Street Fighter 4: how the hell does this work?!

[Cowabungaa]

After the fiasco that was Soul Calibur 4 (not that it's a bad game, I just cannot remember a list of one bazillion combo's with each character) I decided to give fighters another chance. So I read about ST4; not as many combo's, quicker, if anything more akin to Super Smash Bros. (which I rock at) than SC4.

So I bought it, spend a couple of hours in Training Mode practising the controls and whatnot, only to have my ass kicked by Very Easy opponents. I've read that practising with Ryu helps, so I've been doing that, but it doesn't seem to be doing me much good. I can't even execute those powerful versions of combos for some reason. I know how they're done but my hadouken just won't upgrade even if I press Square (got it for the PS3) twice. That sort of thing, I can't seem to figure this game out.

So how does one ever get better at this game, all I do now I swear at my TV and that's not very fun.

 

[Cowabungaa]

Don't look at me. I suck at street fighter. The only fighters I'm good at are jugglers like Tekken.

Tekken you say? Doesn't that have a fuckton of combos as well?

 

[Cowabungaa]

Don't look at me. I suck at street fighter. The only fighters I'm good at are jugglers like Tekken.

Tekken you say? Doesn't that have a fuckton of combos as well?

It has a shitload more easy, devastating moves then complex combos. I always found Tekken is fun where Street Fighter is tough.

Interesting. Hopefully there's a Tekken demo floating around on PSN.

Though that still doesn't solve the ST4 problem. I don't like throwing money away, so I'd like to at least become acceptably good enough at it to have fun. Lets hear it ST fans.

Ex Skills are performed by holding two buttons at once - not pressing one button twice.
Ex-Hadouken for example is QC+LP & MP (or any variation of two punch buttons).
Easy way - QC + L1...

And yeah, everyone and their mothers use Ryu/Ken/Akuma/Sagat. Try using someone else (I use Chun Li myself).

Ahhhh, that explains it, I'll give it a whirl.

As for fighters, the last couple matches I've been playing with Rufus and I've been doing alright-ish with him. No idea what kinda strategies to use and stuff, but at least I can actually execute his combos. Messiah KICK!!

 

[badgersprite]

Please don't bring back all those memories of memorising the Mortal Kombat fatalities/babalities/animalities/brutalities/friendship--FRIENDSHIP!?

I had to clear up all that space in my brain years ago so I wouldn't see the button combos in my sleep.

 

[joshuaayt]

Can't you just grapple your grapple through Grapple Grappler 4?

Anyway, trust me here- with fighters, practise really does make perfect. Won't make your friends like you when you beat the shit outta them every time, but it will make you a good player. Think of it as grinding with a HUGE xp bar; it does take a while, but you will get better eventually.

 

[clockpenalty]

OT Best advice I can give you is stop. Fighting games are more trouble than they're worth.

Oh, be quiet. Fighting games are awesome!

OT:
You made a good choice selecting SF over the button-tap games. Tekken and Soulcalibur *are* games that force you to memorize button combos, counters and so forth...and as a result can be pretty tedious.

Streetfighter doesn't force you to memorize anything! Like you said, it is closer to smash bros than tekken. You just need to practice the motions, and every skill you 'learn' from there is more of a 'sleight of hand' thing than a memorized button combo!

There *is* a bit of a learning curve though. The first thing you should do is practice in the trial mode. DO NOT attempt to memorize the button combos....most of them are impossible to actually use in combat unless you are tournament level. Treat them like dance routines or 'martial arts forms'... they are just practice exercises to get you to learn how to pull off deadly attacks!!!!

during the game, experiment with the different punches and kicks, and learn to fight using just those. Don't focus on the special moves just yet. If you can beat the computer just by well-timed low hard kicks, you are already on the way to glory!

street fighter is more about the mind game than learning combos. If you watch the tournament finals between the best players in the world, you'll see that its all about reading your opponent, and you HARDLY EVER see a big 1000 hit combo! You need to learn to 'feel' when to jump, when to dash, when to block, when to punch, when to throw.

