Sakazaki Dojo > Training Room

The KOF Battle Journal

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choysauce:
nice thread idea desmond!

i want to share a moment i had at one of the runbacks.
i was playing someone that is pretty close to my level in the game and i had lost the first game to a small error on my part when i had the win in the bag. it totally affected my gameplay in the second round and lost my first character free.

i have saiki coming in and cleans up my opponent's first character, but takes me down to half life. their next character comes in and i hop at him twice, but the second time i totally see he whiffed something and i confirm the j.D into an HD combo. i do the 100% combo for 3 meters, and this is the first time i've ever landed this particular HD in tournament. so it gave me such a huge boost of confidence (was totally feelin myself at that point). and the rest of the set i am just mauling and eventually win.

lesson learned, your mood totally affects your play. somehow you always gotta stay positive when playing, especially in this game. still gotta figure out how the top players do this, but at least now i know what the foundation to have a strong tournament presence is

Reiki.Kito:
I was playing yesterday at the Dragon Lounge, a hang out for players on Monday Nights. I was going up against Hotpockets and BBZ a lot of the time.

Throughout that night, they both played Joe. I really had no idea how to fight them. With BBZ, it was just basic frame trap tactics and responding to me jumping with Golden Heel. Everytime he'd throw a fireball, I'd try to jump to get the drop on him and he'd respond by hitting me out of the air. Once I got pushed into a corner, it was either block low to avoid a combo or get hit, getting out even by jumping was covered by DPs, jump CDs, grabbing me if I rolled through the fireball. It was especially hard with Maxima. With Hotpockets, totally different story. Mixing in st.A, f+B into Bakurestsuken made the pressure safe. If I tried to roll, he'd grab me out of it. He was very prepared for anything I tried to get out. Mounting pressure was a bit difficult because getting close to him just wouldn't work. I think I managed to get a hard knockdown on him twice?  At some points, I really just gave up trying to fight the character. It never felt like there was something consistent to hold on to, like a hole I could abuse.

This was especially true cause I couldn't tell when to punish Trust Kick or to just block because a DP was coming. It's different when you're stuck by a gimmick you don't understand very well. Personally, I felt really angry with them, but more so with myself. Once Joe as gone in some matches, I had a much easier time fighting other characters. Usually, I won because I managed to get a combo in or cornered him with a character like Terry to get a mix up in, but if I lost control, it was really hard to get it back. It's encouraged me to put more time to learn Joe so I'm not so surprised by everything he does.

AirLancer:
I play, practice, and try to improve even though I really have no competition in my area. (There's barely anyone around who's even played a fighting game before, much less KOF.) I beat the only other competent player, my former roommate by a 10:1 margin. When I went to LV for EVO, I played a lot against Fernando and Zero, and actually got a few compliments on my play, much to my surprise, since I was still adjusting to the TV's latency (or lack thereof). I still remember one casual match where it was my Kim (who I had only recently picked up to replace K', and was still very much a W.I.P.) vs his Yuri. We both had little life left, though I'm sure he had the life advantage. Yuri did a Raiohken, probably to catch a hop, instead I had neutral jumped and immediately EX Supered to win the match. Zero and anyone else watching had a good cheer from that. Fernando's Athena was a real surprise, I'd never played against one (which applies to a lot of characters, with my small playing pool) and got caught in all kinds of setups.

The sets I've played are usually so one-sided that I can't get a handle on myself as a player, since my flaws aren't being exploited as hard as they should be.

I practice so that when I get back to the States, and hopefully find some competition, I won't be as far behind everyone else that's been playing in their scenes. Trying to find other players, and getting new players into KOF, or even fighting games is a battle in itself. Despite the general lack of players, I still play because I just love the game so much.

My Main Team:

Kula: My first character that I picked up, as well as my favorite. It was Kula that really helped me get down comboing out of c.B hit-confirms. Of all my characters, she was generally the one my former roommate hated fighting the most until I picked Kim.

Robert: Robert is strange. Sometimes I'll have runs where everything goes right, I make all the right moves, and Robert is just unstoppable. Other times he just gets beaten out by everything. I don't think either Kim or Kula ever get as hot or as cold as my Robert does. But still, perhaps much like David Kong, I've put so much work and time into Robert that I don't think I'll let him go. I actually picked up Robert because my roommate tried picking him when we first started playing the game, and he was just really annoying. So, fight fire with fire, and I've stuck with him from then on. I feel that when Robert is well played, he can shut down anything his opponent tries. I also feel that players haven't taken Robert to his full potential, unless there's some sick Robert match videos someone can point me to.

