Don’t be a Scrub Podcast Episode 27: SS2k13 special- Clockw0rk

Hi guys,  Spider Muttons Productions © 2010 is back with our Shadowloo Showdown 2013 special. Our guest this episode is one of the most biggest names in Marvel and my personal Doom idol- Broken Tier’s Daniel Maniago aka Clockwork!

Clockw0rk is famous in the community for playing his Doom Strider team in MVC2 for more than ten years, the man is basically synonymous with the character Strider at this point! He’s been a big fan favourite in SoCal for a long time now with his exciting, improvisational style and for just being a cool dude in general.

They say that you should never meet your heroes, but Clock didn’t disappoint me at all- turning out to be a super chill, upfront dude. You could see how much he loves thinking about Marvel, theory fighter and optimisation in the earnest way he talks about the game, and well- I’m definitely glad I finally got to meet the guy.

It was a good year for Shadowloo Showdown, we got to see Abegen’s She-Hulk tear it up in the Marvel top 8, and see one of Australia’s favourite players take the SFIV crown- the Murdaface Tokido.

We grab Clock to talk about: his experience in Australia and at Shadowloo Showdown, a ton of Marvel and Strider theory fighter, working in the game industry, his MVC2 history, famous moneymatches, and a whole lot more.

You can find Clock at https://twitter.com/mvcClockw0rk or his Broken Tier profile.

Big thanks to Tom aka NefeliousG for some in-depth MVC2 questions, Chad from Dusty Cartridge and Sol for their photos, Bosslogic for another sweet banner, and the Shadowloo crew for letting us use the studio at Shadowlogic for this interview and of course, for another great Shadowloo Showdown! (Be sure to check out Ali’s excellent SS2k13 recap or the SS2k13 stream archives.)

As always, you guys can click on the link below to listen to the podcast, or read the full text transcript if you choose. Hope you guys enjoy the interview! (And the Broken Tier Danger Room stream that should be live now.)

Don’t be a Scrub Podcast Episode 27: SS2k13 special- Clockw0rk

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Don’t be a Scrub Podcast Episode 27: Clockw0rk

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Question index (click to jump to section):

1- How did you get the name Clockw0rk?
2- Do you think you have ten more years of Strider Doom in you?
3- So last night I was having this conversation with you and you were talking about how you had an epiphany with Strider right? You wanted to optimise Strider’s ground game. Did you have a similar sort of thing in MVC2?
4- It really sounds like you’re trying to replicate the lockdown that you had in Marvel 2…the other thing that you told me that you got out of this tournament is watching RF’s Vergil right? And how he would use hidden missiles and how he has a different style of Vergil to American Vergil.
5- UMVC3 patch?
6- Many Street Fighter players say that Marvel 3 is a random-ass game. What do you say to them?
7- Who would you say are the three toughest guys you’ve faced in your long career? You’ve always said that Combofiend was your demon, but now that he’s Capcomfiend do you think you’ll ever get the chance to slay that demon?
8- Tom aka NefeliousG from Queensland asks: There was a general consensus that Strider Doom was theoretically above the top 4 in Marvel 2 but just held back by human execution needed to pull off the perfect lockdown. Do you agree with this or?
9- In EVO 2010 you had one of your best performances at a major for Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Do you feel that you could have taken the tournament or were Justin and Sanford still untouchable?
10- Marvel 2 was Queensland’s game and Tom again asks: They all learned how to pushblock Hyper Sentinel Force from MVC2: Advanced Tactics Volume 1. So they’re asking…when is the sequel due?
11- How did it feel to lose to Honzo Gonzo at Aftershock?
12- For a washed-up veteran you seem to be doing pretty well. Can you tell us your side of the Dark Prince saga?
13- You mentioned the moneymatch against Neo. Quite a number of people consider that to be one of the farewell moneymatches of Marvel 2. Would you consider running it back- in MVC2 or MVC3?
14- Will the Greater Force ever return to Marvel?
15- What is the most bizarre you’ve heard about Australia before you came here and is it true?
16- What about the Australian FGC?
17- How do you stay up-to-date with the evolving ecosystem that’s Marvel 3. Do you watch international streams? Do you watch Japanese streams?
18- So which players really stood out to you in Australia?
19- Any thoughts on Shadowloo Showdown in general? That Marvel top 8, that She-Hulk man!
20- So, speaking of hot cosplayers, so you are the lockdown king right? So what is the Clockw0rk ouroboros strategy…when it comes to women?
21- Another weird question from Tom: What is harder to get in on, Duc’s Spiral Sent, or Chris G’s Morri Doom?
22- So we’ve talked about this before- something that you enjoy really much in this game is people who can articulate, you know, Marvel and the theory behind it. And one of your heroes in that aspect even though you don’t want him to know about it is Viscant, right?
23- S: So speaking of Viscant, how has being on Team Broken Tier helped you as a player?
24- Do you ever see yourself ceasing to play fighting games?
25- You’ve just talked about your Superbot stuff. But after your experience in the game industry, what else have you learned from the industry and do you see yourself returned to it?
26- Sanchez describes doing “the Clockw0rk” as raising the crowd’s hopes and dreams up to the highest level…and dashing everybody’s dreams cruelly with one bone-headed mistake. Fair statement?
27- Any shoutouts?

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Muttons: Hi guys it’s Igor and Muttons, we’re back for our Shadowloo Showdown 2013 interview, and with us we have the legendary Doom/Strider player Daniel Maniago aka CLOCKW0RK!

How are you doing today sir?

Clockw0rk: Doing all right, how about you?

M: Aw, tired as shit man heh.

C: Good shit heh. Yeah, me too.

M: Back at work, you know- back at the grind.

How’s the last few days been in Melbourne?

C: It’s been a lot of fun man. Actually specifically the last day of tournament we went out, we went out eating and drinking and it was pretty funny- your drinks are kind of really super expensive here.

So luckily everyone was just buying me drinks the whole night. I finally felt like how a beautiful woman feels like at a bar, you know?

M & Spidercarnage: (Laughs.)

C: I got to experience that! Yeah, yeah.

M: Did Cactus buy you his uh…what was his favourite drink again?

C: I think he likes scotch and coke or something like that. I think that’s the first thing he got was some scotch and coke. But yeah, people were buying me whatever the whole night. I was pretty…shit-faced by the end of it.

M: Heh nice, nice.

S: That’s what we like to hear.

C: (Laughs.) Yeah it was kind of a wild night. But I had a lot of fun the last few days.

M: Nice. Let’s get into it…

1- S: How did you get the name Clockw0rk?

C: Aw man. You know what…everyone always asks this question! And to be honest I don’t really have a good answer, there’s not really no epic story or anything really. I remember the very, very, very first time I played any kind of online game with my crap 56k connection was I went to heat.net and I signed up with Clockw0rk with like a 1 in it because I think regular clockwork was taken and…I  was on my crap 56k connection so I didn’t really play or keep on with it and I just ended up using that as my AOL screen name.

But in another dimension I am still known by my old screen name before Clockw0rk on AOL which was…

You see I have a really bad fingernail biting habit so my name was Fingernayle…

M & S: (Laughs.)

C: So luckily my name changed! Or else…yeah.

S: Or we could be calling you nail.

C: Yeah heh. Could’ve been Nail. Could’ve been Finger… FN.

S: (Laughs.)

C: But yeah, luckily I changed my name for something a little bit, a little bit less corny.

S: See I always heard the rumour that it was because you played like clockwork due to the whole Strider Doom thing.

C: Um. I think my…in Marvel 2…it doesn’t work for me as well in Marvel 3 but in Marvel 2 my style, as I saw it, was I was just super improvisation and freestyling all the time.

Because I felt really connected to my team, and that’s why I had so much fun playing my team all throughout Marvel 2 because I was just doing whatever I wanted and it was always a lot of fun for me, I was just making it up as I went along.

Because you know, Strider didn’t really have super long combos or what-not. The fun thing about Strider Doom and Ouroboros and all that is you could while you’re “trapping” them you can do whatever you want during it, you know?

It wasn’t like this set- it was less…you know like compared like Spiral Sentinel for example. You kind of always dashed in, did fierce and then call drones and threw the swords or reload the swords, dash in fierce. I mean you can change it up a little bit, but for the most part that was the lockdown. But with Strider, you pretty much could do whatever you want during it as long as- whatever the situation saw fit. So that’s why I would just make it up as I went along, because that was the best way to play Strider Doom really.

So I guess the name fits? I dunno.

2- S: Do you think you have ten more years of Strider Doom in you?

C: Uhh….Yeah! I suppose so.

I mean, I definitely don’t play as much as I used to, but I really like Marvel 3, I really enjoy playing as Strider Doom in Marvel 3, so we’ll see how it goes.

Maybe we’ll have this interview again in ten years, hopefully again in Melbourne (Mel-born-ne).

