago as Sabrewulf (or anyone). I’ve since spent a lot of time challenging the shadows of others and it’s been a hell of a lot of fun. There’s a lot about the shadow system I like—it gives me the ability to fight my brother, for example, even though our schedules don’t always line up—plus it really is shockingly close to fighting a real person (right down to getting teabagged after a loss). Also, as someone who occasionally has connectivity issues (in a perfect world, I would not be forced to use god-awful Comcast internet—but they are the only game in town and their service is fucking dog shit) it is nice to get the “fighting a real person” experience without the “whoops say hi to lag/dropped connections” part.

Oddly enough, I don’t seem to be able to get any statistics about my Shadow’s performance online (I figure he must have been in some fights by now, but I don’t get any statistics beyond the ones I create by fighting shadows myself). There’s no replacement for good old fashioned fighting actual humans, but the shadow system comes incredibly close to it. At this point I’m sure I’ve spent more time fighting shadows than fighting real people, and it’s been a blast. Plus I’m sure it’s all made my shadow even more like my own, awful fighting performance.

Other Stuff

I wound up taking a massive break from MKX—the fighting in KI and USFIV flows so smoothly for me that MKX feels clunky by comparison. I just didn’t want to spend time figuring it out anymore, so I gave it up for a while. My brother has been a little more stubborn about it, and convinced me to give it another try recently, so I went back into it. I read a couple guides on MKX (Sub Zero, specifically) and tried out some of the combos, but the timing on them is unlike anything else I’ve played, and I’m not sure I have the patience to keep banging my head against the wall. It’s hard to muster the urge to get back to the game when I’ve been having so much fun with other (better, if you ask me) games.

Speaking of other games—how about that Street Fighter V news, huh? I can’t help but wonder if they’ve gotten rid of the Z motion in it entirely after hearing Jason talk about how it’s not required for Ryu’s uppercut anymore. I would be more into the idea if I hadn’t gotten to the point where I can actually pull the damn move off consistently, but I think I’m into the idea of a more accessible Street Fighter. It sounds weird to say it, but SFV might be the thing that makes me pick up a PS4? I like the look of it, and while some of the animations still seem a little off (there’s something about Ryu’s fireball that has a little judder to it I can’t quite place), I’m pretty sure they’ll sort that out by the time it launches. I’ll be interested to see what comes out of E3 for it (more character announcements would be nice—I need to be able to play Sakura or I’m screwed).

PS. Please announce Season 3 of KI at E3 and put the KI season 1 and 2 bundle on sale. Thanks.

PPS. If you want to fight my awful Sabrewulf shadow, I'm forddent on XBL.

The Z motion isn't required in SF4 either, the input shortcut works there as well. They're not really removing it, it's just a different way of doing it that's possible thanks to what I assume is how they prioritize inputs. So if you hold down and tap down-forward twice, you'll get that Shoryuken anyway.

@zanetsu: Yeah the input shortcut existed in IV, but I think they've just stopped pretending at all in V (or at least that's the impression I got). It's still an interesting change, I think!

@ford_dent: I don't think it's as much of a change, just Jason mentioning that it's still there. I haven't seen any talks of it otherwise on the web. I kind of both like, and dislike it. Dislike it in the fact that some input shortcuts make it so that unwanted moves come out once in a while, but on the other hand, it can be useful for not just newer players. It can also be used when someone's jumping in on you by you wiggling your, well, stick in my case but whatever you use, back and forth to make it automatically correct the direction of the uppercut, which comes in handy quite a bit.

Earlier in SF4, they fixed a couple of input shortcuts actually. With Fei Long, you could just press back, forward and back again combined with kick to make his flame kick come out. Made it easy to execute, sure, but the problem arose when you were trying to walk around and position yourself, and maybe throw out a normal kick to poke at your opponent, a random uppercut would come out. Gouken had it even worse, the same thing but hitting a punch button made his parry come out. It was kind of hard to avoid this, you could even see it happening with very high-level players. So yeah, I agree that it's an interesting thing, and probably not bad, as long as it doesn't take too much of a priority over other moves you're trying to do.

@zanetsu: I have definitely had a few uppercuts come out when I was going for a fireball with Sakura, but I generally blame my own damn self getting overexicted and rushing an input than anything else. I guess I've just kind of been mostly ignorant about all the other input shortcuts so this felt like a bigger deal than it actually is.

Really it's an ease-of-entry thing more than anything else, and I'm into that because it means I might fight people who are worse than me at the game (such a rarity in this day and age), hahahaha.

@ford_dent: Yeah, I mean, if it makes it so that people stick a little longer with the game and get into it, I'm all for it. Really, I hope that the new Street Fighter is better at teaching basic fighting game concepts a lot better, instead of just sticking a trial mode in there.

@zanetsu: Oh definitely, a proper tutorial would be incredible. Something like KI or Skullgirls' (there will never be a tutorial better than Skullgirls' tutorial mode).