On Friday I made a thread in the NW section entitled “SeattleVersus – back in business,” a thread where I explained the want to get SV back on the horse now more than ever for the general Seattle SF scene.  I made the thread primarily for people to give suggestions and insight on what they like/want out of SV.  With that, I also am using the thread to discuss/announce current projects we’re working on here at SV.  So let your voice be heard!  If you’ve got some insight on SV, let us know at the thread!

A few images leaked out today concerning Super Street Fighter 4 alternate costumes.  Here we get a sneak peak on numerous character’s alternate costumes like Ryu, Chun, Adon, Abel, Bison and many more.  I personally like Bison’s alternate the most, he looks hella buff!  Anyways check the gallery above for larger images.

There’s been a whole lot of information running around concerning Super 4 within the past 24 hours.  With a ton of new video content and the release of Hakan, we’ve had a lot of stuff to chew on before April 2uth…so here’s more!

Kineda did a nice run down of the Capcom Fight Club in San Francisco!  At the event, fans were able to play the “final build” of Super 4, thus the reasoning for so many videos to come out recently.  Check out more info and images of the event over at Kineda:  Capcom Fight Club in San Francisco

More brand new Super Street Fighter 4 videos have been uploaded from the Game Developers Conference last night. The Super Street Fighter 4 Videos here feature various matches between Hakan and Dhalsim, Akuma and T.hawk, Ibuki and Ryu and even Makoto and Juri. So check these videos out to get a glimpse of the new characters at work! You can find them over at the “shoryukenvideos” youtube page!

Rumors far and wide have been spread around concerning the mysterious “final” character…the fun loving oil tycoon “Hakan.”  Today both IGN and Famitsu spilled the guts and released various scans and videos of the long anticipated Hakan.  From what we’ve seen, Hakan looks like he uses profuse amounts of oil to slip and slide in order to deal damage to his opponents.

With special names like oil dive, oil sliding, oil rocket and oil shower, you can tell that we’ll be having one slippery time learning what this character has to offer.  His ultra is absolutely ridiculous, where he squeezes his opponent tightly to his oily body where the opponent eventually slips away from Hakan, hurling the opponent to the corner face first.  The ultra looks to be used as an anti air, but in all hoensty, I’m not even going to go into strategic aspects as of now…check out the video and watch how crazy this guy looks.

The NW section of SRK has been seeing a lot of silly threads as of recently, however the “Ask” threads are providing to be highly entertaining and somewhat informative!  With FrankDaDank’s “Ask Frank: Being Gay” thread and Zig’s “Ask Rob: Being White” thread, the threads pose a fun and entertaining way to learn more about the personalities in the NW.  Most recently Jetay’s “Ask OMNE: Being Black” has been created, and I can’t wait to see the answers that Jetay pulls from questions like:

- What makes DeeJay so good?

- I see this commonly, larger white girl with a black dude…explain.

- What are your thoughts on people referring to “acting Hood/ghetto” as “acting black”?

- And at what point if any, did Michael jacson become officially not black?

This thread already has me rolling.  If your looking for a way to kill time, ask a question or just scroll through the thread.

With Super 4 just around the corner, people are excited as ever to hear news about the new characters.  With the newest additions of Super 4’s cast, players have been anxiously waiting for more footage of the new characters.  The trailers were exciting but it left players feeling a bit “empty,” not knowing what the 3s to Super 4 transition would bring.  Fortunately for us, Super 4 was showcased at the “Cebit” show in Europe where fans got to test out the game.  With videos popping up over the web, here’s the first:  Makoto Vs Ibuki!

Recently on SRK, I made a thread in the Northwest section entitled “SF4:  Mentality and core fundamentals.”  In this thread, I wanted to create an area where I could lay down some knowledge concerning specific mentalities and core fundamentals that are important to understand in SF4 to become better players.  More or less, I didn’t want the thread itself to become a discussion point.  There are way to many people who like to chime in and throw in their opinions when in all reality, it’s not what the thread was created for.  In response to that, I have decided to make these updates HERE at SeattleVersus!