S: Melbourne (Mel-burn-ne).

C: Melbourne?

S: I love the way you guys always roll the R.

C: Yeah, yeah, sorry that’s… (Laughs).

S: No no it’s fine, it’s actually…most Americans can actually pronounce my name properly without dropping the R. Because most Australians swallow the R.

M: So….how do you say your name properly?

S: It’s Igor. (Ig-gor.)

M: So I’ve been saying it wrong all the time?

C: Igoru? Igor?

S: Yeah. There you go. See you said the R right.

C: Yeah, Igor. Okay, okay.

S: Most Australians drop the R.

C: So they say Igah?

S: Yeah, basically.

3- M: So last night I was having this conversation with you and you were talking about how you had an epiphany with Strider right? You wanted to optimise Strider’s ground game. Did you have a similar sort of thing in MVC2?

C: Yeah! Actually I think it was…either end of 2002 or early 2003, and I remember… I don’t remember what the exact event was but I do remember I had this epiphany of how to lock down 100% with Strider Doom in Marvel 2. And it had to do with shifting the screen. I myself refer to it as screen shifting. And basically if you watch some of those old videos, when necessary at the end of ouroboros I would dash forward even- dash forward because they would still be blocking…

The way molecular shield worked in Marvel 2 is that first he would summon the rocks and then he would launch the rocks. And between summoning and launching that’s when I would dash forward to shift the screen to make the orbs leave faster. And the reason why that would work is because as long as they block the first sequence of rocks and you did the dash forward they weren’t able to move through that anyway. So by shifting the screen, they would block the first sequence, then you dash forward and press like whatever buttons you needed to get to the next set of blockstun which is when rocks launch and by that time hopefully you have an animal coming along. And by the time the animal comes along you activate ouroboros and the rings take over the blockstun of the animal. And that’s pretty much how you would pretty much lockdown 100%.

I mean, I feel like a lot of Strider Doom players they knew how to activate ouroboros, get in there and call Doctor Doom, but I feel like a lot of them had a hard time keeping it going for more than two reps kind of thing. And it was basically that screen shifting thing.

I think there was a lot of really talented Strider Doom players…

M: That was when you had your “moment”.

C: Yeah, and I remember I think I messaged ShadyK on AOL or something, we used to talk a lot on AIM. AIM was the shit back in the day. And I was like “I think I know to lock down 100% now.”

And I…I feel like I peaked a few times during the Marvel 2 era. In 2003, early 2003 was one of the times…one of my peaks, I guess.

Well I guess that’s not really “peak” by definition, but I think that’s one..I should say instead of peaks my game elevated me into kind of the next level.

Speaking of which, I kind of had another half-epiphany, and this was way late in the game, like 2008, 2009. And up until that point I had never used…you guys know how Strider has the punch teleports and the kick teleports? The punch teleports are in the air and you can double jump after and block after, but the kick teleport was the original Marvel 1 teleport. You do it and you can’t really do anything.

But if you use the kick teleport when your opponent’s trying to pushblock you out- you end up right next to them, and you get sucked into them. So the blockstun is definitely extremely consistent- they can’t get out. So if you go back and watch some of the old videos, the earlier years versus the post-2008 years, I was using a lot of kick teleports just because if I feel that they’re going to pushblock me out I would use the kick teleport and I would just be right there. And also you’d end up at the edge of the screen too so it would be easier to lockdown after that, activate the second ouroboros. And that’s kind of like a very brief run-down of how my game evolved in Marvel 2.

M: In Marvel 3 now you have this ground game thing in mind, how did you come up with it, does it come to you in training mode or?

C: Err…yeah…it started with um…

When I was writing the Brady book, and I had an advance copy of the game just because you know- obviously I needed a copy of the game to write the book.

And after messing around with his moves a bit, you know he doesn’t do a lot of damage, so I figure that the best way to get the most out of his game was to have a really strong ground game.

M: Right.

C: My original hypothesis had something to do with the quarter circle forward with M, the Ame-no-Murakumo move where he does like the running move, and the satellite, because you cancel the satellite from that move or Gram.

I figured his ground game had something to do with that because that move negates pushblock. So I didn’t mess with it…I didn’t gain too much traction with that until just recently that I had an epiphany on how his…

Two things: one, there’s a hierarchy in which his special moves work. More specifically, his projectiles. I feel like his bomb, the quarter circle back with H is his best projectile. [It has] medium durability so it beats most projectiles, invincible on the way in that kind of thing. But it’s really slow to start.

M: For sure.

C: On the hand his formation whatever it’s called, formation B I wanna say. The satellite. It starts extremely quick and recovers extremely quick. So there has to be some way, some rhyme and reason to his moves, especially after…

And I had this epiphany in part of when I worked at Superbot and I was kind of like an honorary design member, I would be helping them out with the character design, that kind of thing. Mostly how it played.

And I saw how much they were putting into just basically how the characters work and what they should be able to do and that kinda thing. Each character would always start with a vision of what they were supposed to play like. And in my opinion, from a game design perspective, the character design in Ultimate Marvel 3, or Marvel 3 in general, is phenomenal, really.

Each character plays really unique, they’re all really quirky and whatnot. Imagine if someone told you to make Dante in a fighting game from the ground up, and he has all this crap that he does that spans four or five games, the Devil May Cry games. And yet look how flawlessly or seamlessly his moves work into one another in Marvel 3, it’s incredible.

I feel like fighting game players they often take that kind of thing for granted. “Oh the devs don’t know what they are doing” kind of shit. Shut the fuck up, what do you know about making a game, you know?

But at the same time, given that I figure that whoever the designer, the designers, that designed Strider, definitely had something very specific in mind when they gave…

You know, why does L Gram do this much hitstun, and why does H Gram have this much range and this much recovery, etc etc etc.

And so with the projectiles what I’ve found to have the most success, I’m trying to figure out the hierarchy of the projectiles, but right now what I’m working with is I know that it starts with…I know bomb should always be preceded by the satellite. So it should always be…use your assist or maybe if you get a moment to activate the satellite, and then satellite and then bomb. And then when the bomb is just on the screen, it makes a lot of players pause.

M: It makes them hesitate.

C: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That bomb is in a position where a lot of characters want to attack. Then where Zero wants to normal jump up and..

M: And H…

C: Yeah, and dash in, and Magneto wants to dash in at you. and that bomb is going to stop anything that’s in its way. So I feel like even just having the bomb on screen kind of makes them hesitate and that hesitation is enough for you to even get a H or M Gram out, an animal out, you know, and after the animal comes out you wanna teleport, or maybe activate another satellite, throw another bomb, or a satellite into another bomb, but it all starts with that satellite.

S: It gives you options.

C: Yeah, yeah. And I haven’t perfected it or anything like that, but that’s what I’m working with right now. And the other epiphany I had is that…I believe the best…the main thing that his ground game is going to revolve around- and I’m still kind of experimenting with this. But I believe it has something to do with hit confirming two hits, specifically LM. I’m not sure how well it works with any two hits, but LM in particular.

So the idea is that when you’re close to your opponent, you get them to sit for a moment for you to dash up for a moment and do LM. And basically if that connects you hit confirm that into a combo. And if they block it, and if you react to this fast enough, your options include…and hopefully you have a satellite ready already. But most likely you won’t. But if you have it ready already…and I haven’t messed with this…I messed with this only once in training mode, but I believe how it works is if you LM, the main thing people are gonna want to do is pushblock, you know? In Marvel, especially, when they start blocking something they always start mashing pushblock.

S: Negate it with the satellite right?

C: Yeah, or what I’m saying is if you react to the pushblock you can do M Gram and that’s going to be a frame trap. If they do anything besides block they’re gonna get hit with M Gram, that’s a wallbounce, you can combo off of it. If you wanna stay in, you do the M Ame-no-Murakumo, the running slash and you get right in their face. I believe that’s a frame trap as well. And people often don’t expect that. And if you have a satellite behind that one of the easiest ways to open people up with Strider is to do M running slash and then super delay it so you frame trap a satellite and they get hit by the satellite and you dash up and hit them. Kind of like how…you know it’s like that stupid thing where it’s like a game of chicken kind of like Juggernaut in Marvel 2 in how you do whatever that dash move is and you try to hit him and then he head crushes you kind of thing? Same kind of idea.

M: Right.

C: Or you can do…One other thing that I tested was throwing an L tiger but I think that’s not the safest thing against certain characters but it can work depending on the screen positioning since the animals depend on the screen positioning, they don’t come from Strider, they come from the back of the screen.

