sleepmode

fighting game knowledge seeker

aka orin | salaryman gamer | fgc jack of all trades | mvc/ggxx/vf | marxist


i played in an x-men vs street fighter tournament tonight! this isn’t the first time i’ve played the game in a more informed setting, but it helped remind me of a few things about it

most fg players who know anything about xvsf probably know that it’s the “old marvel game where everyone has an infinite”. and like, yeah, the game only has a handful more restrictions on combos than its predecessor, x-men children of the atom, but still manages to give everyone some kind of infinite combo. so you’d think that these combos would centralise the meta -- first hit wins, right?

no. this game has infinites, but the game actively fights you in your attempts to do them (or much of anything else, for that matter), likely due to a whole range of factors from an unforgiving input buffer to cps2-era frame skipping to the game just fucking making shit up sometimes and causing your combo to drop

this game isn’t about infinites. it’s about turtling, whiffing super jump normals to build meter, and then spending that meter on the slew of supers that hit 0F after flash. if meter is on the table, it’s probably a bad idea to commit to much of anything

this makes the game a hell of a lot more approachable than it sounds on first blush (and most of the infinites aren’t that hard anyway), so you can pick it up in an afternoon and find something that works pretty good

but i think i stopped playing it because it feels like ass. my ass is going back to cota LOL


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in reply to @sleepmode's post:

I am the guilty party that this post is about. I am wildly turned off by MvC2/3 and games that are adjacent to it in terms of combo length/philosophy/mechanics, and XvSF is one of those games that suffers from the fact that the only content that's easy to find on it is combo videos, frequently the source of most of my misled preconceptions on games and the way they are actually played.

I mean, you certainly can't be blamed for that -- the combos are the first thing about the game people gravitated towards, and because it didn't address a whole lot of the excesses of the combo system from COTA, it became a huge part of the game's identity, despite the fact that it also makes the game a massive turtle fest alongside the huge number of 0F supers because no one wants to commit to anything. I think you wouldn't like this version of the game either but y'know