patrick miller writes about videogames

Played in a small (~14 people) Marvel tournament in Fremont today and spent most of my time getting beat down by Windzero’s Frank/MODOK/Haggar team in casuals. It’s pretty nasty. I won’t go into details right now, but that MODOK shield assist makes point Frank real dangerous.

Won the first two matches or so, lost to Windzero 3-0 in winner’s (almost took a game or two but dropped some rather important combos), played one of the guys I had beaten earlier and won, then blew a 2-0 lead against the other guy I sent to losers to finish 4th. 4th place gets me a Rock Band patch and keychain, or something. Hurray.

Great experience, though. It’s the first time I’ve been able to sit down and play a protracted set of casuals before a tournament, so by the time things started up (about 3 hours after i got there) I felt nice and relaxed. Between yesterday’s tournament and today’s tournament, I’ve really come to appreciate a few things about tournament playing that I’ve never thought about before:

• Developing a “new player routine” as a kind of psychological test to learn more about the kind of player you’re going up against if you’ve never played them before (Doom missiles is really good for this)
• Developing several different patterns and levels of aggression for each of your characters (the guy who got 2nd played a lot of runaway Doom, which was infuriating, and when I played him in casuals I got a bit overeager and made some mistakes)
• Learning how to pay attention to every single UI indicator the game gives you (greyed out assists, for example)—particularly handy when you’re not wearing headphones
• Why Wolverine has more tournament success than Zero even though Zero is almost always considered the better character (AKA why I want to learn Wolverine and copy PR Rog’s Wolverine/Doom/Vergil team)
• How to make on-the-fly adjustments after getting owned by new tech 

I stopped competing seriously pretty much once I started college, since I wanted to focus on school stuff (and I didn’t have a car, so I couldn’t find any regular tournaments anyway). Then, it seemed like kind of a waste of money and time — I could have more fun playing more games per hour at a console session with my buddies, and spend less money besides. But with UMVC3, I’ve pretty much only played the game at console sessions with my buddies, which means I’ve developed a pretty good understanding of how my team and tech is supposed to work, but I need to expose it to lots of other people to make it better. So I’m really glad that I’ve been making it out to other sessions with new people thus far, and I hope I’ll be able to continue that up until Evo at least. Putting myself out there and playing more (and keeping this blog) has really made it easier for me to figure out how I can step my game up further, and kept me motivated besides.