And incorporating that with assists and all that, I believe that’s what his ground game is going revolve around in the future when people get it down, is hit confirming LM, but then again it’s kind of a work in progress, I could be a 100% wrong. But that’s…

And another thing I noticed is that there are some situations where some of his moves won’t be a frame trap and they can just mash out or throw you, and in those situations some other moves will be a frame trap. So for example, if they don’t push block, then you can do LM into I believe L running slash which doesn’t make him run at all but that’s definitely a frame trap, I think there’s like a one or two frame gap where you basically can’t do anything but get hit or block. But again for the most part no one’s going to just…I believe 98% of the time if you dash up and LM someone they’re going to push you out.

M: For sure.

C: I believe it’s all about hit confirming either into a combo or something that frame traps them from a push block which is like a M Gram or a running slash. I’m kind of still working on that, but I believe that’s what his ground game is going revolve around. And I’m just trying to perfect that, really.

4- M: Right. It really sounds like you’re trying to replicate the lockdown that you had in Marvel 2 that…maybe you can’t do it because Ouroboros is level 3 now, but maybe you wanna try to do it in another way. And the other thing that you told me that you got out of this tournament is watching RF’s Vergil right? And how he would use hidden missiles and [how] he has a different style of Vergil to American Vergil.

C: Yeah, so for those of you who don’t know, RF aka Rugal Fantasy I believe which is what RF stands for!

M: Okay, I didn’t even know that!

C: Yeah he’s this legendary Guilty Gear player. He used to come to EVO and just body everybody. I remember seeing like a DVD, you know they used to have those DVD trailers all the time? Yeah RF was featured in those all the time. He was this like godlike Guilty Gear player but it’s interesting- he’s also a godlike fighting player in general, I believe he had the best Sagat at one point?

S: I believe he’s the only person who’s won two SBO titles in one year.

C: Oh really? It was for Street Fighter [IV] and…

S: And Guilty Gear.

C: And this guy this whole weekend was playing Marvel non-stop.

M: Yeah, yeah. No Street Fighter IV at all.

C: Yeah and he…I was watching him play, I was watching him play a little bit. And Abegen came up to me and introduced me to RF and said, yeah RF wants to run some sets with you. And I was: okay, cool. And the very first thing I noticed…

Well he uses Chris G’s team. He uses Morrigan, Vergil, Doom and he uses hidden missiles.

And the thing is that his Morrigan…his Morrigan execution is obviously really good. And RF, he is really good, but you can just tell that he doesn’t have as much experience as you know, certain players that have been playing for much longer, like there are some situations that he doesn’t recognise or some stuff that’s not optimal.

However! (Pounds fist.)

However. His Vergil is just…

I think the best way to describe his Vergil is…he is so confident with Vergil. His Vergil’s so confident. So he uses the order of Morrigan, Doom, Vergil. And if he loses Morrigan he has Doom Vergil left. And basically the very very first chance he gets he DHCs Vergil in safely with Swords. And some players, they need to…Well most players they need something to get started. Whether it be landing a hit or making you block an assist or something- all RF needs is to have a meter to get his swords started.

He won’t even have you in guaranteed hit, he won’t even have you in guaranteed blockstun, he’ll just activate swords, but it just goes to show how confident he is, and to get his game started all he needs is one meter. And he just goes crazy, he’s so suffocating with Vergil Doom. He has the roundtrip glitch down pat, and the thing is, you see a lot of other players that use Doom, including some of the best, that use Doom are…

They use Doom missiles with Vergil and they’re doing the swords and they’re throwing the roundtrip, and they’re doing the roundtrip glitch and they’re calling hidden missiles. But it seems…

He is extremely deliberate to what he’s doing.

M: Yeah, yeah, that’s it exactly.

C: Like he has very specific strings that he does to keep you locked down. And I was talking to ToXy, and he uses Magneto Doom Vergil…but he was beating ToXy like 10-0 kind of dead when we were running exhibitions even though they were using the same thing, and ToXy was just like- yeah I don’t know. He’s just one of those players that makes me not want to play the game kind of thing, like I can’t even…I don’t even know what to do, and yet he’s using the same thing, you know?

M: Same character.

S: See, that’s the thing, I was talking to ToXy during Saturday in pools and he said that basically RF’s Morrigan is more of a distraction. Because basically what he found out is he doesn’t know how to get out the roundtrip properly. And he found that when he got a hit on Morrigan, he would snap Vergil in because he knows he needs to kill RF’s Vergil.

C: Mm!

S: Because if Vergil Doom get him- he’s basically done till the end of the round.

C: Yeah! He’s just so…and he’s not even doing optimal combos or anything…it’s just…

The main thing is it reminds me of how I used to play Strider Doom.

S: Yeah, exactly.

C: Strider Doom wasn’t necessarily about chip damage. Everyone thought Strider Doom was about chip damage. Look at the chip. Look at the chip.

But really, Strider Doom was about…just like anyone else- it’s trying to open your opponent up, I’m trying to get that hit. I was so confident with Strider Doom that…yeah it reminds of that same confidence, all I needed to do was to have a meter to get started and I felt like if I got a hit during ouroboros then I won the entire match. The entire match!

That’s how confident I was.

And it feels like he’s the same way. So it’s not about the chip damage, it’s about not letting your opponent…limiting your opponents’ options, because obviously they’re blocking. And during that entire time going from situation to situation, and in anytime they misblock then you’re going to win the game. And what’s interesting about his style, it doesn’t matter how many characters you have left, it doesn’t matter how many resources you have left, if you have X-factor or not, but if he lands a hit on any of your characters he’s going to X-factor.

And why that is, what I’m guessing is that when he X-factors and kills a character with level 2 Vergil he builds so much meter. And so then he has more meter for swords. It’s so…

I played so many sets against him. To be honest, I did fairly well against him but at the same time…I couldn’t stop talking to people about his Vergil Doom. And even to…as much as I tried to communicate to him about how amazing his Vergil Doom is, I talked to Tokido with him a little bit and Tokido said that: yeah obviously his Morrigan is not up to par yet, it’s still really good. But he says his Vergil Doom is, and the word he used was- it’s very clever. Very clever, very smart. and that’s what I’m talking about, he was very deliberate on what he’s doing.

So I was trying to watch him. And even when I go home I’m going to try to watch some matches of him just to pick up and try to emulate what he’s doing. He’s convinced me to…Because I kind of switch between all three Doom assists when learning this new team but he’s kind of convinced me to try my best to stick with hidden missiles.

S: If you watch the majority of his tournament matches he actually wins with Vergil…Morrigan always gets hit, and most people kill her because they think she’s the problem.

M: Morrigan’s just there to create meter imbalance. Burn your meter trying to kill her. And then in the meantime he has so much meter and he just does his thing, you know?

C: Yeah. He has this combo, I’m not sure if other players do this, but he has some combo, some kind of ground combo into Vergil assist and then he shoots the meter stealing fireballs during it?

M: Yeah, yeah!

C: And it goes exactly with what he’s trying to do, you know?

His Morrigan’s okay, his Doom’s decent but his Vergil…And apparently he’s really proud of his Vergil too, I’m not sure if that was mistranslated, but I wouldn’t be surprised man. He has definitely one of the best, if not the strongest Vergil-Doom I’ve ever seen.

It was really inspiring to watch him play.

5- M: It’s kinda interesting that we’ve talked so much about these characters and there’s so much yet to be discovered, and yet when there was a rumour of Marvel getting patch, everybody’s like patch this, patch that…

C: People think they know so much about this game. And it’s just that old saying, and I forgot who said it, maybe [Socrates] or something like that? But he said that: the only thing I know is that I know nothing. Kind of thing? And people are convinced that they know exactly what to do, and what not to do, who’s good and who’s not good and yet…

This supposed Vergil Doom that you see everyone using, somehow RF used it in a way that I’ve not seen anyone use to that same degree. Whether you can argue with me or not, that’s how I feel. I’ve never had anyone’s Vergil Doom inspire me like that, and I see Vergil Doom all the time. It’s just all about people…

Why improve yourself as a player when there’s something wrong with the game, you know? Let’s patch it. You swear that…

As long as I see people dropping combos, you know myself included, this definitely applies to myself don’t get me wrong, as long as I see people not playing matchups correctly, as long as I see people dropping combos, as long as I see all that stuff, not playing to their best of their ability?

Don’t…don’t…I don’t wanna hear anything about a patch, right? Prove yourself as a player first and then we’ll talk.

6- S: So speaking of that, many Street Fighter players say that Marvel 3 is a random-arse game. What do you say to them?

C: (Exhales.) Um…

Not to make a bad comparison, and I’m probably not the most knowledgeable person about…poker. But poker is you know, you are dealing with cards that are dealt to you kind of thing, and yet you have…consistent poker players.

S: Professional players.

