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undefeated!
Mar. 10th, 2014 12:22 amTotally unrelated to anything productive, an interesting experience yesterday:
How'd that happen?
Sometime in January, I met up with the local fighting games community (FGC) folks. It turns out they're really friendly, and they meet like a half mile down the street, at this one guy's apartment. Any given Friday evening, maybe five or a dozen people will show up, and we play fighting games! There will often be two or three monitors set up, most people bring their joysticks, and we play and practice and share experience! It's a great time.
I'm definitely one of the weaker players, but not like terri-bad. Also I basically only play Tekken, but most of the other folks play several different games, focusing on Street Fighter or Marvel vs. Capcom. Occasionally the Smash Brothers players show up too, although they're a semi-separate community. And there are handful of other Tekken specialists...
One of the guys from the group, Josh, has been giving me really good Tekken training; he's been playing competitively for years, and we do *drills*, and he gives me *homework*. It's intense. He's a research scientist here in the Chemistry department; I wonder if he's sublimating his urge to teach into training fighting games players. I'm getting a lot better with a little bit of guidance.
Anyway, the tournament. There's this tournament up in Indianapolis, once a month, "Godlike Saturdays". ("godlike" is a word that shows up in the fighting games world pretty often; it's pretty tongue-in-cheek) And I found out that some of the Bloomington guys were going! I thought I wouldn't stand a chance against actual competitive players, but it sounded like an interesting time. Josh had said that "if the Cincinnati guys don't show up, you'll probably get in the top three", by which he meant both that I was progressing, and that he didn't have a very high opinion of the Indianapolis Tekken players. And more importantly, Lindsey agreed to make the drive up there with me! So Saturday afternoon, up we went!
We showed up at the arcade in the mall in downtown Indianapolis, and eventually found our way to this mini-movie-theater area in the arcade, like three rows of stadium seating with a big projector, where you could see the current main event. It was full of young-ish dudes, monitors, and video game consoles. It was almost entirely dudes, although one woman was in the top 8 Street Fighter players! Folks were standing around, playing games (competing, warming up to compete, or just playing casually), watching other people play games, talking about games...
Lindsey made her graceful exit to go do some work, and I registered for the tournament. It turned out that there were only two other people signed up to play Tekken! So Josh was right; the Cincinnati guys hadn't showed up, and I would, by default, be in the top three. I milled around, looking for a casual Tekken match so I could warm up, but didn't find any. Instead, I watched people playing Killer Instinct and King of Fighters...
Pretty soon, they called up the Tekken competitors and said since there were only three of us, we'd play a round-robin instead of a double-elimination bracket tournament, which sounded sensible. Normally, in the bracket format, you play matches that are best-of-three *games*, but here we played best-of-five. (in either case, each game is best-of-five rounds.)
We plugged in our controllers and futzed around a little bit to warm up. I had this weird strategy pop into my head: for the warmup matches, I was intentionally trying not to reveal my actual skill, just messing around and pressing some buttons... because this is serious business.
My first opponent introduced himself with a handle that was something like "Nega-Zaku". Having noticed that I was doing a bunch of throws during the warm-ups, he told me he was going to break my throws during the match! A bold claim! (it's kind of hard; you have to time it just right, and pick the right buttons to press to escape! better players can often do it) ... I don't think he escaped too many throws.
I started out playing Jun/Kazuya and won the first two games, even though I was really weirdly, viscerally nervous. I kept dropping combos, because my hands were shaking! Then I started to calm down, but he took the third game, seemingly having figured out how to defend against my offense. I switched to my new team that I've been working on, Kazuya/Jinpachi. (you're only allowed to switch up your teams when you've lost a game) ... and he couldn't defend against that team, so I took game four, and the match. alexr defeats Nega, 3-1.
In the second match, which happened immediately after, I played the other guy, whose handle I forget exactly, but I couldn't pronounce it even at the moment. He really didn't know how to play Tekken Tag 2, and had come in with a familiarity with other Tekken games and thought he'd give it a shot. I just steamrolled him, 3-0. He didn't take any rounds, even.
And with that, I had won the tiny tournament! Then Nega and the other guy played for second place; Nega took it easily. I wandered over to the registration table to collect the winnings ($15! $5 for each player), and we sat around and played a few more games for fun, with Nega and I doing our best to teach the other guy how to play Tag 2. Friendly guys. Nega asked if I'd be back next month, so he could get his revenge!
Although maybe next month the Mythical Cincinnati Guys will show up and destroy us all.
