God, I miss Dark Resurrection. Tekken 7's a good game, but it's a bad Tekken.

I ventured into ranked for the first time earlier and it's left a bit of a sour taste. The netcode's pretty impressive, though, with only one of my eight matches screwing me over heavily. No, the problem lies with comeback mechanics, and as I've been saying for years like a stuck record, pros will always make Supers look less offensive than they are through their knowledge of each other.

I think I need a post-it for my monitor saying OKI DOES NOT EXIST IN THIS RAGE MODE, DOES IT. No, sensei! Lee's a mild sleeper in a FT3 offline setting for my money, but online I reckon he's near the bottom (proviso: unless he gets those juggles to wallsplats). Because as soon as my random opponents have their Rage Arts, I can't use any frametraps or oki. Against randoms no-one can — you have to assume they'll always mash, and that really hurts Lee because he has decent oki.

I lost two rounds (and the match) to a Bob for frametrapping as he mashed RA. Other than a well-timed parry, your only other option's to block Lee's HMS+1,4 and return to neutral at a safe distance. My better opponents were ready to low-crush me for refusing to walk into their fresh RAs with highs and mids, so all I could do was backdash to have a good look at them unless they landed at my feet from knockdowns.

I've digested it now and I'll be stronger as a result, but I hate that RAs shut down so much of everyone's game. The first half of the round's almost always the most fun, and easily the fairest (I lost two of my eight to Rage damage, having nice leads prior). I'd need to play a lot more, but the ranks didn't seem to reflect their players as much as the T6 days, so I get the feeling that comeback mechanics have compressed them. A couple of those I played were trying new characters, so I'm sure they were better than they seemed.

The worst was a Gigas with CZ after his name, who absolutely hammered me with a laggy spammed jab. Every time I tried to interrupt I got crushed by it, and he kept using a low at random intervals and then mixing his oki between a wake-up punish and a hits-grounded. The lag was enough to keep me from punishing his jabs with WS moves. Horrendous. He had a high rank and I could tell he was feeling himself, but he wouldn't rematch me! I wanted another shot to KBD and play it long, instead of eating his spam for trying Acid Rain and WSes.

It rubbed me up the wrong way that he was clearly flowcharting me with the help of a bad connection, with a ten-plus winstreak. Given my utter lack of Gigas knowledge, he was probably good enough to beat me without scumming it up. Those guys are the worst. I mean, he blocked my buffered slide with anticipation at one point, so he was clearly on the ball.

Right now, it feels to me that the high-damage characters are best-suited to online. Gigas and Kazuya gave me serious trouble and beat me, and I just scraped by a Heihachi. Whereas I had few problems against Katarina, Law and Hwoarang (although Hwo has some serious damage in the right hands). But like I say, I haven't a clue about Gigs yet. Kaz won his match when my RA didn't quite reach his nearest hurtbox; it was the right call because he'd pressed a button, but he'd been smart enough to ensure a safe range.

None of these feckers rematch, though, do they?! I'd love a FT3 mode without the comebacks; reckon I'd get back into the top 300 with that. I'm almost as good as I was ten years ago, it's the game that's changed, and I've struggled to evolve with it since Rage was invented.

Sadly, unlike 3rd Strike, hardly anyone appreciates Dark Res' purity any more. It really was and remains the best. I hope Soulcalibur VI isn't ruined with egregious, semi-braindead comebacks, but it seems to be heading that way. Maybe I'll get into Hyper Fighting over the summer...

I'll say one thing about T7: I haven't run into the same character twice yet.

Increased my win ratio from 62 to 77 tonight, but my nerves are a bit shot now. I'm still making hard work of matches I should win comfortably through a lack of patience. Improving, though.

I wish I could use Baek, because I think he'd tear through the lower ranks online.

Future strim schedule is either going to be sporadic, but will try to sort out a consistent day at least.

Or it will be regular because I will give up and just become a total shut-in.

Nothing bad mang, I'm just sort of stuck between worlds at the moment. 

I played less and less games lately but got more and more real life stuff done but at the same time sometimes I just wake up and I'm like 'What am I doing this for again?' 

So all I'm saying is that the strim will be back, but it's going to either be less often than before because if I was brutally honest I think games are just a convenient way for me to put off doing things or maybe this is all temporary and I just go back to playing more games and the stream comes back like it was last year or whenever I was doing like 4 nights a week or some shit. I dunno which yet is all I'm saying.

I am so ready to give up a chunk of my leisure time to a fightman again. Alas, the world is only bringing me shite.

I mean, if they took out the Rage nonsense and remembered what made Dark Res so rewarding, it wouldn't be a bad game at all.

I checked in with the Lee players on 'Zaibatsu and they're a bit Sudoku, Rouj. Main complaint's that his unique abilities aren't special any more, so you might as well use someone else who does the rest better.

I've bought a Crown 309 from Help Me, by the way. He uses a slightly firmer switch for the up direction. The downside to my Suzo is that it's bad for circular movements (deep diagonals), and I'd like to be able to play other games.

I tried Hyper Fighting recently and it's night-and-day in comparison to the modern versions. I struggled to react to jump-ins with Rog's cr.HP and had to use his st.MP a lot more.

I've literally (real literally) spent the last hour watching 3s vids from the early 00s. Kuroda Vs RX yo. Hype before Hype was a thing.

I'm trying to understand why the animefighter format is so well represented at all industrial tiers tbh. I can only assume it's an animation pipeline thing, whereby you can get away with a convincing piece of work for just a bunch of big keyframes and a lot of shit happening to mask the cracks.

Well...

Well up for SC6. Zasalamel has been a backup choice for me, never mained him but like his style.

Always happy to see Ivy of course. Nerd boners!

Hoping they announce another new character next, preferably some ducked up demon cut with a giant soul cock or something, not another who kid.

Oooooh. Lots of games there I've been curious about. I know some are a bit guff but at that price...

Wow... So the myth about KoF in Mexico?

Totally legit.

They actually still have an arcade scene.

What's more, apparently, they have public square viewings for new DBZ episodes sanctioned by the local authorities...

Didn't catch the event. This vid is amazeballs.
Hope this is a sign of things to come.

Straight garbage character design and presentation. Oh well!