C: Yeah, professional players that you see consistently do well. And how is that? A game that just by definition should be more random than Marvel. And yet both in Marvel and in poker you have consistent top players. And one of the things that I really respect about Filipino Champ is that he takes high…he has respect for high-level Marvel and takes it very seriously, you know. To the point where he is looking very…he studies the high level game, he has a lot of respect for the high-level game and he tries his best to understand the high level game. And if you ask him he’ll say that he doesn’t think Marvel is random, you know?

And not to nitpick, but I believe that in any computer programs or anything there is no “true random”?

S: Yeah, nothing is truly random.

C: Yeah, nothing is truly random. But people get hit by things that they don’t think they’re supposed to get hit by and they’ll call it random. People will lose, they’ll call it random.

But yeah, the hitboxes are huge. But that’s not random. We know how huge the hitboxes are. You know exactly what you’re getting into, you shouldn’t be pressing buttons when you’re behind some character doing a super because it’s probably going to hit from behind as well.

If you’re getting in the back of the neck with Wesker jump S, that’s not random. You know that that hitbox is huge. And that’s just how I feel. There might some things that might surprise you, but more likely than not if something caught you by surprise, and you feel that is random, you probably shouldn’t have been doing whatever you were doing in that situation in the first place, you know?

Especially when people get hit by huge hitbox things, you probably should have been blocking instead of trying to press a button.

S: Yeah I wouldn’t call it random, I would probably just say it’s more a lack of knowledge.

C: Yeah.

S: So you mentioned back in the vanilla days of Marvel 3 that a less skilled player could random out a better player, [while] in MVC2, a more skilled player would usually win. Do you still think this is still the case for Ultimate Marvel 3?

C: Umm…Do you have me on record? Is that on record me saying that?

S: I can dig up the video if you really need me to…

C: No, no, no, I’m positive I said that. You know…

S: Something along those lines.

M: I think what you meant is that sometimes, a less skilled player…

C: Oh you know, we see that all the time, I’m not even going to lie. But you know it’s semantics, I was just probably just talking shit, but yeah there’s definitely situations where a player might not have been “as skilled” can beat a player who is more skilled. But again, I’m positive that during that interview the game had not been out even a year and people were still getting hit by random supers. I myself was extremely afraid of random supers.

And you’re seeing that as the skill gap widens it’s been two and a half years to this day, and for sure with Champ you can always count on him to be on top, you can always count on Justin to be on top. And really its always been like this in Marvel. There’s like a few gods, a few guys that are really on top. And then there’s several hundred players right under that who can beat each other in any given day.

S: And to be honest with you I think as time goes by, as we play Marvel 3 longer and longer, I think the gap will [widen] a lot more, the better players will go a lot higher…

C: Yeah, I’m positive that I said yeah players can random each other out but I didn’t mean random as in…like it should or shouldn’t happen kind of thing, but rather weaker players can take out greater players for whatever reason. Whether it be matchup knowledge or whether that person wasn’t on his game, or whatever.

S: You know what comes to mind? It was Devastation when Filipino Champ lost to…

C: The Arthur player, KinderParty (MailOrder) I believe?

S: Yeah, but see again…

M: That’s just a lack of knowledge.

S: Exactly, early days…even look at today now, from six months ago- how people deal with X-factor.

C: Yeah!

S: X-factor through blockstrings was a huge thing at one point but now it’s not so much.

C: Yeah, people are buffering in throws, they’re trying to do throws, that sort of thing.

Just to put myself on blast, I got killed at EVO…This last EVO was probably my worst EVO performance. And I made it out of my pool but it was my very very first time I ever lost in my pool before. I made it out in losers, I lost to a player using Firebrand Hulk Arthur. I’m not sure a lot people know that, it wasn’t even on stream or anything.

So people might say oh, Clock got “randomed out”. But when in fact i was just running into Hulk assist all day. And I didn’t adapt, I didn’t adjust my game, so…

You’ll say that yeah, these top players, they can get “randomed out” if it’s another one of those reasons, maybe they didn’t adapt. But then maybe they’re not top, if that happens, you know?

M: You’ve mentioned Champ a bunch so…

7- Who would you say are the three toughest guys you’ve faced in your long career?

C: Geez…

Champ is just…I’ve never played a Dormammu like his, his blocking is impeccable to the point where it feels like a lot of…

M: Doesn’t have to be Marvel 3, it can be any game that you’ve played.

C: Oh okay. But for context’s sake I’ll just stick to Marvel 3.

Champ is just…he’s so difficult to open up, his defense is just on point. To the point where I feel like I have quite a bit of Doom mixups and I feel like most of them don’t even work on him kind of thing. To be fair I haven’t played him in a long time, especially like I feel like I’ve improved quite a bit since the last time I’ve played him, but then again- so has he. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same thing. He just doesn’t take risks, his movement is so good so he doesn’t have to put himself at risk and he can get himself out of a bind if he needs to. He’s just such a solid player.

Justin is always such a suffocating player, that sort of stuff that I was talking that RF does with Vergil Doom, [Justin] pretty much does it with pretty much anyone.

He just…his offense is strong, and he fills in the gaps in his offense with his assists and then he takes over with his point character’s own offense again and it’s just nasty.

I haven’t played him too much to be honest, but I felt pretty hopeless against Chris G. His defense is just so on point you can’t air throw him. The main…for players like these guys you can’t just bullshit your way through the match, you have to be pretty clever about opening them up, you have to put in some effort. They’re not gonna…if you give them an inch they’re going to walk all over you, and if you want  to get any kind of traction against them, you’re going to really put in some work in, I feel.

M: Well on the record, you’ve always said that Combofiend was your demon. But now that he’s become Capcomfiend and sort of retired from tournaments…

C: Well yeah, Combofiend I can’t say enough about him regarding how legendary of a player he is, he’s just another inspiring player, he’s kind of busy these days, I hope to play him again some day but…

M: Yeah but now that he’s Capcomfiend do you think that you’ll never get that chance back to slay that demon, you know?

C: Ah, I mean- we’ll see. If it comes to the point we have to go down to Capcom HQ to hunt him down in front of all the executives, I’m down to do that.

M: (Laughs.) Nice. Nice, nice.

M: So this question is from Nefelious G aka Tom from Queensland who’s one of our OG Marvel players and one of our…well he provided most of the Marvel 2 questions for this interview.

C: Oh you guys collected questions and stuff?

M: Yeah, yeah.

C: Yeah from what I understand, the Queensland guys were big on Marvel 2.

M: Yeah, yeah. In fact down here in Melbourne, remember we were talking about how X-men vs. Street Fighter was…

C: Yeah, yeah!

S: Was our game.

C: That’s really strange, heh.

M: And Queensland loved Marvel 2 so…

C: Yeah I met a lot of the Queensland guys when we were out at Crown, and it was awesome talking with them about Marvel 2 and the old days and that kind of thing.

8- M: But Tom asks: there was a general consensus that Strider Doom was theoretically above the top 4 in Marvel 2 but just held back by human execution needed to pull off the perfect lockdown. Do you agree with this or?

C: Hmrrngghhhhh.

Um. I did…I looked at Marvel in terms of teams, obviously. People talk about “oh they only have four characters.” Actually in my opinion it had dozens of viable teams at high level play, we saw this time and time again you know, a lot of people doing work with Iron Man, J360, Combofiend, guys like that.

My opinion was that…the top three teams, the SS tier was probably like MSP and Thrax and Matrix and then I’d say my team Sentinel Strider Doom was probably at the bottom of the S tier of teams in that game, along with Combofiend’s team and what not. In regards to the question I think that I wouldn’t say it was above those top teams as far as perfect execution and all that, when in fact the thing about Marvel 2 is that it had like this, in lot of people’s opinion, this infinite skill cap. That why you had Sanford, Yipes and Justin. There was a ton of extremely, extremely talented Marvel players but the fact that Justin, Yipes and Sanford were head and shoulders above even the best Marvel players was ridiculous. Sentinel was as fast as you played him kind of thing, and people were some expert Sentinel players.

So I feel that with perfect execution and super duper theory fighter, Strider Doom yeah, it is one of the best, but at the same time super theory says that Sentinel…

M: Will be bloody sick too…

C: Yeah, but teams like Matrix and Thrax will eventually outlast Strider Doom. Not to say that they can’t fight him, but the fact of the matter is, Marvel 2 is one of those unique things where when you have one of those unique matchups that a few games have had: where Sentinel vs Sentinel, the better Sentinel will always win. You cannot random out another Sentinel player with Sentinel.

And given that on Sentinel Strider Doom just by virtue of you only having Doom assist to work with, Vajira’s almost useless against another Sentinel. Sentinel Commando or Sentinel Cyclops beats Sentinel Doom clean because you just didn’t have as much…

M: Right, I see what you are saying.

C: Yeah, so if you were fighting Sentinel vs Sentinel, the other guy- even if you were just as good as the other guy, just by virtue of your assist…

M: The matchup.

