Today continued much like yesterday. I continued to hone my Balrog in Street Fighter V. Tomorrow I will for the first time in months play a significant amount of ranked matches. Double fight money starting at 1 PM EST. I figure this is a good chance to carve out a bit of extra coin for myself.

I livestreamed more of The Witcher 3: Complete Edition today. I'm still, very obviously, getting acclimated to the game, but I'm having a lot of fun with it. Ramping up my play time with it slowly. I completed a few quests today and seem poised to be battling a Griffin soon. Though I might be better served to power up a bit before that. We shall see.

PSN on PS4 was down for a bit today but seemed to be functioning fine on the PS3. So I used the opportunity to play some more Mega Man Legends. I defeated a boss enemy and have reached another ruin to investigate.

Aside from that the only noteworthy item from the day was my pre-ordering of Pacman Championship Edition 2. There are not many things I'm certain about, but that game being awesome is one of them.

So, today, I continued my usual investment of time into Street Fighter. Leveled up Balrog to 42. Another 1000 fight money off of that. Put some lab time into the Rashid matchup and deconfirmed the things I thought I had figured out yesterday, did find out that I can punish the Eagle spike with the dashing punch. It's just hard to be patient enough to maintain charge while waiting for the block stun period to end.

Struggling still in Witcher 3. It is completely different from Witcher 2, which was, of course, completely different from Witcher 1. Enjoying it, but I'm certainly acclimating to the systems very slowly. Still though, I'm tremendously enjoying my play sessions even if my execution isn't anywhere near where I want it to be yet.

I did end up getting back to Mega Man Legends today. I made some progress in the story. I feel like this game is worth seeing through.

My Rocket League partner and I ended the day in Prospect Elite divison 3, up a division overall on the day. At one point we were in division 4. But connection issues both for us and our opponents kind of marred the whole day. Still, Challenger rank seems within reach. I couldn't even imagine that a short time ago.

Apologies for no entry yesterday. I think I'm getting a little bored with sharing minor adjustments and fighting game routines almost exclusively. Though that is the vast majority of my game play these days. I digress.

So, I think I discovered some info about the Rashid matchup for Rog. I need to do some lab time to verify that though. That's my biggest takeaway from the past few days. Gonna put serious time into that.

My Rocket League partner and I, since finding our way back to Prospect Elite have continued to play well, but not have not left division 2 yet. SO CLOSE to challenger level. Just want to get there, even if only briefly.

I started playing The Witcher 3: Complete Edition today. I actually livestreamed my whole play session. Gameplay only though, ignoring all comments and not speaking over the game. I made a few hilarious mistakes leading to my demise, but overall got things going today. Cannot wait to give it some real time. I have three days off now so I should be able to do that. Not sure what this means for my play of Mega Man Legends.

Combining multiple sessions since my last post I played quite a few matches the past few days, but not as many as I would have liked to. I played very well for the most part I felt and came to a realization against Rashid that he's actually a lot like a more mobile less hard hitting version of Bison. That's helped me out quite a bit.

Still exploring the Vega matchup to unsatisfactory results, but I made some progress against Birdie with finding a good consistent punish for his dash headbutts. Things are going according to plan.

After two great days in Rocket League my teammate, @fazzle and I are back up to Prospect Elite. Can we make it to Challenger league? Time will tell.

Mega Man Legends is coming along swimmingly I got another crystal and some amazing spring boots to help me explore further. Hoping to really plunge into it on the weekend.

So I didn't get to do any lab work on this day. A bad confluence of events caused that. I did however play many matches and was very happy with my overall game and execution. Landed a combo I had been working on in the lab the last week or so:

Overall I was rather happy with how things went yesterday in spite of not getting the lab time I wanted. Hopefully I get that time today.

As far as other games go I started playing Mega Man Legends. It's a Zelda-ish 3D Mega Man game that came from the pre Dual Shock era of the Playstation. So the controls are a hassle, but the game has such a great atmosphere and still plays really well in spite of it. Also graphically it holds up surprisingly well. I think I might end up seeing this thing through. Time will tell.

I had a pretty good day in SFV. I was very happy with my execution for the most part and I managed to land some combos that I had been working on in the lab. Struggled mightily against a few very good Laura players so I spent some lab time trying to figure out something to work into my arsenal against her.

Didn't find a ton of things I could do to punish her as much as I was hoping, but I established a few things. A successful block of her overhead is easily punished with the Under Impact target combo which of course can be linked into V-Trigger dash punches and ultimately, Rog's critical art. I was hoping to find a way to crush counter that overhead, and I did, but the timing and exact spacing required is rather prohibitive, so while that's not optimal I think it'll have to do.

I wanted to put some time into studying what else I can do in the Chun Li matchup but didn't devote lab time to it yesterday........ because I did more Hard survival. I made a few highly unsuccessful attempts with Cammy, but managed to clear it with Guile. I was the recipient of numerous lucky breaks during the run with Guile, but none was bigger than this one:

I have no idea why the CPU Mika did that, but I'm grateful. Also, anybody who has played a lot of Survival knows that you pretty much never get Full Health recoveries that late, so I was doubly lucky. I did have an opportunity right before the final blow to take a match from another player so I'd have another shot at Mika later, but by that point I just wanted this mode to end one way or another and went all in.

In other gaming news I finally finished Uncharted 3... on a save file I started in the early part of 2014. Took me a while but I'm glad to have moved past it. I'll get to UC4 someday.

I also played Proteus. I found the aesthetic to be captivating. It looks so simple, but by the end of the island I played I was genuinely awestruck. Worth looking into if you haven't played it.

I played a good number of matches this day. Was happy with how I played for the most part, especially in the second half of the day. In the lab I was not very successful on this day, but I did learn that my medium and hard grand blow is a useful tool for getting under Fang's poison tosses as long as I don't react extremely late. Other than that not much to report.

As far as other games go, me and my partner continue to play atrocious in Rocket League. Just have to muck and grind our way out of it sometime. Slumps like these are brutal though.

I've hunkered down and dedicated myself to finally putting away Uncharted 3 during this stretch of being off work a few days. I played from chapter 12 to 16 yesterday. Hopefully I'll be able to make big progress again today. The game really got good during this stretch.

So I had a real good day online yesterday. Felt like my execution was mostly on point. I put in that lab time on Nash and his Moonsault/Somersault/whatever you want to call it kick. I found it easy enough to counter the normal versions of it with the ducking hard punch, but what I really liked was what I figured out I could do against the EX version, which you see quite in my experience with Nash players so far. The EX version, Rog can easily crush counter it his standing hard kick... which of course is easy to followup with a cancel into v-trigger and dash punch string across the screen into critical art. Cannot wait to bust that one out on somebody.

I also took Rashid through hard survival. He's one of the easier characters to do it with. I used one basic combo and otherwise just used Roundhouse Eagle Spike the whole way.

So I had a pretty good run of matches yesterday. During a battle with Nash I, on reaction, punished his somersault kick with a ducking hard punch. I want to take the time today to expand on that and get in the lab and see how easily/consistently I can replicate that.

Also had another discovery with turn punch, in that it is able to be linked into the v-trigger dash punch strings. Hadn't realized that. Useful in that sometimes when plans go awry just getting someone into a block string with that is useful. Certainly this will be an easier way to trap them in that.

Didn't get to play very much at all yesterday. Only got to work on some execution drills to stay sharp. Getting back to action today.