Hello!
Welcome to SinisterSticks.com
My Most Famous Victim of my Ambidextrous Joystick.
This sounds like a good sales pitch for an ambidextrous joystick, but what makes it a killer sell is the identity of that cocky friend. That friend is a childhood friend, who later turned out to be a famous gamer. I was his best man at his recent wedding. He is Jamal "Zophar321" Nickens.
1) He got better since then, (so good that he was the all-around Original Xbox champ, as determined by the reality game show, Life to the Power of X, and later parlayed that into an appearance on WCG Ultimate Gamer Season 1 where he got third out of 12, and I'd like to spread this about him: He did Basic Cable TV's first televised teabagging. (It was against Dante.) And WCG didn't want a teabagger being their champion.
First, on the next episode, Lisa Leslie gave Jamal last place. Luckily he played an NBA video game to a first place tie, where combined he was middle of the pack. Then in the gauntlet, they eliminated 2 people when Jamal was second to last.
I can't prove it, but they got their just deserts. It took a corporate takeover of WCG's assets for him to get paid his thousand dollars on a temptation dare, which means WCG is now out of business. If my theory was correct, couldn't have happened to a nicer company. Even if I did prove it correct, which is a stretch to prove correct, they are corporately dead. So I just add it as urban legend which happen to fit the facts. If they did it, they got away scot free. .)
2) I got a lot worse, thanks to mental/emotional problems like autism, and the side (possibly chief) effects of the medication slow down my reflexes. (Yes, I admit it.) but have gotten better reflex-wise since I drank a high energy zero calorie drink called Pepsi Max.
3) But most importantly the game has changed. So much so that the fighting game is fundamentally designed differently.
In the Genesis days, if you could pull out super moves 100% of the time when you willed them, and can surprise opponents, then you are a Street Fighter II New Challengers master. And if you do that without thinking to yourself the physical movements, meaning if they are like second nature, then you can use more of your brain power to focus on the screen, strategize based on position health bars and time, and most importantly react to the screen, among all the other little things, successfully blocking based on reflex. Everything could be done on these newer games, except one OPTHER very important thing's changed: Ping time.
TV ping time on a consumer level gaming monitor like the Playstation 3D monitor was good at the time, but measures 33 ms, so you're behind 2 frames. Even if I were to buy a Pro 3D monitor, the ping time is 11 ms, or slightly less than one 60 fps frame. CRT TV are UNDER 1 MICROSECOND. Two major things are effected by this ping time, combo timing and defensive reactions. Defense on these newer games are either guesswork or you predicting your opponent going to the well one too many times, whereas on the Genesis, you can react to an opponent in real time, and if you see the first frame, you can 100% block if you knew all opponent animaitons. Also combo timing on the Genesis was fluid and can be played by feel and you could realistically come up with a 4 hit combo without researching it. Now, not only are combos engineered, they can't be felt through. They tell you the combos, and expect you to practice it. And their tutorial sucks where the timing of button presses are not evident, and on a CRT TV, you could more instinctively tell when the next stage of the combo was coming by watching or listening, but with modern monitors, you have to lead it. So it's a pre-meditated combo.
But even today, it'd be a lot fairer match
I admit fighting games have changed from a game of reaction to a game of Machivellian chess. You have to dedicate yourself to combos, memorization, practice. You couldn't do a Jamal and be in the top 10% of all modern fight games by feeling alone. I don't know Jamal's practice schedule. He competes occasionally, but now focuses on his wife, son, job, occasional friend visits, and Twitch Stream once a week of usually playing Genesis games and eventually planning to own the whole collection. , but he hasn't announced his victories. Besides, Jamal's strength is not competing in one game 8 hours a day for weeks on end. His style is to be a Jack of All Games. As he said on TV, "You may beat me in one game that you choose, but bring 3 or 4 more games, and I'll whoop you."
But he'll be more familiar with more of the modern fighters. I'm kind of familiar, but play it by ear mostly. He'll have more proactive tactics, and he has beaten me when I didn't have my right handed fight stick. Head to head, both locally and online, he won 2 out of 3 over 10+ matches when I had my right-handed stick on Street Fighter 4.
But even if we were to play locally Street Fighter II New Challengers for the Genesis on a real CRT TV, It'd be probably closer to even because he knows it's the right tool for the right job. Trust me, he would not bring a pad to a stick fight. If I had my right handed stick, and Jamal was stuck on a 6-button pad, he'd lose. But he'd probably have a 6-Button Genesis stick to help him even the odds. It'd be a fair competition. 8 years ago, he would have won. But Pepsi Max gives me a competitive boost.
Jamal criticized my ShoRyuKen.com post when I said a right handed Joystick by me or ANY of my friends beat him on his pad is an insult, and he denied that happened. Then he told me he didn't want to be shown up. I told him, I was just trying to show a moment in time, where a joystick being a performance enhancement was not even a consideration. I gave him a perfect excuse for that day. That day, the right tool could be used for the right job, and right handed fighting is more natural for Street Fighter 2, IF YOU HAVEN'T DEVELOPED EXPERT SKILL with a left-handed stick. If you were a newbie, you may consider a right handed joystick. Jamal probably didn't care enough to order a custom right handed joystick, or didn't think right-handed helped him so much that he had to play right-handed. I was a pioneer with my custom SNES/Genesis ambidextrous stick. Then again his first 2 systems were the Colecovision and the Vectrex, and the Vectrex was Left-handed. Back to Joystick Main.