C: It was always a bad matchup. So it’s kind of hard to say, it’s kind of a tough question. But we’ll leave it at- Strider Sentinel Doom at its best could fight anything. I’ll say that.

M: That’s a fair answer.

9- S: In EVO 2010 you had one of [your] best performances at a major for Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Do you feel that you could have taken the tournament or were Justin and Sanford still untouchable?

C: (Sucks in air.) Umm….

(Long pause.)

To be honest, Sanford and Justin had my number dude. I’d play them, I’d run into them at multiple EVOs. I had a chance against Justin in 2002 and 2003, but ever since then I could never touch him. Not even close.

Sanford, the same thing would always happen, I would beat him the first round, we would kind of go even the second match, but he would edge me out and he would kill me in the third match. And this happened a lot of times and sure enough the same exact thing happened in 2010 you know?

I did well that tournament, and I might have had a chance to beat Sanford…but its interesting, the last three times I’ve played Sanford at EVO… I was 9th place master in Marvel 2, because I always ran into those walls you know?

And the thing was that- a lot of times I would watch some of my matches against Sanford, I wouldn’t really mess up too much. I would be playing pretty well, and it’s just…he was so fucking good. And he would just beat me to the point where I wouldn’t even be too upset. Because I did my best, that was the best I could’ve played. And he still beat me. So you can’t even be mad at that, you know?

M: Right, right.

C: So I think that tournament, even if by some chance I beat Sanford? I probably wouldn’t have beaten Justin, you know? That’s just how good these guys were.

M: That’s a pretty honest answer.

S: See I always find that really fascinating. Because there’s a couple of Dee Jay players that play in Connecticut. And they say basically the same thing about Sanford in Street Fighter IV. It doesn’t matter how well they play- he always…

It’s not that he randoms them out, it’s just that he has this type of style that you just have a very hard time beating him. Even when they’ve played their best, and they felt like they played their best, he still wins.

And I find that really fascinating.

C: Yeah! Sanford’s tough.

And I feel like he’s a very emotional player, he’s kind of like Combofiend. He does have a breaking point, as we’ve seen facing against Potter, Bill, or those guys. But at the same time, when he gets really pumped up and hitting the buttons really hard and mashing and all that, he’s fucking- he’s a monster. He’s really tough to deal with. And I’m glad that he’s still doing well to this day. He’s the King, man.

S: Yeah. The King. All hail the King.

C: I have a lot of respect for Sanford as a player, he’s huge.

M: Next question.

10- As we’ve just discussed, Marvel 2 was Queensland’s game and Tom again asks: They all learned how to pushblock Hyper Sentinel Force from MVC2: Advanced Tactics Volume 1.

C: Oohhh! Advanced tactics is a classic!

M: So they’re asking…when is the sequel due?

C: (Laughs.) Yeah it’s funny- we put Volume 1 thinking we were going to keep on with that. But actually to this day that’s the only video I’ve ever produced.

Well, I don’t wanna say that, I did a few videos here and there for G4 for the release of a new game, small combo video for xTekken, small combo video for Ultimate [Marvel], but that was kind of more projects I was doing for G4. But just for the fighting game community specifically- that’s the only video I’ve produced.

I guess there was an honorary part 2 that Magnetro put out in 2008 or 2009 or something? And he labelled it Advanced Tactics Volume 2, and there was a lot of cool stuff in it. You could probably find that video on YouTube or ask like Mike Z or Maj or Magnetro about it. But actually you know, ShadyK, he’s still producing a lot of great strategy content, he released that Vergil video a few months ago and it’s helped out a lot of Vergil players including myself, so look to Shady for that kinda footage I guess.

M: Speaking of ShadyK, didn’t he invent the double footdive Doom loops? The footdive footdive x3 in the mid-screen?

C: Yeah, yeah actually um…

M: But everyone calls it the “Clockw0rk” so how does it feel to…

C: I feel like people call it the Shady loop!

M: Oh really?

C: I mean I don’t know…

S: Not from what I’ve heard.

C: People can call whatever they want anything, maybe I’m wrong, but the way I remember it that I saw a video of someone doing…this was in Vanilla, I saw a video of someone doing like launch, superjump up, and they would… I don’t even think they did any hits, they went straight into the footdive footdive and were doing that mid-screen. And I showed Shady the video and I was like, yo this is crazy.

I remember I didn’t really make anything solid off of it, but he ended up making that into that combo and yeah…

M: Yeah, which became the bread and butter…and then everyone called it “the Clockw0rk” so it’s like history repeating itself…

C: Yeah…you know, people….

I don’t really care too much who gets credit for what, you know, but I think Shady had a large hand in…

M: In Ultimate [Marvel 3] Doom.

C: Yeah yeah. That footdive footdive loop.

S: Well that and he’s basically the Vergil master at the moment for the US as well.

C: Yeah, yeah you know, I remember back in the day we saw…when Ultimate was first started, we saw Vergil anchor on all those teams in Japan and we couldn’t really figure out why.

And I remember people would use Vergil anchor but they would activate X-factor and they would activate swords and all that. And I remember I was talking to Shady at the time and he’s like no, that’s not what you’re suppose to do. You’re suppose to just zip back and forth with Rapid Slash and combo after it with Devil Trigger and you’re not even supposed to use Swords as much as people saw and…

And I think people really picked up that. Yeah, Shady, he’s a huge innovator man.

M: Mm mm. Yeah it’s too bad he doesn’t really enter into tournaments nowadays, he’s easily top 8 in…

C: Yeah…that’s always been his thing, he doesn’t…

And you know, a lot of players too, myself include. He doesn’t always perform to as well as we know he can in tournaments, but he does well here and there. And also in the Fall Classic he made top 8…

M: That’s true. That’s true.

C: He beat a lot of heavy hitters too.

11- S: How did it feel to lose to Honzo Gonzo at Aftershock?

C: Hahah!

It felt terrible, Honzo Gonzo SUCKS!

M: (Laughs.)

C: Dude sucks…nah nah he’s good, he was playing that keepaway and I didn’t adapt to it.

Yeah we were all losing that day. Actually the team was like me, Fanatiq, Y2J, Wentinel, Combofiend…And everyone was talking about, oh you got Combofiend and Clock on the same team? NorCal’s going to get bodied, that kind of thing.

And I think me and Combofiend, we didn’t win a single game.

M: Yeah.

C: It just wasn’t our day.

With that said!

And Chris Ceglia if you’re listening, he’ll argue this with me, and any Norcal-ers will argue with me all day but…

M: (Laughs.)

C: On one hand it was 2-0 as far as sets go, but it came down to the very last round each time, you know?

Killerkai was on that team too I believe.

S: Oh no it was…

C: Oh was he not? Knives? Me, Wentinel, Y2J, Combofiend…I’m pretty sure Killerkai was on that team.

S: No it was what’s his name…why can’t I remember the name…he got second at 2012…

C: Oh Infrit? Yeah Infrit played too. Oh dude. Was Eliver not on the team?

S: Maybe Eliver was on the team.

C: It might have been a 7 on 7.

S: I think it was a 7 on 7.

C: But anyway, Honzo’s a good player- I generally have a really hard time with that defensive runaway style, to the point where one of the biggest changes I’ve made to my game recently is I run like hell now.

And that’s why I don’t even have too much problem with Captain America anymore. Because I used to hate fighting against Captain America. But I just stay at the top of the screen against that motherfucker now.

S: Yeah he can’t really do much about it up there anyway so.

C: Yeah, yeah exactly, unless he has certain kinds of assists and what not.

But…yeah Honzo’s…

People don’t know- Honzo’s a really intelligent guy, he just acts pretty stupid…

S: Oh yeah, definitely.

C: He just acts like an idiot, so. Whatever. (Laughs.)

S: I mean, the first time I actually spoke to him, it was one of the first things that I picked up, was that he was really knowledgeable and he studies the game a lot.

C: And actually he’s really mature, is my big thing [with him]. I find whenever there’s like big controversies in the fighting game community he speaks his mind.

S: And I think he’s only 19.

C: Yeah he’s really young. He doesn’t know shit about life.

S: ….Child. Ha ha.

C: But it wasn’t so much losing to Honzo as it was just losing in general. You know it’s always a disappointment losing. I didn’t do as well as I expected to. But I mean, it wasn’t the first one we’ve lost.

M: Well to flip it and finally talk about one of your victories….

C: (Laughs.)

Oh you had to search long and far for one of those?!?! Hahahaha.

12- S: For a washed-up veteran you seem to be doing pretty well. Can you tell us your side of the Dark Prince saga?

C: Oh man…

S: We’re digging up history here!

C: (Looks sheepish) Ummm…haha!

S: I’ve seen the YouTube videos, I’ve spoken to Mike Ross, I’ve spoken to a number of people…

C: (Giggles.)

S: …But I’ve never actually heard your side of it.

