If both players are spamming the fireball button, Guile wins. They often do.
Gripped by a madness most peculiar, I awoke a few days ago with the irrepressible urge to purchase a 3DS and a yet another variant of Street Fighter 4. Continuing from their ‘simple’ controls scheme options in Marvel vs Capcom 3, SSF4 3D defaults to simpler controls, to compensate for the difficulty of pulling off moves on the 3DS’s tiny Dpad and Analog Nub.
The ‘lite’ controls allow you to bind any move in your arsenal to any button on the 3DS, as well as to one of four touch screen buttons. So players who used to have trouble pulling off a quarter circle forward consistently, can simply map Hadouken to the right trigger. This is important because it allows these players to pull off any move without taking the time to do the directional command, essentially giving professional level speeds and execution to amateur players.
Moves with high priority, such as Ryu’s Shoryuken have become to mainstay of a lot of lower level players. Normally once players have reached the level whereby they can effortless pull off an extremely fast dragon punch, they have also been playing for long enough such that they know when to and when not to use it. This is not the case at the lowest levels. I have won a fair number of matches simply by blocking whenever my opponent gets near me and then punishing whichever move they throw out without fail.
While fireball stalemates are still common, the "Dynamic View" has some more interesting balance changes due to the difficulty in perceiving the distance between you and your opponent.
Other matches devolve into fireball wars, thrown out with inhuman timing as both players hit the Hadouken button as fast as possible. These fireballs are being thrown out literally as fast the game will allow, so they always meet and cancel in the exact same spot between the players. No one gains a slow advantage, they stay locked in total equilibrium. A common tactic is for a player to rush in and get the first hit to put him at a life lead, then back off and start throwing out the fastest fireballs he has. His opponent can either start hitting the fireball button himself and stop the game from progressing, or attempt to close the distance. The problem is that at this skill level, trying to navigate the fireball field will do more harm than good for most players.
The logical counter, which is to throw out an EX version of a fireball, is very rarely used in my experience. I don’t know for sure whether this is because people simply don’t know about EX moves, or whether they’ve bound so many buttons that they can no longer use them. This strategy I’ve seen most with Guile and Seth, due to the speed of their Sonic Booms. Sometimes players even set up their own custom matches that only last 30 seconds, to make their time killing strategy easier to pull off.
Reports of characters without fireballs online have been greatly overstated.
Playing with a friend over ten matches, a curious rock paper scissors emerged. It was a Ryu mirror match and he bound DP to the right trigger. He’s smart enough not to simply hit that button constantly, however I couldn’t get around his ability to get up close and throw those into my face. I couldn’t match his DP spam since I didn’t have it bound to anything and can’t even pull it off consistently, let alone at the lightning speed that he could without having to input a command. So I switched to Bison, who I don’t think he’d ever fought before and started spamming his moves, which I didn’t know the commands to but could simply bash on the touch screen for. This worked pretty well, as he didn’t know what to do with Bison. Eventually he took his game more slowly and started blocking my moves so I had to find something new.
This illustrates the fundamental trinity of low level SSF4 3d.
- Both players race to find the best move to spam, which their opponent is unable to deal with.
- The other player can then try to find a new strategy their opponent doesn’t know how to deal with. Surprise.
- Or they can figure out how to counter the spam and get better as a player.
However, as most random matches last only a game or two, the last option is fairly unusual and it becomes an arms race to find either the last word in simple to use spam or an unconventional strategy, against which the opponent doesn’t know when to use their spam.
Radiant Agenda 