Where Did You Start?

the first game i remember playing ever was mk2. i dont remember much from it other than i was like 2 or 3 at my cousins place playing it and i used to cry when fatalities happened. yep.

i figured id give you a little bit of my backstory on fighting games while im at it. im really bored and i actually kind of kind of want to try to remember what i can in the past 4 years that i've been involved with the FGC

okay so im in the middle of typing this and HOLY SHIT THIS IS LONG but if ive met you at a tournament or you stayed in the nitti room, it might be some good reads to bring back some memories of the past.

as far as competitive play goes, i started with SF4 at the end of 2009 (super was already announced). as soon as i got the game, i ordered a shitty Hori Fighting Stick 3 and started mashing. i had no idea what the fuck i was doing but i was having a lot of fun with it. i had a friend who was really into GGPO 3s but he didn't really like sf4. he introduced me to SRK where i found out about competitive play. i honestly didn't do much reading up on things in the beginning, i didn't know where to start and being completely honest, the friend that i had, while he was a pretty good player from what i remember (which was a long time ago and at the time i didnt know what i was doing), i didnt learn much from him and just got bopped all the time. i went to my first tournament less than a month after i bought the game, where i met KDZ and Darth Arma very briefly. it was a local in some shitty hotel about 10 minutes away from where i grew up and that was the start of it all. i was really quiet back then, didn't really know what i was getting myself into but i really liked being around the game and i really appreciated watching the better players go at it. i just practiced my combos but didnt understand how to use/deal with footsies, zoning, anti airs and nonsense for a while. it took me a really long time to get anywhere. it probably wasnt until close to the time AE came out where i actually learned how to use these things, but not really how to deal with things. i also settled on a character (seth) and a playstyle (i always leaned towards zoning and lame play) and this is around the time i started to actually feel some progress. so fast forward to 2010, AE comes out on arcades and is in CF and i was retardedly hype. i was really excited to see yun and yang in the game because i always thought they were cool characters. however as time went on and i saw more and more AE 2010 edition, i started to really lose interest in the game (i think most people that play/played sf4 can all agree that AE 2010 edition was by far the worst). first off, it seemed like a 6 character game to me (yun, yang, cammy, akuma, fei and viper). on top of that, its the only time i can really remember SF4 players saying that a character has no bad matchups (as in yun, im pretty sure people said that about yang but i honestly cant remember but he was also talked about a lot) on top of that, my character was completely changed and the way i played him didn't exist anymore. i was finally getting somewhere and everything i have learned and built my playstyle upon with my character i chose was thrown out the window. during this whole SF4 time, i didn't really meet many people. i just really liked fighting games and i always thought it was exciting to be aorund them.

So at this point in my fighting game career, i start to look at other games that arent SF4. the first game i decided to try out was arcana heart 3. looking back im not entirely sure why i settled on that, but i think homingcancel.com was the first community site that i found outside of SRK if you can believe it. i think it was from arturo posting about it. i imported it from playasia and it took fucking forever to get here. i was really bad at anime, didn't really understand anime mechanics at the time but i mashed in it and had a lot of fun. through this game i met players like Achtzhen and Danny Schme who were always real cool dudes. Achtzhen happened to live relatively close to me so we would always push buttons in anime. games i generally don't play or have heard of. he would always come to my place with some poverty ass shit and bop the shit out of me. he would try to teach me how to play but honestly it all went over my head.

AH3 never caught on however so i wasnt really in there for very long. i think after ECT3 i stopped playing (oddly i really want to pick it up again and play it when i go to majors, game is actually really fun!) and didn't really play anything seriously. i would still play SF4 but i always thought that SSF4 was much better than AE (i actually think SSF4 is the only good version, lets see how ultra is but im not really interested). i remember getting vanilla marvel 3 5 days before street date and went in on that. i really liked it for the first few weeks but then people found the real cheap shit and i wasn't really about it. i was still actively going to tournaments, playing SF4 (i believe i was playing sakura at this time) and still not really knowing many people. AE2012 got announced and i was actually petty hype. however, for whatever reason i ended up picking up UMVC3 and liking it a lot more than vanilla marvel 3, probably because by this time i was able to land combos consistently and i could xfactor wesker people to death. AE2012 came out and i dabbled in that for a bit. anyways, in between all this time i started attending rutgers where i found the UGS club (underground gaming society) which at the time was mostly focused on competitive play (now its all casual bullshit and i dont even go). here i met the rutgers heads such as Rokunaya, Colpevole and Grover (those are the ones who have done well). Rokunaya was a melty blood guy and he always wanted to show off the game to everyone there. he knew me from homingcancel and he actually hit me up there and told me about the club. also, because Roku existed, pretty much everyone who played fighting games at rutgers played melty blood. i still didnt have a game that i really considered to be my main game, just mashed in games and potmonstered tournaments. at this point i started to really understand how to get better at games after playing with those guys a lot (mainly Colpevole, Grover, Paul, Greg).