M: Yeah we wanna know your side. Because you just showed up and played, that’s all we saw, you know?

C: Yeah…let’s see.

I think that was like 2006 or 2007 or something like that. I had a lull in fighting games as far as me being very active…I wasn’t as active as I once was.

I started being more active around winter time of 2000 whatever that year was and they started having these tournaments at the university of Cal Poly Pomona which was actually the same place they held EVO 2k3, 2k4. And I was just trying to get back into the game kind of thing.

And this guy beat me, and he was getting all loud. And I was like, oh wow. This guy really wants to, he’s really feeling himself, you know?

And I got home…I lost, I got home and…

Was AIM, AOL instant messager really big here in Australia? It was mostly MSN right?

S: Uh we used ICQ and MSN.

C: ICQ, okay. So AIM…

S: AIM was never a big thing here.

C: I’d leave my AIM idle. I got back to my computer and this was this cascade of messages!

Yo you gotta play this guy.

Yo did you see the video.

Yo you gotta play this guy.

I was like, what the hell is everyone talking about?

I see this interview…

M & S: (Laughs.)

C: This Youtube video…I guess Youtube was getting popular at the time. And this guy was like talking hella shit about everyone and everything. And they had a clip of me losing to him. And at the time there was this talk of, I think EVO was coming up and they wanted to do a 5 on 5 East Coast vs. West Coast. And… some of my training partners back in the day were ShadyK, at the time, Bill Wellman, Chris Schmidt, Potter…

And there was a poll to vote who was gonna be the team. And we were team three, so we were calling ourselves team three and vote team three and all this.

And truth be told, it’s kind of a dumb way to vote who gets to play against, who gets to represent West Coast vs. East Coast rivalry. We were just having some fun with it, whatever right? And him and his friends wanted to play, but he made a good point: if the point is to have the best play the East, then may as well play it out kind of thing right?

And on the list of people voting and all that stuff, on our team had me and Shady, who you know, were not as active. And I guess he felt that, you know he was a solid player, he was coming up and doing really well. And he felt that he deserved a mention or to be on that team.

And he decided that the best way to do that was to pick the weakest people who were on that list and challenge them instead of like the best players which is baffling to me. But you know.

M: Heh.

C: So he ends up calling us [out] in the video, and I remember like, whatever. I’ll play him. Right?

And then there’s just a bunch of drama from then until the moneymatch, he had won a few tournaments and I went to Family Fun and I played against one of homies, like talking in my ear the whole time. And shit like that.

And then came the actual moneymatch, I was pretty pumped to play, I was training pretty hard for it…and yeah I mean, I whupped his ass.

I was so confident, I got so confident to the point where I was just doing whatever I wanted in the matches and he was eating all of it. The bombs were really slow in that game, they did a lot of damage, but they were really slow, and he was really vulnerable, but I ended up landing four in a row on him at some point.

And yeah, I ended up beating him.

S: So at what point in the set did you feel like you had it wrapped up?

C: Um I…what was it. I had made some ridiculous comeback I think it was game 4 and I think I felt pretty good…No! I felt pretty good after the second game because I had a really good second match. I had four in a row and even though he beat me three after that? I still felt pretty good and I kind of just ran with it.

M: Right. My biggest memory from that match is that he sort of ragequit the last match and just walked off right?

C: (Laughs.)

M: And you kept playing, you didn’t look at him, you just kept on playing and playing and playing until you like killed him! I just thought wow, that was some focus right there.

C: (Laughs.)

Yeah I was pretty focussed to win. So that was that…did you guys all watch that match down here, was it pretty popular kind of thing?

M: Yeah!

C: (Laughs.)

S: Very much so.

M: Yeah! Everyone’s seen that, everyone’s seen the Neo match as well. So it was funny that you were explaining to me last night: you know I once played this moneymatch with this guy called Neo and…

M: And everyone knows that match, man.

C: (Laughs.) Yeah I’m not gonna assume that anyone has seen any of my matches kind of thing, but I guess they were pretty big.

M: Is it weird to come outside of the U.S. and come to Australia and kind of find out that everybody knows who you are, at least in this community…

C: Uh…yeah…when it comes to Marvel 2 I’m not too surprised. Because I played Marvel 2 for a really long time, I’m sure if anyone else from the old-school Marvel 2 days came out here they’d be treated the same way but at the same time…in Marvel 3 I haven’t really, in all honesty, I don’t think I’ve made too much noise in Marvel 3, but everyone seemed to have a really high opinion of my game here too, so I was very humbled by it.

13- S: Well you mentioned the moneymatch against Neo. Quite a number of people consider that to be one of the farewell moneymatches of Marvel 2. Would you consider running it back?

C: In Marvel 2, Marvel 3?

S: That’s the question.

C: Well the thing is, I didn’t really want to play that match to begin with.

M: Ohh.

C: I had some personal things going on at the time and what happened was…um…

Not to get too deep into all that, but I told myself that I’ve been doing things a certain way all the way up to that point, getting the same results so…

Around that time in 2010 I was gonna start doing things differently. And that was probably the first thing I started it of, or in fact, my old ways, my old self wouldn’t…Ah I don’t need to bother with a match like that. But you only live once kind of thing right? So I was like, fuck it, I’ll play it.

And I trained as hard as I could. Bill trained me for that match, he was probably the best training partner I could have had for that match. Him and Potter and…I played that match as best as I could, I just ran out of steam pretty much.

You could tell by…

There was a few key points where I really cringe when I watch it. But there was two points in particular. There was one where I had a…I knew I was tired. Because there was a match where I had a timeout where I lost like by a pixel. I thought I was going to win, actually. But when it came to timeout and Strider did that thing where he explodes kind of thing, I remember the crowd going “Ohhhhhhhh…”

And I was like: “FUCK”.

Because what happened was, I had him in Ouroboros but I had him juggling on top of my head and its kind of hard to keep things going when he’s juggling on top on your head. And instead of jumping up and doing like a air chain to get a bunch of hits in I was on the ground just mashing jab.

S: I remember that moment.

C: And that’s because I was too tired to put in the extra effort to jump up. I was kind of auto-piloting, just mashing jab. And if I had jumped and a did a little more damage I would have won that. And that really drained a lot out of me, getting that loss. That loss hit me really hard.

And also, the second to last match he did Hyper Sentinel Force and I was maybe a sweep’s length away from him and I activated Ouroboros. And pretty much in Marvel 2 Ouroboros negates Hyper Sentinel Force almost completely as long as they come out in the same time. But instead of dashing up to infinite Sentinel, I started walking up. And because I started walking up, I hit him with one hit, it flashed orange, the super armour but then I didn’t get the opening on him. It was just because I was tried, instead of dashing up like I should have put in the extra effort. Strider’s all about…

M: Putting in the effort.

C: Putting in super effort, you know, because you have to! Because he’s that kind of character. But I walked up and it just…

And I was thinking man, I’m tired. I can’t…I can’t even focus anymore, kind of thing. I’ve been playing for however many hours in the most intense match I’ve ever played in. I knew at that point- man it’s going be tough. I don’t know if I have any more energy to do this, and sure enough I lost the next match.

M: Right.

C: And that’s what sealed it.

M: So if you run it back, would you take a break, I mean sorry if you…

C: No I mean, yeah I didn’t want to play that match to begin with, so I don’t really see the reason why I would need to run in back…

M: Sorry…

C: I’m not gonna…He earned that win, I don’t need to take that away from him kind of thing.

M: Sorry I didn’t mean run it back, I mean if you were to do it again.

C: OH. If I were to do it again,

M: Would you take a break or you know…

C: Ahh… If I were to do that match again. Hm.

M: What would you have done differently.

C: (Thinking.)

S: It’s kind of hard to say because the crowd was so insane at that point, you kind of lose yourself. Because I was watching that live. At work.

C: Oh shit. Really?

S: Because of the time difference.

C: What time was it? When it was on.

S: It was about 1:30 in the afternoon, on Monday.

C: Oh shit. And you watched it live.

M: And then you watched it on the train afterwards.

C: How many people were watching that match live?

S: Think it was about 15 or 16 thousand?

C: Oh shit! Hahaha.

S: Because remember this was 2010 so it was before streaming got really huge.

C: Okay. So a lot of people were watching that match.

S: And Iplaywinner still replays it every once in a while on their channel.

M: And Dogface was electric on the microphone.

C: Oh yeah Dogface, he’s like my favourite…he’s such a witty person dude. His wit is…Yeah he’s awesome.

S: He’s actually our inspiration, why we started doing this.

C: Yeah, Dogface is the man, dude.

Yeah it’s hard to say to say, like even now, I know what…

I don’t remember exactly how every match played out, I do remember some key matches, but really as far as remembering what it was actually like being there? I hardly remember. That was a out of my body kind of thing, you know?

