Season's Beatings 4 (SF4), Podcast Jumping Off, etc, etc.

This has been long overdue, wish I'da posted about this as soon as I got home.

Season's Beatings 4 was off the chain. The stream wasnt top tier, but it existed so that was enough for me, and as soon as they shut down the chat things worked out great.

Now, the first thing that happened was Sanford beating Daigo twice in team battles with Cammy. That's where all the buzz came up about console characters being cheap. *2*.

The next part of big interest was obviously, the main event. Daigo vs JWong in finals. *1*.

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*1*: In my opinion, the winners and grand finals between Jwong and Daigo should and probably will go down in fighting game history for 2 reasons. One being the flaws of having exclusive characters in a large scale competitive game, and second another citation of a top level players ability to adapt in a dire time of crisis (which is what Daigo was facing).

The sets were pretty amazing. Justin did everything he needed to setup a win for him, develop a character (Fei Long) and a strategy that not only is viable for fighting against a top level player like Daigo, but a character that has tools that actually counters the other character's normal playstyle. (Ryu).

And Jwong ran with it.

Poke traps with rekka -> c.HK, midrange EX Dragon Kick through projectiles (which Jwong used to setup a 50/50 afterwards, ill go into that more later), Jwong had all the right stuff to beat daigo.

And for a while, it was working.

Winners finals was just brutal to watch. There's no way to really put it lightly, Daigo got obliterated. And I mean that in every sense of the word. When you watch WF, you see Daigo completely confused and lost as to what to do. I cant go as far as to say it was like watching JWong play a scrub, but Daigo flat out could not defend himself. It was actually very disheartening to watch.

The irony of Fei Long is that, unlike most situations such as this where a person defaults to a higher tiered character, Jwong pulled a u-turn and went the OTHER way. It's not like he just easy-mac'd a character or anything, he put in work (winning Battle Arcadia 6 with his Fei Long), but I think it's interesting that he went DOWN the tierlist and got more solid results.

There's a reason for this, and I'll hit that in point *2*.

Now, when Daigo landed in the losers bracket (Losers Finals vs ILoveUJoe) he was clearly shook. I'm not sitting here saying I'm a pro of any kind, especially in terms of Street Fighter, even SF4; but just by watching his play you could tell something was up. Laswagga had walked off saying "There's no way Daigo is going to lose to a Sagat, even if it is Joe", and went to watch his GF play Pokemon Stadium. I was thinking the same thing.

But I kinda got worried a little bit when Joe took a set. Then another (I think?). "You send him to losers, and I'll do the rest." Joe's words sorta echoed around as I watched Joe inch his way to a spot in grands with Jwong.

Daigo, on the other hand, was probably just recollecting himself.

Because after dropping however many games/sets he did, he came back full steam. It-was-not-pretty. Now dont get me wrong, he didn't exactly rollover Joe or anything, but understand that Daigo knows how to pick apart a Sagat, and he did. I don't know how many times I saw him time Joe and walk straight into close range. It was pretty creepy.

And so he came back. From "The Bracket of Alternative Success" as I've coined for it, and he was ready to go again.

Now, this is where things got REAL interesting in my opinion.

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Daigo was already shook from fighting Jwong, but somehow, some way, he started to adapt. He fricking learned and adapted. The baffling part about it was that he was fighting a monster that he had literally never seen before.

You gotta understand, I think this transcends the landmark of John Choi's adaptation that was noted at B3. Choi had to fight against a mechanic that he knew of, but didn't know all of the options for.

Daigo was fighting a character that, for all intents and purposes, he'd never really seen before.

But he didn't really give two ****s about it. "Justin Long" was between him and 1st place, and he was going up top or going home. No punts.

Now, I can't remember how long it took for Daigo to do it, but he started to catch on to the fei/ryu matchup VERY quickly. He started noticing "where the 50/50s were", he started learning where and how to space, understand that Fei has a very viable overhead and respect that zone, and most importantly, he stopped touching the hot stove of trying to punish lp Rekka with c.mk.

(I quote the 50/50 comment because JWong's main strat was to get a stock, sit about midrange, and ex dragon kick through a projectile on reaction. When this landed (which it ALWAYS did provided daigo threw a hadoken), Jwong opted to set this up as a throw 50/50. You can actually link into a s.lp from here, which you can link into something else (rekka, flame kick, etc etc) I'm actually going to e-mail him on his site ( http://jwonggg.com/ ) and ask him about that, because I'm curious myself)

Beyond this, Daigo just had to hold on and get his keep his confidence. And he did. When he started getting comfortable, that's when the SRK -> FADC shenanigans starts coming out. Some would work, some wouldn't, that's how Ryu works; get 'em to fear the shoryuken on 50/50.

Daigo stormed back out of the first match to reset the count to 0-0 for one final match. At that point, he was looking like he'd gotten some backbone, but was still kind of shaky on the matchup overall.

The point where this turned around in my opinion is when Daigo went for some of the "crunchwrap supreme nonsense" as I call it. I forget what setup the situation (everything flies by when you try to keep up with the subtle details), but Justin was holding block looking to play footsies with Daigo. Daigo walked up, looking like a blatant throw setup. Jwong was thinking throw, Daigo was thinking SRK.