Kim: The last addition. In general, I tend to be a fairly defensive player. In SF I mained Guile. On the other hand, I just throw away all my fucks with Kim. It's gotten to the point where I can tell that my one real opponent is extremely hesitant to press buttons whenever Kim is in c.B range.  The main problem is perhaps I get too button happy with Kim.

My former roommate generally plays Kyo, Saiki, King, and Mr. Karate. He clearly understands and applies footsies and spacing. Though, he tends to play very recklessly. Occasionally, he can just zone me out extremely well with King with the combination of her great j.CD and the use of smartly placed fireballs. It's very rare for him to throw a bad fireball for a full punish. A flaw I need to correct is that I don't tech throws as much as I should, especially the ones where I literally see him coming up and think "he's about to throw me." My main advantage over him is the fact that I can do HD combos with pretty much all my my characters, whereas he can only really try to do one with King, and he often forgets what combo he's even going for as he does it. If he improved his combos, we'd probably be much more evenly matched, since right now the times I'm most fearful is when his Mr. Karate anchor is loaded with 5 meters. I know that he'll EX Ranbu me for just about anything, so doing everything is potentially a risk. Still, the last time we played it was 45:6, so it's hard for me to think about how I can improve.

DJMirror949:
 Oh how fun this will be. Recently I been playing Saiki/EX Iori on my team. I used to play Kula/K/Kyo but I always felt like I never play Kula correctly so I just dropped her. Right now I'm in this characters crisis phase that I don't know who to replace Kula with. I decided to play Iori (Claw) for a few weeks but I felt like he has to be on the right moment/situation which I'm not really good at yet. So I switched to his counterpart and so far I'm kinda having some success but feeling that I'm not able play him to his fullest potential with all his tools since I'm not able to do stuff like Empty Cancel Rekkas, safe jump setups, doing DP into command grab, dp in hcb hd combo loop etc. I only been playing with arcade stick for a year and I think my execution is below average, so I think I'm just gonna keep sticking with to improve executions for now.

 Saiki on the other hand, I'm playing him because I'm have a deal with CMD Duc and improving my abilities to be patient, learning more about spacing, picking right positioning, improve defense, learning how to fight against zoners with & without, but the most important overall is picking better decisions. So far it is a big struggle since I'm just the rushdown player with my characters and it's a huge change to my gameplay. I don't know how much I have progressed with him since I have hate/love moments with Saiki. Characters like Duo Lon/Chin/Benimaru drives me nuts while characters like Daimon/Clark I can relax. My big weaknesses right now is learning how to time things better, switching up the 3 styles on the fly (Attack/Passive/Defense), fighting against zoners (which I still have a hard time getting in), learning to be patients, learning how to respond back against certain things, able to apply the zoning/defensive style of play with K/Kyo (Which I'm just used to going in all the time) and much much much more. There's still alot more but I'm going to take my time getting better. Also people has been giving me shit about taking my time learning on how to get better which I'm just ignoring most of the time because I don't think it's a good idea on stressing yourself out and wearing yourself out in the process. The games are meant to be fun not stressful.

Also I change my third character (my other two is Saiki/EX Iori) every 2 weeks: I first started with Terry now I'm going to Mr. Karate now. After Mr. Karate, I'm thinking of between Clark/Mature/Vice/Benimaru/Athena. Well I'm doing this so that way I have a better way of understanding how the characters works and see how other people punish the blockstrings/moves/setup that I seen other people do (Copying blockstring is not that hard but combos & setups are a different story for me) And there you go. That's all I can say for now I guess.

solidshark:
That period where you've been away from playing for almost a week or longer and come back is weird. Sometimes it makes me feel really rusty, but the last time, I felt refreshed, like a small vacation before coming back to the job I love.

When I didn't have time to play during the week, but still had 20 mintues here or 15 minutes there, I just picked up my stick and practiced combos based on memory without even turning the game on. It kept my muscle memory really sharp. I'd performed better than the last game before my absence, even team-sweeped (OCV) a guy who usually team-sweeps me.

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