Cross-ups, meaty attacks and two in ones, oh my!

I spent a lot of time in the arcades as a kid. There were these Sunday sessions where you’d pay a whopping $12 and got about 4 hours of free play on all the machines in the building. It was an institution for myself, my brother and friends. I toyed with the fancy light gun games of the time but I spent a large majority of my time on the most crowded machine. Street Fighter 2.

Fifteen or so years later and I’ve got Street Fighter IV to chew on. I went into it saying to myself “hey, you know SF, you’re not bad at it at all. Those hours in the arcades and the weekends of hiring Super Nintendos just to play it have given you a pretty damn good idea of what you’re doing”.  Turns out I was so so wrong.

After watching this video, I discovered there’s a whole other level to SF that I’ve missed completely. Apparently most of this stuff is somewhat applicable to SFIV as well. Cross ups, meaty attacks, two in ones, reversals; all in the list of this secretive underlying level of play that I was oblivious to. I understand now what defines a “good” player more so than I did before.

So diving back into SFIV, demoralised and downtrodden over my discovery of this new higher level of ability, I expected to get my rear end handed to me on many occassions and I did. Even though I play Ryu a lot and you spend 90% of your time holding the opponent at bay, but I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent with my neck bent at an odd angle, spread eagle with a large Russian wrestler’s sweaty mits wrapped around my midsection.

Seems practice might be the only way I’m going to get there, but for the moment online play is just a wash for this aged warrior. Any tips?