Hey guys, I just downloaded this game for the PS3 on account of the Capcom sale going on right now, and holy shit is it kicking my ass.

Here's the thing: I'm not just talking about the AI (which has been absolutely destroying me). I'm by no means a pro at fighting games, but I've played several and I'm pretty decent at a few of them, and I cannot for the life of me execute command moves reliably. Even things as simple as a fireball or an uppercut only seem to happy every other attempt (if that). I've been playing arcade mode on normal with Ryu and it took me about five attempts to beat one fight, and now Chun Li has been kicking my ass for the past half hour.

Could anyone help me with some tips? I would especially like to know if there's some trick I'm missing to executing command moves, like things related to the timing or the motions of the stick. I really want to enjoy this game but I'm struggling really hard with it.

What other games have you played? SF4/5? Those games allow you to fudge the inputs really heavily so you might've learned how to do them wrong. The old games require you to more or less do the exact motion. Which for a fireball would be, down, down forward, forward, punch. Or for a an uppercut, forward, neutral, down, down forward, punch. The uppercut input particularily throws people off because you actually have to make the stick go back to it's original postion in the middle of the move, while in sf4/5 you can just kinda fiddle between f/df and itll figure it out somehow. You also may or may not be pressing punch too fast after doing the motion, I know that was an issue to me. I had to force myself to delay it for the proper timing. Very counterintuitive.

Oh and make sure to really scrape the edges of the stick to catch those down forward inputs. An easy accident is to do a fast quarter circle and just go from down to forward, skipping the down forward entirely.

Are you using a regular arcade stick? One tip for doing exact motions is to anchor your hand to the stick and letting your fingers do the motions, if you use your entire hand or your arm to throw a fireball your grip will usually change alignment constantly and make the inputs inconsistent. You wanna limit the things that can go wrong with an input by changing as little as possible about where your hand is for every attempt.

If you try to throw a fireball and you get a crouching punch then you hit the button too early. If you get a standing punch then maybe you missed the down-forward, or you did the motion very slow.

Does the HDR training mode have an input display/command history? If so, turn it on, it should be able to show you exactly what you're doing wrong.