Street Fighter 6

[Metroid66]

The very king of fighting games is back, and I'm head over heels with the little beauty.

 

It looks and plays incredible. So much detail and so fluid in motion. I know I'll be posting in this thread in five years time, although tbf, probably as the avid spectator to online tournaments that I've been for 10 years by now.

 

Truth is I've never been able to play the thing to any degree of competence, I just like watching other people do it.

 

Having said that I've decided to do something I've never done when (trying) to play it. I'm going to go with grapplers. Maybe slowing things down a bit for myself might be more appropriate for my age - (advanced)!

[AndyKurosaki]

Just had an hour on this. Man, there’s a lot going on. Been playing the series since SF2, way back in the day. I’m no combo master, but I do enjoy playing as Ryu/Ken.

Created a character in World Tour mode. Had a few goes in the Battle Arena, which seems quite involved. Will have a better crack at it tomorrow. But yeah, certainly made a good first impression.

[one-armed dwarf]

I took a long weekend, so I'm going to take JP as a sort of project and see how I go. He's the zoner Santa* character, and puts spikes on the screen to setup pressure, extend combos and control neutral, and teleports. Sort of like GG testament. His neutral game is pretty hard to get a grasp of, his buttons are very slow and it's a struggle. There's a parry he has which puts a delayed time bomb which I've not really figured out how to leverage. 

 

Bouncing between training and online matches, I have one or two conversions from a normal into fireball which gives something like 50 frames advantage on knockdown, which seems to be around what you want to put a spike on the screen. As an aside the visual aids for frame data in this game are excellent and do a lot to really demystify that stuff. Strongly recommend spending time with the training settings menu if you've got the appetite to learn some fundamentals with the presets they have. I've also got a punish counter with back medium punch x2 into OD fireball which works well with DPs, or drive impact if you are just trying to throw away all your meter. Trying to get an anti air now to control and throw away these jumping in fuckers and that's all I'll use until the neutral approach becomes more clear.

 

If I don't feel like I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel with him on Monday then I might go with Juri. Not that I'm expecting competency that quickly, but just seeing how I feel about him by that point

 

The game is very cool. I felt this way with the beta but you can tell it's going to be a big hit more in the SF4 sense. Numbers on steam are ridiculous, and crossplay out the gate means it's off to a great start.

 

(also can someone fix this thread title pls 😭)

 

*If you want to see him in action lookup Diaphone on twitch, or Sonic Fox. 

[mfnick]

I just gave it a very quick go. Big mistake, this is quite complicated. Makes you fuck about creating an avatar and I couldn’t for the life of me find a way to just have a quick online match, it shoved me straight into some battle hub thing with no idea what I’m doing. Once I finally got in a match (after a few disconnection errors) I got obliterated. Also forgot about the modern control thing now by default, spent far too long shouting at my character wondering why he was pulling off random moves I’d not asked for. Confused why I couldn’t pick a character before battle too, just defaulted to Luke? Bah! 
 

I shouldn’t have even bothered lol. Need to set a good couple of hours figuring it all out before jumping in. Also need to go into training mode and figure out what all this drive malarky is about. 
 

Looks great in motion though. 

[one-armed dwarf]

8 minutes ago, mfnick said:

I just gave it a very quick go. Big mistake, this is quite complicated. Makes you fuck about creating an avatar and I couldn’t for the life of me find a way to just have a quick online match, it shoved me straight into some battle hub thing with no idea what I’m doing. Once I finally got in a match (after a few disconnection errors) I got obliterated. Also forgot about the modern control thing now by default, spent far too long shouting at my character wondering why he was pulling off random moves I’d not asked for. Confused why I couldn’t pick a character before battle too, just defaulted to Luke? Bah! 
 

I shouldn’t have even bothered lol. Need to set a good couple of hours figuring it all out before jumping in. Also need to go into training mode and figure out what all this drive malarky is about. 
 

Looks great in motion though. 