With that, these posts will most likely be thrown in the “strategy” section here at SV so if you’re ever looking for the archives of these articles just remember to check back there if you’re interested.  I also hope to have a few guests write articles geared towards mentality and general strategies in SF4 as well such as Seattle’s own “Deezo” and possibly NorCal’s “TanakaForce.”  With that, here was my first post in regards to free damage…

Stop giving up free damage

There have been many times where I see players lose when they shouldn’t have. In most cases, the statment above is the primary reason as to why this happens. The excuse of “he was plain better than me” can only go so far. In fact the correct school of thought should instead be “he out played me.” Skill can always be measured, however the extent of someone’s skill has to be questioned when you realize that YOU are killing yourself . This is a pretty obvious aspect of SF, however it amazes me how often players go off and essentially kill themselves based off of stupid decisions.

In many times these “stupid decisions” are quite obvious. Why did you jump in when he has 2 meters and an ultra stocked? Why did you jump in and give away three things…damage, a knockdown, plus potential mixup options! A lot of players don’t realize the gravity of their decisions. The fact of the matter is that you need to be able to make your opponent work for the damage he puts in instead of giving it away.

It’s surprising to see how much this school of thought transforms a player’s overall “skill.” Essentially they didn’t really change anything, however they started playing smarter rather than trying to play “better.” Players that don’t give away free damage require their opponents to out play them and work with their OWN skill, rather than fight with what their opponent GIVES them.

Try to take this mentality on for yourself and realize just how often you lose without truly putting up a fight. With a touch of “risk to reward” thought mixed with “stop giving away free damage” you’ll find the value in understanding the difference of “he was just better than me” compared to “he out played me.” Though the two are interrelated and some what redundant, you’ll find that often times when you lose, the true culprit is none other than yourself.

The moral of the story is to remain patient! Stop helping your opponent kill you. Before making a questionable decision, weigh out the risks and rewards and go from there. Stop giving up free damage and start making your opponent work for the win. When you stop giving away damage, you challenge your opponent to prove that he is a better playerthan you are. No harm in that. Pack up, lick your wounds and move on to learn how to win next time.

SV’s been extremely dead to say the least.  I’m sorry that updates haven’t been happening for all those that still view…I’ve been preoccupied with life and SV just hasn’t be a focus for me currently.  I’m planning to keep things fairly active here though by posting every once in a while (at the very least one update every 5 days).  I also would like to disclaim that I’ll probably get a bit more opinionated with posts and updates to keep things interesting, however I will refrain from trying to be overly crude with them.  With that, thanks for continuing to check out the site, and sorry to be so lame

In other news, Super 4’s official release date will be on April 27th here in the US.  Shockingly, Japan will actually be receiving Super 4 AFTER us (this a first?)!  To hype us up, 2 awesome trailers were released yesterday on the Nakky blog, one of which being an anime trailer and the 2nd being a standard promotional trailer.  Nothing new seen and nothing new heard…but seriously Capcom?  An anime trailer to hype us up?  Wow they sure know their fans.  A bit of new alternate costume information was released as well (lol at Blanka being in Dan’s gi).

In other news, Super 4 just needs to hurry up and get here.  Cut the anime trailers, let us know if the 3s characters are in or not!  Other than that, thanks for keeping on with SV and expect to see me update a bit more often!

Many of you new Tekken players have likely seen or heard of “the Notebook” that myself and other T6 fanatics have been carrying around. Well, our good friend Jon Frost was kind enough to scan and upload the whole thing to his website. You can find it here.

WARNING: It’s a pretty big .pdf file, around 40 megs, so you might want to right click and “Save As” instead of opening it, depending on your computer.

Not all of the information is up to date, but enough is to make this a great starting point for learning any character. Once you memorize the basics, be sure to visit the Tekken Zaibatsu character forums for more in-depth strategy and combos .