Walk up SRK -> FADC -> Ultra.
It.
Was.
Huge.

When he landed that, the match basically turned from "Daigo playing Ryu vs Justin playing Fei Long" into "Daigo vs Justin".

Daigo proceeded to defy pretty much everything that came before that period of time and went on to land some of the clutch moves stuff ever. The Umehara Shoryu, Hadoken -> Shinkuu Hadoken traps, you name it, he did it. Eventually momentum started to swing his way and his hits turned into solid combos, eventually ending the winning round with a solid string leading to stun and a focus attack finish.

Beast.

The one last note I want to make about this before I go into the short talk about Jwong is that I feel as if Daigo actually didn't the matchup to the point of where he could win, but really he only learned it to the point to where he could defend himself. If you watch, from beginning to end, he was still eating EX Dragon Kick for throwing hadokens. I'll never know if he didn't believe JWong could do it on reaction or if he was giving off a tell, but the fact of the matter if he kept putting it out there for Justin to take, which he did not miss very many of.

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Now, understand that there was never a point and time Justin Wong was playing poorly in this set. He pretty much very consistent in his game throughout this whole episode. Spacing like a champ and setting up poke traps, having no fear to stalk at mid range and throw out ex dragon wing on reaction. Contrary to the talk of a lot of haters out there, Justin did not slouch at all during this battle with Daigo.

Solid like a rock. The only thing that could possibly happen was for Daigo to come move him.

All in all, Justin realistically didn't do anything to lose this.

Daigo did what he needed to win.

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*2*
Now, a HUGE debate came up saturday during the the team tournament. The topic of "are console characters cheap?"

This came up when Sanford beat Daigo not once, but twice in teams. Cammy vs Ryu.

"Oh man, console characters are cheap."
"There's nothing Daigo can do to prepare for that!"
"It's in the game, so it's legit."

People going back and forth on the topic, especially in regard to Daigo coming from Japan, where they mainly (I think only?) play the Arcade version.

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The main argument that people have FOR console characters is mainly that they are in the game, they are not banned in tournament, they are legal.

The main argument against is that there is no way people coming from overseas (specifically Japan) can prepare for console characters, they don't see console characters. "It doesn't matter how much you READ about a matchup, if you don't play a high level player, you can't actually LEARN the console character matchup." -Flash Metroid.

Flash is right. It doesn't matter what Mago's rank is in whatever top caliber RanBat arcade in Japan, if he's got to fight a console character, he's inherently at a disadvantage because he more-than-likely has never SEEN that character (in SF4), let alone has a clue how the character functions in the game.

Here's the problem with the argument, we're not talking about Japan. We're talking about America. (All patriotic and "AMERICA, **** YEAH!" jokes aside.)

In America, our arcade scene is everything short of dead. That's why we have console tournaments. Console tournaments obviously have console characters. If these characters are not busted by birth (which all of them save Akuma are very, VERY far from it, and he's not bad by any stretch of the imagination), then what sense does it make to ban 1/3rd of the characters in the game? It's not like we have a large amount of arcade cabs in America, and aside from Denjin Arcade, I honestly don't know if there is ANY large scale arcade tournament for SF4 in America.

I keep saying in America because that's where this tournament happened. In America. It's not like everybody hopped on a plane, flew straight to Daigo's house and said "Hey man, we're playing SF4, we got consoles, take your Gens and Goukens and STFU!", no he came to USA and entered a tournament on his own. (I actually think he was flown here, but regardless, it was a tournament here.)

Was he at a disadvantage? OH DEAR GOD YES HE WAS! And it is a horrible disadvantage. He lands any combination of Sanford, Rashaan (was he there?), Jwong, or any other beast (heck, probably just highly competent) console character and he was done. But again, he came here. It's not like they sprung this on Daigo at the last second, you can't convince me he didn't know about this. It's perfectly reasonable to argue that he shouldn't have been ready for Justin specifically to throw a CC at him, it's not Daigo's job to study American tournament footage. (especially when JWong only left him with ONE tournament to do so)

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If this wound up being any other kind of scenario, a 5v5 USA vs Japan, Team USA going to SBO, or heck, if Justin tried this in the exhibition with Daigo, then yes, it would make perfect sense to say JWong was pulling some BS on Daigo. But this, nor Sanford vs Daigo in teams, was not not a set-in-stone match. This was again, a tournament on console in a society that has a vast majority (if not) of it's tournaments on console.

In the end, it has to be noted that everybody who's arguing this point is arguing solely that this is unfair for Daigo, who came here. Nobody seems to have a huge problem with it overall.

-shrug-

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Beyond that, AJ (Alternate275) and I randomly decided to start doing a podcast today. Like, literally, it was random. We did the first 4 topics today. Don't know how we're going to divide it up or anything, but be on the look out for it. It's going to be pretty interesting.

Our first batch of topics were obviously going to be fighting games, but we're going to branch out real quick.

... especially since topic #2 was about Shanoa Cancelling. ^_^

"Ignis!!"