A Fighters Journey #2

33 Days to go…

So in the recent practices of Capcom VS SNK 2 I made a new rule for myself, engage only when the opponent makes the first move. It stops me from taking the offense a little too often where I’m liable to put myself in a vulnerable spot. Once a special move is in motion too early and the opponent blocks, it’s all over from there. It’s certainly keeping me in control and giving me that little extra time to foresee and prepare.

I’m getting to know Nakoruru a lot better now. Her diagonal blade sweeping attacks sure come in handy covering a large area from ground upwards keeping opponents at bay. What’s also useful is that she’s a character who can really zip about the screen! She’s like a bouncy ball, her moves help to travel across the screen faster and the bonus either adds an attack on the way or dodges something. Hopefully this action of a girl on too much Red Bull will cast a bit of intimidation and panic to my competitor.

Using Ken pretty much means I can use Ryu just there’s a small difference of move sets. It’s got me wondering who’s the better of the two. Ryu has a good special hurricane kick that sucks the opponent into it, yet that same command grants Ken a nice special combo of kicks going further into the opponent’s direction. I guess it depends on who I’m fighting, they’re both good moves in stationary or incoming situations.

Now there’s been one major issue that I was shocked to not have clocked onto earlier. After all this time I had only been playing as player one which meant I started on the left hand side in every fight. Putting me on the other side totally rendered me useless. Logically everyone knows that when you’re on the opposite side your controls are reversed. However pulling them off is less easy when you’re not use to it. Immediately I started up playing Hard mode arcade as player two. It was vital that I made better practice of it as there’s always a 50/50 on which side I’ll be fighting on.

After a while playing the A.I only teaches you so much, It doesn’t take too long to figure out it’s behaviour patterns. Unfortunately I don’t know many local players of the franchise so I’m going to have to research online and analyze commonly used combos. Quite a hard thing to prepare against without somebody to pull them off for my practice. Figuring out ways of countering/dodging dangerous situations is going to be tricky, let’s hope my instincts serve me well on the day. In the meantime I’ve picked up a few details to perk my awareness in a bout from the Shoryuken Wiki.

Okay last time I checked the list of contenders has gone up to 88, big numbers eh? Quite scary when I have no idea how skilled everybody is. One can only keep practising…