M: Wow…

C: And so it’s hard to say. But I guess I…

It’s not even what I would have done differently in the match, but leading up to the match I would have tried to…

Once I confirmed that I was going to play the match I probably would have tried to have like a…probably eating better and sleeping better kind of thing.

M: Sleeping better, yeah, yeah.

C: If I felt better and had more energy to keep playing that match I guess that’s the best thing I could have done.

M: Right. That’s really interesting that it became an issue of stamina rather than skill you know?

C: Oh skill definitely, but stamina was a huge thing, yeah.

S: Well I mean, it was a first to twenty.

C: First to fifteen.

S: Fifteen, sorry.

C: Yeah, it’s tough, it was tough to play Strider Doom in Marvel 2 because you need a certain amount of intensity to play really tops. And even when I play at the arcade, I wouldn’t really get like…you know how some people would get like these fifty game streaks and stuff like that? I ain’t got any of those since I was younger. It was tough, especially when players got really good, it was tough for me to hold a really long win streak in Marvel 2.

M: Interesting, interesting.

C: Yeah.

S: I really want to ask the Greater Force question.

M: Oh go ahead, go.

C: The Greater Force. Hahahahaha.

S: Where is it?

M: It’s on the first page. I’ll ask it.

S: Go for it.

14- M: Will the Greater Force ever return to Marvel?

C: The Greater Force that I once knew long ago is long and dead.

M: (Laughs.)

C: I’d be surprised if I ever saw him again. But I wait to this day- I wait at Super Arcade, hoping he’ll return.

M: (Laughs.)

C: And he will see, if he’s listening right now, we’re out there, we’re playing dude, come join us. (Laughs.)

M: Hahaha. Aw man…nothing else needs to be said.

15- M: What is the most bizarre you’ve heard about Australia before you came here, and is it true?

C: Umm, a few weeks before I came here, I saw this map. I saw this picture of it and it said: two percent of the Australian population lives here. And it basically highlighted the majority of the continent. And I didn’t realise…you know, in school they don’t teach us shit about Australia, you know?

M: (Laughs.)

C: I’m sure that’s apparent to you guys anytime anyone foreigners mention Australia, talking about the same crap all the time.

S: Uhh…you’ll be surprised.

C: Oh okay, but I didn’t realise that most of the continent is uninhabited. That’s crazy to me.

One of the biggest things that I felt was strange, and I found this last night was; 7-11 is like way more expensive than going to the supermarket. It’s the exact opposite [in the states].

M: Oh really??? Is 7-11 cheap…

C: 7-11 is cheap ass back home. You can get a slurpee, a big old slurpee however many ounces for like a dollar. And also! The very weirdest thing is that…

I guess…well two things. Bottled drinks, I guess the big sizes cost less than the handheld sizes.

M: Correct.

C: Which is really frickin’ weird to me. Because you get more drink, why does it cost less? I guess it’s the convenience, of the one that people want.

And also I went to some fish and chips place the other day.

M: Interesting.

C: I went to the fish and chips place the other day and I got a bottled water and it was $2.50. And I was like dude! You can get this for a dollar back home!

And my friend was like, $2.50? That’s actually really cheap.

M: Yeah heheh.

C: And I was like: what? You are shitting me!

M: (Laughs.)

C: I will drink out of the faucet! You know.

S: Australia is very, very expensive.

C: Yeah, that’s really strange to me. Some of the expenses are really strange to me. Or backwards.

S: Let me put it this way. Australia has a population of twenty three million people. California has a population of forty? Forty plus.

C: Huh.

S: But you look at the size of Australia is actually…

M: Almost equivalent to the continental U.S.

C: Mmm.

S: The size of America, yeah. Well, North America.

C: Wow. Oh wow. So it’s comparable?

S: Yeah, approximately. But basically we just live on the edges…

C: Yeah, yeah on the coasts.

S: Because the centre is all desert, most of the time.

C: Huh. That’s really weird to me.

M: That’s weird to me! I didn’t know 7-11 was cheaper in the States.

S: Very much so. In Australia 7-11 is considered to be more of a convenience store.

M: It’s an emergency store.

C: So you pay for that convenience.

S: Exactly.

C: Oh yeah.

S: Because they’re open 24-7. The other reason is because the way Australia pays wages….

C: Oh the minimum wage is much higher right?

S: Yeah. It’s about 16 bucks.

C: Yeah.

S: The other thing is that when they work on Sunday they have to pay them time and a half…

C: Oh really?

S: Yeah. Sorry, Sundays is double time, Saturdays is time and a half.

C: Wow, wow. I didn’t know that.

S: So that’s why certain things….public holidays, companies have to pay a fee for being open on public holidays. Things like that make Australia a little bit different to the U.S.

C: As far as I get how much the pricing goes and all that.

S: And so forth, yes.

C: Ohh.

M: Well this is still a little disappointing. I expected you to say that you know, we have dingoes in our backyard.

C: (Laughs.) Oh yeah, yeah!

S: Oh yeah, I’m going to go jump in my kangaroo and ride back to Geelong.

M: (Laughs.)

C: Yeah, yeah, jump in a pouch or something. No, a lot of that stuff was really surprising. I’m sure there’s other stuff that I can’t remember. But just off the the top of my head, that’s the stuff that was really surprising to me.

16- M: What about the Australian FGC?

C: Oh yeah, you know what’s really awesome,  we’re  sitting  here right now in this HQ, this HQ is fricking awesome dude. When I  first got here I was marvelled by it, I even took a video of it on my phone.

And Stef, as you guys know, he’s one of the best players here, he was offering for me to stay at his place if I wanted to. And it has like a proper bed and all that stuff. And I was like dude, this place has like a shower, and it has space upstairs, I’m straight dude. Don’t even sweat it. It’s just kinda cold here. But besides that…

M: See that’s why I was wondering. Because a lot of the guests are staying in the St. Kilda hotel, I was wondering why the Americans were still here. Because you want to be here!

C: Oh yeah, Ali was like, you can either stay here or here or here. But this place has a lot of people that kind of thing, and then they showed me this place, and I was like, this is fine.

Because I think, me and Snake Eyez were the last to arrive. Because we were here the day before the tournament. So I guess everyone else’s accommodation were kind of settled and what they were going to be doing.

But yeah I didn’t mind, this place is great.

Yeah, the FGC here seems really organised. The passion’s really strong. I was really impressed, the skill level obviously is very high.

Much higher than I thought- not to shit on Australian players, but I was just, I didn’t know what to expect kind of thing. And I was pleasantly surprised that everyone here, the players are really good. And they’re really “up-to-date” with the rest of the world.

S: Actually, we have a question about that!

17- How do you stay up-to-date with the evolving ecosystem that’s Marvel 3.

M: Do you watch international streams? Do you watch Japanese streams?

C: To be honest I haven’t watched a Japanese stream in a while. There was a time where I would try to tune into Frieda’s stream every now and again. I forget what it was called, Amal…

S: Amalgame TV, him and Fubarduck.

C: Yeah, yeah I used to watch that for a time. If I see a link for Japanese Marvel I always try to see it, but I can’t say that I’ve seen any Japanese footage in the past six months kind of thing.

M: Right. It seems to be like a SoCal thing, like you guys have such a vibrant, big scene- why watch other people when you can play,kind of thing.

C: There’s definitely no shortage of people to play with, and that kind of thing. But um…I don’t watch too many streams but I don’t really have a good reason for that. I should, and I probably will try to put an effort to watch more. But generally if I’m looking at twitter and I see a link, I’ll tune in and just see what’s going on.

M: Interesting.

18- So which players really stood out to you in Australia?

You mentioned Stef, and anybody else?

C: Yeah yeah. Stef is really good, and he seems to be a student of the game. Of course Somniac is really good, he’s a student of the game, he had some really good advice for me against a lot of strats and what he’s kind of thinking when he’s playing. He has a really interesting team actually, I’ve never seen it before. He’s kind of like a…

M: Nemo+ Dormammu.

C: Yeah, yeah. That bolts assist man, it’s really hard to deal with. Yeah of course Baxter is really good, I was impressed by his Doom and like, his strategy. He had a plan going in with the match I played him. And he basically stuck with it, I didn’t adapt. And he got me good.

Yeah, and from what I understand, there’s a lot of good Street Fighter players here as well, Snake Eyez was telling me there were a lot of players giving him a hard time that kind of thing, so.

M: But it’s kind of interesting that a lot of top players believe that we’re behind in all the games in terms of the level of our skill, but the game that we have the most fighting chance- a lot people believe it’s Marvel. I’m not sure why that’s the case.

S: I don’t think that’s true.

M: You don’t think that’s true?

C: What would you say is…

S: Our best game would probably be Street Fighter IV. Mainly…the problem is the majority of our top Street Fighter IV players are kind of over the game. And they play it on a more of a casual/social level?