So I know we joke sometimes about @alexrudnick's "career" on the pro fighting games circuit, but he in fact just *won a Tekken tournament*.
— Lindsey Kuper (@lindsey) March 8, 2014How'd that happen?
Sometime in January, I met up with the local fighting games community (FGC) folks. It turns out they're really friendly, and they meet like a half mile down the street, at this one guy's apartment. Any given Friday evening, maybe five or a dozen people will show up, and we play fighting games! There will often be two or three monitors set up, most people bring their joysticks, and we play and practice and share experience! It's a great time.
I'm definitely one of the weaker players, but not like terri-bad. Also I basically only play Tekken, but most of the other folks play several different games, focusing on Street Fighter or Marvel vs. Capcom. Occasionally the Smash Brothers players show up too, although they're a semi-separate community. And there are handful of other Tekken specialists...
One of the guys from the group, Josh, has been giving me really good Tekken training; he's been playing competitively for years, and we do *drills*, and he gives me *homework*. It's intense. He's a research scientist here in the Chemistry department; I wonder if he's sublimating his urge to teach into training fighting games players. I'm getting a lot better with a little bit of guidance.
Anyway, the tournament. There's this tournament up in Indianapolis, once a month, "Godlike Saturdays". ("godlike" is a word that shows up in the fighting games world pretty often; it's pretty tongue-in-cheek) And I found out that some of the Bloomington guys were going! I thought I wouldn't stand a chance against actual competitive players, but it sounded like an interesting time. Josh had said that "if the Cincinnati guys don't show up, you'll probably get in the top three", by which he meant both that I was progressing, and that he didn't have a very high opinion of the Indianapolis Tekken players. And more importantly, Lindsey agreed to make the drive up there with me! So Saturday afternoon, up we went!
We showed up at the arcade in the mall in downtown Indianapolis, and eventually found our way to this mini-movie-theater area in the arcade, like three rows of stadium seating with a big projector, where you could see the current main event. It was full of young-ish dudes, monitors, and video game consoles. It was almost entirely dudes, although one woman was in the top 8 Street Fighter players! Folks were standing around, playing games (competing, warming up to compete, or just playing casually), watching other people play games, talking about games...
Lindsey made her graceful exit to go do some work, and I registered for the tournament. It turned out that there were only two other people signed up to play Tekken! So Josh was right; the Cincinnati guys hadn't showed up, and I would, by default, be in the top three. I milled around, looking for a casual Tekken match so I could warm up, but didn't find any. Instead, I watched people playing Killer Instinct and King of Fighters...
Pretty soon, they called up the Tekken competitors and said since there were only three of us, we'd play a round-robin instead of a double-elimination bracket tournament, which sounded sensible. Normally, in the bracket format, you play matches that are best-of-three *games*, but here we played best-of-five. (in either case, each game is best-of-five rounds.)
We plugged in our controllers and futzed around a little bit to warm up. I had this weird strategy pop into my head: for the warmup matches, I was intentionally trying not to reveal my actual skill, just messing around and pressing some buttons... because this is serious business.
My first opponent introduced himself with a handle that was something like "Nega-Zaku". Having noticed that I was doing a bunch of throws during the warm-ups, he told me he was going to break my throws during the match! A bold claim! (it's kind of hard; you have to time it just right, and pick the right buttons to press to escape! better players can often do it) ... I don't think he escaped too many throws.
I started out playing Jun/Kazuya and won the first two games, even though I was really weirdly, viscerally nervous. I kept dropping combos, because my hands were shaking! Then I started to calm down, but he took the third game, seemingly having figured out how to defend against my offense. I switched to my new team that I've been working on, Kazuya/Jinpachi. (you're only allowed to switch up your teams when you've lost a game) ... and he couldn't defend against that team, so I took game four, and the match. alexr defeats Nega, 3-1.
In the second match, which happened immediately after, I played the other guy, whose handle I forget exactly, but I couldn't pronounce it even at the moment. He really didn't know how to play Tekken Tag 2, and had come in with a familiarity with other Tekken games and thought he'd give it a shot. I just steamrolled him, 3-0. He didn't take any rounds, even.
And with that, I had won the tiny tournament! Then Nega and the other guy played for second place; Nega took it easily. I wandered over to the registration table to collect the winnings ($15! $5 for each player), and we sat around and played a few more games for fun, with Nega and I doing our best to teach the other guy how to play Tag 2. Friendly guys. Nega asked if I'd be back next month, so he could get his revenge!
Although maybe next month the Mythical Cincinnati Guys will show up and destroy us all.