Yeah there's some UI stuff in this that's weird. The auto selecting of 'modern', the obfuscating of things that should be more easy to discover like the matchmaking option.

 

On the other hand, I like the psuedo MMO element of it. Apparently Fortnite is like that as well, sort of a virtual hangout. Past that slight bit of UI muckery the game is pretty well thought out. Reminds me of Playstation Home a bit as well

[AndyKurosaki]

Yeah the Battle Hub was what made me go “What the fuck is going on here?” Doesn’t do a good job of explaining things, unless I missed something obvious. Still, you can play SF2 and Final Fight in the lobbies. So there’s that. 
 

The trophy descriptions are a bit complicated as well. Every one of them has a paragraph of description, which leaves me thinking “You what?”

 

I spectated one match, mistakenly leaving the commentary on, think it’s on by default? Christ, that was awful. Some arsehole spending the entire match talking shite, “Oh, that’s a bold move from Player 1. What can Player 2 do now?”. Thankfully you can turn it off, so he can permanently shut the fuck up. 
 

Still, after an hour some of it made sense. Will see what tomorrow brings. 
 

 

[Maryokutai]

You do have menus on top of menus on top of menus. On the plus side this shows that there's a lot of stuff in there, because SFV couldn't have pulled off such a multi-layered IU even if it wanted to at launch.

 

I tried JP out first as well but quickly realised he's way too complex to learn in parallel of getting the hang of new system mechanics. Went with Manon instead who's rather straightforward but at least has some sort of little gimmick to differentiate her from the likes of Zangief. I do think JP will end up being one of the best characters in the game though, he has space control beyond anyone else in the game. His EX counter also, oddly, counters everything and by that I mean both strikes and grabs. I wonder if that's a bug or a feature because it's very unusual.

 

I'm currently having some trouble adjusting to the Xbox pad but that should work itself out after a while. Other than that this seems like a very strong package all around, and I'm not even going to touch World Tour.

[AndyKurosaki]

I’ve put most of my time into World Tour so far. It’s quite interesting making a hybrid with various fighting styles. And I’ve quite enjoyed going against other peoples creations in Avatar Battle. Some of which just have you looking at the monstrosity they’ve made, and go “What the actual fuck?” 😄

[one-armed dwarf]

Yeah I saw that parry on leffen's twitter

 

I was pretty happy to randomly confirm that parry into level 3 Critical Art. I didn't lab it or anything, just threw it out there to see if it would land.

 

Spoiler

 

I'm winning more often in iron now, and some of the keepaway gameplay is getting more intuitive and I'm knocking down more regularly. It's mainly silly knowledge checks right now, I'm more patient in general with this game than I was learning strive though so I learn more quickly now. I'm glad I learned a DP punish because ppl be doing stupid nonsense in iron. They love DP-ing

[mfnick]

Good vid! Don’t really understand what was going on but looked cool, 

[mfnick]

OH MY FUCKING GOD!! These modern controls fuck off!!!! It’s honestly taken me over 10 minutes to sort it. I’ve got it set to classic in all the main menus but when I was playing online it still reverted to modern! Eventually found out after googling that not only do you have to set it in the menus you have to also set it in the character profile & then tell it you want it like that on every character too otherwise when you change character it’ll be modern again. WTF?! Who thought this was a good idea? Just give me a main toggle. 
 

Anyway, finally sorted it and I’m actually enjoying it now. Played some Ranked matches, I’m very much a scrub but had some fantastic fights already. Up to Iron 2.

 

Anyone on for a few bouts? 

[one-armed dwarf]

I don't know the best way to go about it, but my profile in the game is 'stir fry' and my user code is in this screenshot

 

 

So I assume if we add ourselves in SF6 we can have cross platform friend requests and stuff like that, and see if we are on

 

I'm still very bad at anti airing. Timing the crouching heavy punch is getting me, as well as recognising the spacing.