Also get used to losing! People have been playing this for 20 years! You can't start beating the veterans right away but with patience you will reap rewards! Dont be afraid of being called 'cheap' if you win by just hitting someone over and over with one move! Watch the top players... they do not subscribe to these silly 'honor rules'

When you are really good, practicing in the trials will give you the muscle memory needed to turn a low punch into a low punch/hadoken combo. Its all abut the muscle memory and the timing. You'll begin to learn little nuances such as how the speed of the hadoken changes with the button you use to throw it.

Dont worry about being unable to throw an EX hadoken! You dont even want to get into the bad habit of wasting your meter that way, not too early. As a beginner, master the basics!!!! SF is NOT a game about rote memorization

It is an EXTREMELY SATISFYING exercise of mental agility and manual dexterity! You honestly do not know just how GOOD it feels to win, and know that it was a combination of planning ahead, reading the opponent, reacting to emergencies and perfect execution with good timing that got you the victory! And if you have the right mindset you will enjoy defeats too, because you will learn something from every fight against a strong opponent!

Finally, someone told you not to use ryu/ken/akuma. I disagree. You are a beginner, and deserve to use the characters that will give you the most bang for your buck at this early stage!

In particular I will advise you to learn Ken, and get good at using his hard punch shoryuken. You will be extremely satisfied every time you smash an opponent with a well timed 3 hits!!! It is pretty unfair, but hey you are learning! they should cut you some slack

You can also look up the 'ken flowchart' online. It is actually a derogatory jab at 'noob' ken players for following an easy 'script' but the truth is....it is effective! against fellow noobs maybe, but you need the ego boost that a few wins can create to really make you feel SF4 was money well spent! AND believe me....it *is*

Good luck! I hope to see you in the arena sometime

 

[omega 616]

After the fiasco that was Soul Calibur 4 (not that it's a bad game, I just cannot remember a list of one bazillion combo's with each character) I decided to give fighters another chance. So I read about ST4; not as many combo's, quicker, if anything more akin to Super Smash Bros. (which I rock at) than SC4.

So I bought it, spend a couple of hours in Training Mode practising the controls and whatnot, only to have my ass kicked by Very Easy opponents. I've read that practising with Ryu helps, so I've been doing that, but it doesn't seem to be doing me much good. I can't even execute those powerful versions of combos for some reason. I know how they're done but my hadouken just won't upgrade even if I press Square (got it for the PS3) twice. That sort of thing, I can't seem to figure this game out.

So how does one ever get better at this game, all I do now I swear at my TV and that's not very fun.

One of the shoulder buttons is a "double button" if you will, instead of pressing triangle and square for example, you press L1 and it presses both for you.

Hope that makes sense.

All I did on that game was pick sagat, mash the analgoue stick into the diagonally down and towards my opponant and hammer both kick buttons, with the odd punch thrown in.

It either resulted in alot of normal attacks or a metric fuck tonne of "tiger knee", "tiger knee", "tiger knee", "tiger knee", "tiger uppercut", "tiger knee", "tiger knee" ... you get the idea, then when I felt fancy do the triple knee into massive uppercut special move thing.

Good thing I never played online, huh?

(sorry, I don't know what the fuck all the EX up into ultra combo beta gamma means)

 

[Raziel_Likes_Souls]

Practice. One doesn't become a fighting game master overnight. Or get KOF instead, XI should be about 20 dollars these days.

 

[pyrosaw]

That game is stupidly impossible. Not worth it.

 

[RandallJohn]

I once played SF against a guy who claimed to have trained with pro SF players. He chose M. Bison, and spammed Psycho Crusher THE WHOLE GAME. I think that kind of put me off on multiplayer SF, So yeah, I'm not a huge fan. I'd imagine it just takes practice, though, like anything else. Fighting-wise, I prefer a game like Virtua Fighter, though. The longest combos aren't too crazy long with most characters, there's less juggling (though it's still there,) and when I play with my friends, I find that we use more strategy than when we play SF. I've seen the super-long combos, but my friends and I don't use them, and we can usually get through the main game without them.

As far as SF goes, have you tried all of the characters? Maybe you're just using one that isn't suited for you.