So coming into my second semester im just chillin in my room one night and im like, hey fuck it im going to preorder sc5. i figured i might as well try it. sc1 and sc2 were 2 of my favorite games as a little kid and i figured if i didnt like the fighting, sc has historically had great single player. turns out i get the game, the single player experience is mad bullshit, but i remembered all the fighting styles from back when i was younger and i was in there. i guess since i still had pretty shitty 2d fundamentals, i didnt find it that hard to pick up 3d games. there was one other sc player in the UGS club (randy) who played NM but i never really got the chance to play him much. i was really the only one that picked it up as their main focus. i went to one of the early break tournaments for sc5 where i played aeon and my first round i played Bibulus, but didnt actually formally meet him. it was week 1 or 2 and i was still just figuring things out. i wasnt used to a block button, 3d movement, air control or teching in 3d. i ended up going to the break a second time about a month later but for some reason they didnt ahve a tournament. i remember being kinda upset about this one because i was practicing pat a lot for it. the next week sc5 was dropped from the break. it wasn't until after school was out that locals started happening again at local battles. this is where i met Ramon, Jaxel, Bibulus, Royal Lance and JJJ. my first local battles tournament i ended up getting 4th, losing to Ramon (for some reason he was playing Ezio) and Bibulus's Algol (who was a character i never played against before). next i went to ECT4 where i met ZeroEffect and OmegaXCN (dont know if i really met anyone else there, i was mostly chilling with LI peoples) were I probably had my best showing up to that point. i lost first round in a mirror match (i dont think ive ever won a mirror match in tournament in any game, i just suck at them) and then i lost to a raphael player. I also met YoungFox there, who made top 4 with raph, but to my knowledge that was the only tournament he was really able to go to. so time goes on, i hit up a jaxeldome where i met Thermidor and Dreamkiller. it was also the last one for whatever reason so i guess i killed the jdome lol.

after that, no locals for sc5 really existed anymore. so i had to wait till NEC to get my next tournament in for sc5. in between this time i dabbled in ttt2 for a few months but didn't really get too into it because i just liked sc5 more. i started to become a regular at the break with that game and i met players like BrianH and the RealLaw. I had fun playing tekken but honestly i found that it was the only game where i would always rage really hard when i lost. so NEC rolls around and this is the tournament where i really decided that i absolutely love this community. ive said this a few times but this is the first time i can remember being part of the FGC where it didn't feel like a bunch of cliquey top player worship and like an actual community. here i met most of you guys, Jimbo, IRM, Sandman, Xeph, Chicago, Partisan, Reptile, GO, Sporko, RTD, Malice and a bunch of other people i cant remember. it was also probably my strongest showing overall in sc5. first round i had to play the raphael player who beat me at ECT and i ended up 3-0ing him in pretty sure. i also remember playing black mamba in winners and almost beating his pyrrha which got me mad hype for whatever reason. i just thought it was awesome that i was able to keep up with an established name. leaving NEC i realized i wanted to somehow give back to the community. some people say i ended up doing so, im not sure, you guys can say so for yourselves.

after this apex happened, which was at my school. here i housed a bunch of people at my apartment and met Woahhzz. small turnout for this one but it was a hell of a lot of fun. i had an awesome time streaming in my room and i also felt like it had a great pool of talent regardless of the number of players.

next tournament was winter brawl and this is when i started doing the hot dog thing. here i met kAb and harry (mad props for coming out from Washington by yourself), most of the Avylon guys, Jazz, as well as a shit ton of other random people who just wanted to talk to me cuz i was the hot dog. this was one of my favorite events because i thought it was fucking hilarious how everyone wanted IRM to lose and he made winners finals and everyone was like wuuuuut. and we saw the original maxi pop off when he made winners finals there (only to be followed up by the legendary TFC pop off). and this is when i randomly got random FGC hollywood status just by doing something incredibly stupid, but for some reason they all know i play soul calibur so im all about it.

final round was my next event and it was the first time i ever really did any significant traveling for a tournament. also it was the only time i went 0-2 in sc5 while actively playing it other than that one time i showed up at the break. here i met Heaton, SomethingUnique, mkl, ringout, coolc, zoom, partywolf, jansaur, whatever Chicago people werent at NEC, psychochronic and a whole bunch of random people from the south that also were about the hot dog. this was by far the most fun ive ever had at a tournament. i went 0-2 in every game but gave no fucks and just had an awesome time (i also come to realize that i tend to scrub it out when im not int he north east).

after final round i started dabbling with injustice and i became a regular at the break again. i had that one time where i made winners finals using nothing but deathstroke guns and that was absolutely legendary how bad i scrubbed it out at the end.

after that ECT happened. here i met MastaCJ, Kvasir, Jailhouse, DragonGod and MikeMetroid. This was the first major where i didn't focus on calibur, but i was trying to get do the best i could in injustice while it was still new. i actually did pretty damn good against REO i remember. unfortunately, that was the only major i played in where i feel like Deathstroke was a top tier character. calibur i didn't really focus on too much but that had probably one of the most hilarious calibur tournaments ever. ZeroEffect as JJJ, sporko coming too late to register and then later finding out that someone signed him up before he got there and he was already drunk, the glorious losers finals picture that had me, jim, IRM, OmegaXCN and lordsavior in, ninjaguy asking me how to beat sporko and actually beating sporko and plenty of other nonsense. also, this was the first time the nitti room got shut down. apparently when i was getting food or watching injustice or something like 25 calibur players ended up in my room.

after that summer jam came around and that was my first time coming in with avylon. i was really grinding up injustice but i played like shit all weekend so nothing really came out of it. i remember losing to maxout in the losers side in injustice and raging mega hard hahaha. at this tournament i pretty much knew everyone there. also i decided to enter AH3 for nostalgia sake, didnt remember how to play it at all but landed one of my old setups once and i got hype lol. i also entered chaos code which ended up getting stupid amounts of money in bonuses for a 2 dollar entry game. i ended up getting second having never played the game before.

at TFC, this is when i really started doing shit for avylon. i didnt really prepare for this one, i just wanted to be there for the sake of being there. before this one i was playing mad Dota2 and was taking a break from fighting games. i thoguht i was lost forever but after leaving i barely played. all it took was for me to go to an fgc event for me to be like "okay i want to play fighting games again". here i met a lot of injustice players, honestly i cant even list them all because it was ridiculous how many i met. this tournament also had the most hype 10 AM finals ever. shoutouts to being louder than smash while having like half the people there.


HOLY SHIT THAT WAS FUCKING LONG
 
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