[AndyKurosaki]

Yeah some stuff gets explained to you, others not so much. There’s a barrage of tips in the menu, but getting through them all would be quite time consuming. I’m looking forward to unlocking more clothing options via World Tour. I see you can spend real money to buy clothing options in the Battle Hub. Nope, sod that. 
 

Spent most of the day playing this, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. Then I saw you can play Final Fight and Puzzle Fighter in the Battle Hub lobby, so spent an hour or so doing that 😄

[mfnick]

3 hours ago, one-armed dwarf said:

but my profile in the game is 'stir fry' and my user code is in this screenshot

It appears to have its own friends list in game so I’ll try and send you one when I’m on tomorrow. Played against Mary earlier using the in game friends thing. 
 

Great fights btw @Maryokutai, totally outclassed me. How the hell you’re so good with so many characters already I’ll never know. Got obliterated but was an interesting learning experience. I really need to stop jumping. I need to figure out how to close the gap on Ryu & Ken Hadoukens too. Parries don’t help getting closer and jumping just gets you a dragon punch straight to the chin, 

 

Some if the new characters have really difficult to read attacks as well. The Shun D drinking type guy - only fought people using him twice but he is ridiculously powerful and fast. Manons dancing grapple shit always catches me out too. Just find it so hard to read. I’ll get there though. Got to actually go on the training mode got a bit. I’ve just jumped straight in with zero practice & getting taught a hard lesson for it. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Those beatings are practice too, the most valuable kind cause it tells you what you need to learn

 

You can jump at me all you want, my anti-airs are shit lol

[Maryokutai]

7 hours ago, mfnick said:

How the hell you’re so good with so many characters already I’ll never know.

 

With the exception of Manon I only used the classic characters which fundamentally still work the same as they always used to. I thought your Gief was decent though, seemed to fit you better than Ken.

 

Fireballs are indeed good in this game, which I didn't expect to happen at all because of the Drive mechanics. Rule of thumb is to neutral jump them when far away and not jump after blocking one, because that puts the opponent in an advantage. There's more to it of course and it can be tricky depending on the character. It's something I personally struggle with in some matchups as well when playing Manon, despite her little pirouette being invincible to fireballs.

 

Also generally speaking, if you want to demystify a character you can always go through their tutorial. It takes some time but they really go in-depth into the gameplay they envisitioned for each and every one of them.

[mfnick]

Yea Zangief seems a bit overpowered IMO. But I’m definitely better with single stroke type powerful characters than combo and rush type. Balrog was my main in SFIV and I did quite well with him, I’ve never been great but could hold my own. But I just prefer using characters like Ken so I’m trying to get better with them even if I’m rubbish lol.

 

Like I say, need to actually hit training rather than trying to remember moves from back in the SFIV days then mashing buttons.  

 

[one-armed dwarf]

Check out the presets in training. Anti airs, punishes. I've set up the pressure preset for the dummy to cycle responses between doing nothing, jabbing and drive impacting on block to better recognise when I need to DI/grab the DI/jump etc (DI can be cancelled into from special cancellable normals, which is also something that you can have visually indicated on training)

 

 

It's very good

[mfnick]

Really wish I’d bought this for Xbox now. Got a hankering for a fight stick but there are no reasonable options at all on PS5. Whereas there’s dozens on Xbox at all price ranges.

 

Dont suppose anyone wants to swap do they? 😂

[Metroid66]

So after 10 years of spectating I've finally launched my online venture into Street fighting. Let me be clear, I'm the purest form of shite at this. I'm nervous, anxious and rushed. My combos go out of the window and pulling off a command grab (I insist on classic controls) is some far off dream.

 

But I've been winning loads of matches with Zangeif. I don't think most people know how to play against him, and he's so powerful, a couple of big hits and a throw or two and it's game over.

 

Pretty good character for a bum like me. And I don't mind losing either, so I'll always go for a rematch with a stronger opponent until they get bored with my shiteness. 

 

As far as ranks go I'm not really into all that. I've got no real goals in this. I'll just keep playing and trying to get better. I love it tho. I can't wait to see a good pro tourney.