Just my two cents.

 

[RobotNinja]

Just choose Vega and look pretty. That's all I can do in that game. It's funny, because I'm actually really good at Soul Calibur. I usually play with a few characters and only memorize their useful combos.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

Don't let the short movelist fool you. It is much, much harder to play SF4 competitively online than it is to play Tekken 6. The SF4 mechanics are so much more demanding in terms of raw finger dexterity. I can pull off just about every Tekken 6 combo in the book, but I'm still baffled by EX cancels into super combos.

Sure, you can play without those sorts of combos - but you will get absolutely trashed by anyone who pulls them off.

 

[DustyDrB]

All I can do is punch and kick. If I try anything more I just end up accidentally jumping and landing into someone's insta-death move. You can go far with kicking and punching though. Or at least you can against the people I've played against. A lot of the combo moves are impossible to read how to do on my TV too.

So I'm basically this guy...

 

[Durxom]

After the fiasco that was Soul Calibur 4 (not that it's a bad game, I just cannot remember a list of one bazillion combo's with each character) I decided to give fighters another chance. So I read about ST4; not as many combo's, quicker, if anything more akin to Super Smash Bros. (which I rock at) than SC4.

So I bought it, spend a couple of hours in Training Mode practising the controls and whatnot, only to have my ass kicked by Very Easy opponents. I've read that practising with Ryu helps, so I've been doing that, but it doesn't seem to be doing me much good. I can't even execute those powerful versions of combos for some reason. I know how they're done but my hadouken just won't upgrade even if I press Square (got it for the PS3) twice. That sort of thing, I can't seem to figure this game out.

So how does one ever get better at this game, all I do now I swear at my TV and that's not very fun.

I'll try and help as much as I can...

Basically...don't worry about doing bad against the computer...the computer doesn't that much...the computer follows patterns, you want to worry more about online/offline matches more than anything, than the computer matches.

Also, just try and find a character that you like. I don't know if you are playing the normal SF4 or Super SF4, but ya..just find someone that you like to play and stick with them. Also at first....DO NOT WORRY ABOUT COMBOS!...Just worry about execution, its not going to matter much trying to do the combos if u can't even execute the moves right. So say....just working on trying to do Rufus's Messiah Kicks or Ultra, then work on trying to do them 20 times back to back, and so on and so forth.

(though Rufus isn't really that friendly of a beginning character due to his 1-frame links)

I can try and help u if u have any more questions, either just quote me I guess, or send me a PM on here. =]

 

[lacktheknack]

After the fiasco that was Soul Calibur 4 (not that it's a bad game, I just cannot remember a list of one bazillion combo's with each character) I decided to give fighters another chance. So I read about ST4; not as many combo's, quicker, if anything more akin to Super Smash Bros. (which I rock at) than SC4.

So I bought it, spend a couple of hours in Training Mode practising the controls and whatnot, only to have my ass kicked by Very Easy opponents. I've read that practising with Ryu helps, so I've been doing that, but it doesn't seem to be doing me much good. I can't even execute those powerful versions of combos for some reason. I know how they're done but my hadouken just won't upgrade even if I press Square (got it for the PS3) twice. That sort of thing, I can't seem to figure this game out.

So how does one ever get better at this game, all I do now I swear at my TV and that's not very fun.

There's a pants-on-head amount of timing involved. You just have to blunder away at it until something clicks. Once it clicks, everything becomes easier. Took me twenty hours to beat Seth for the first time, but I was on a high for hours.

Hint: See the health meter of the enemy (do this in training)? Punch the enemy. Did you see a flash of something shoot accross the health meter? See if you can time your blows to land as that flash reaches the other side of the health bar.

Hint again: Play through the Trial "Challenges" (read: Tutorials). That helps immensely.

 

[lacktheknack]

That game is stupidly impossible. Not worth it.

Oh yes it is.

 

[feeback06]

You see I grew up in an arcade. There were always these college age kids who knew everything, and after getting your ass kicked by them enough times and whining your start to learn things from them. Fighting games are a genre where practice does make perfect and it does take a lot.