M: Well if you look at Shadowloo Showdown, there were two guys in KOF [top eight], there were two guys in Marvel. And there was zero in Street Fighter IV.

C: Mmm.

M: But I guess more Japanese [SFIV] players came down. So it’s [tougher.]

S: Also numbers as well.

M: True, correct.

C: You know the player that everyone keeps telling me about from different sources, they keep telling me about what his name…he’s from…

S: Humanbomb?

C: No, not Humanbomb. Um…He’s a Marvel player and he uses Morrigan, Storm…something.

M: Oh! His name is Arnold. He’s a pad player.

C: Yeah yeah! He’s a pad player, he wins a lot of the majors out here, he’s supposed to be really good.

M: Correct, correct.

C: They were telling me that his triple team- you know Storm is one of those really great support characters like Dante and Doom. And one of those things is the triple team. And Storm’s triple team is huge. Having Storm on your team I guess he just kills assists immediately.

S: Yeah he snipes with her a lot.

C: Yeah I thought that was really interesting, but I guess he couldn’t make it out. Which is kinda…that sucks.

S: Yeah he doesn’t travel all that much. He made it out last year but didn’t make it out this year unfortunately.

C: Yeah on one hand it’s easy to say we’re ahead or behind in this game, in that game. But you don’t really know until you have sat there- the players have really had a lot of time to sit down and play with other players kind of thing you know?

You can watch all you want but you don’t really know what it’s like until you’ve had substantial time with another player kind of thing.

M: To play with them, right, right.

S: One of the other big Australian issues is also geographical dispersion. Because we have Queensland, we have New South Wales, we have Victoria.

And they’re all very far away from each other.

C: Mm.

M: But that’s the case with America right? East Coast/ West Coast?

S: True, but America has a higher population density. So you’ll get a lot more people playing in general.

C: Yeah, that’s always a problem. I was actually…also one of the things I wanted to do was to have a talk with Tokido. I had a talk with Tokido after the tournament about improving and all that, and he said well one of the advantages he has…well it’s two-fold.

One: it’s very dense (Japan) and everyone’s not too far away from each other you know, so it’s easy to get really solid games in.

And the other thing he told me was, and I think this was like the number one thing that he said. And the number one reason for his success was that he extremely consistent  training partners that pushed him, that kept pushing him kind of thing, kept pushing each other. In this case being like Mago and Daigo. And that’s something I really envy, you know?

And it’s really about you know, despite geographical differences, despite all that, there’s definitely a lot to be done, a lot that can be done with what you have to work with. One of those being that- getting together with the players who are local to you and just really striving to improve.

M: Right, right, for sure.

19- Any thoughts on Shadowloo Showdown in general? That Marvel top 8, that She-Hulk man!

C: Oh yeah, Abegen’s She-Hulk man. That’s a monster. You can just see the confidence in his game and he goes for that cross-chop mix-up on incoming. He really knows what he’s doing.

The thing that amuses me the most about his game is when he has that Thor ground grab DHC into the air grab?

M: Yeah heheheh.

C: It’s like…to this day I’m pretty sure that’s nothing can be done about that. If he has those two meters and if you’re close enough?

M: You’re done.

C: Yeah, yeah. You’re done. He’s really talented man.

Shadowloo Showdown- I had a great time. The venue was fucking beautiful. One side of the entire venue was just windows and glass and so there was a lot of sunlight. Nice patio, there was plenty of stations, always somewhere to play casuals- always somewhere and someone to play casuals with. A lot of great cosplayers- a lot of hot cosplayers.

M: (Laughs.)

C: There was just a lot of really great talent that I saw in all the games. You know, I wish I could have put up a better fight. But you know I’ll have to save that for the next Shadowloo Showdown I guess.

M: Right. But man that was electric man. We couldn’t have scripted a better moment where you and Baxter were down to like Doom vs. Doom.

C: Oh. Yeah…

M: And everyone in the room was like: it’s Clockw0rk’s fucking Doom!

S: Heheh.

M: And I dunno what was going though your head at that moment…

C: Yeah for me it was like…he had a pretty significant life lead on me at that point. So I was like, well, I’m going to have to put myself into danger if I want to win this. And he ended up edging me out so.

M: Right, right.

C: And I got to play Tokido, and it’s actually this…

This weekend actually I finally have admitted to myself that yeah, myself and the characters I use- I have a really big problem with Nova. And I’ve been trying to focus on what to do against that. And I think my answer is to pick Doom Ammy Strider and focus solely on plink dashing to get him to block Ammy instead of butter gun and things like that.

So I’ve been kind of playing around with that. And I talked to Tokido about this too and he’s like yeah, of all the characters and teams you use, Strider probably fights Nova the best, but Strider’s Strider you know. You probably have to fight him much harder than he has to fight you, because he just has to touch you once kind of thing. So I’m going try to focus on that matchup.

M: Sorry, what did you say when you said you’re going to use plink dashing with Doom rather than buttergun?

C: Yeah so, you know when you wanna…the whole point of Doom Ammy is you want to get them to…

M: To block Cold Star.

C: To block Ammy, yeah. And I feel like against Nova, especially nowadays there’s a lot of Novas, they always have this ground control assist whether it be bolts or plasma beam or what have you.

So you don’t want to be on the ground. And so I think that right now my best bet is to normal jump up, air dash up, fly, and then plink dash, and then in the middle of my plink dashing call Ammy in the middle of it. Or, get close to him and press Ammy and footdive at the same time, that’s probably my best best from him to block Ammy.

Because when I was playing Tokido, I lost to Tokido 3-2 in the tournament, but I played him several sets after that, including a first to ten. And he was beating my ass.

The thing is, it’s so hard to…You can’t stay on the ground, and if I press any kind of projectile, he can just…

M: Do the superman.

C: Do the superman on reaction and kill me. So that’s why I found my best bet is probably to just improve my plink dashing and get him to block that way. And I feel like even just the past few days I’ve gotten better at plink dashing, we’ll just see how it goes.

M: Because everybody knows Doom…you can’t just plink the regular way, you have to do it with M because he can’t cancel his H.

C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’ve messing around with that a little more. I’ve been doing okay…but. Yeah that and my Vergil, obviously. My Vergil sucks, sometimes I feel like a sitting duck, sometimes I feel pretty confident, like I know what I’m doing. But it’s mostly like…the flow.

That’s basically what it boils down to. I feel like my flow with Doom, my game flows pretty well. My Strider, you know I’m talking about how I’m having these epiphanies and how his ground game is supposed to work and all that. But in the grand scheme of things what I’m trying to get down is a flow of how Strider’s game is supposed to look. It looks pretty disjointed at this point. Sometimes you’ll catch me just standing there and I’m kind of thinking about what to do and that kind of thing, and that’s really bad.

And so, the main thing I took from RF is that his flow with Vergil Doom is so good. And I feel like if I got my Vergil up to that level that I could be such a better player.

M: Because your team would be complete. Any of your characters you can’t just…who do you snap, you know?

C: Yeah, it would make me a much more complete player. So we’ll see.

S: Still early days.

C: Yeah, yeah. Still much improvement to be done.

20- M: So, speaking of hot cosplayers, so you are the lockdown king right? So what is the Clockw0rk ouroboros strategy…when it comes to women?

C: Ahahaha. Oh geez.

Um…I couldn’t tell you, none of the cosplayers looked at me today!

M: (Laughs.)

C: Or during the tournament. So couldn’t tell you dude. (Laughs.)

M: Ah man. That’s disappointing. ‘Cause…you know, I thought Street Fighter skills would transfer to real life but…

C: I mean, really, it just comes down to confidence right?

M: That’s true.

C: That transcends everythings. It transcends your professional life, transcends your love life, transcends your fighting game ability. That’s probably the best thing I can say about that.

M: Confidence, yes.

21- M: Another weird question from Tom: What is harder to get in on, Duc’s Spiral Sent, or Chris G’s Morri Doom?

C: (Smacks his lips.)

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…

It depends on the matchup but I feel in Marvel 2 if you’re Magneto or Storm, circle swords is so freakin’ hard to deal with. But Chris G is Chris G and Morrigan Doom is Morrigan Doom. So that’s tough to say. But I’d say at their peaks Chris G was probably overall a better player than Duc. Probably more versatile in that regard.

It kind of not a really fair comparison. But just for the question’s sake, yeah, I’d have to give it to Chris G.

M: Okay, cool cool cool.

22- So we’ve talked about this before- something that you enjoy really much in this game is people who can articulate, you know, Marvel and the theory behind it. And one of your heroes in that aspect even though you don’t want him to know about it is Viscant, right?

C: Heheh, yeah!

I  straight up…he was one of my heroes when I was growing up. I used to be a super huge forum crawler. Nowadays we have twitter, before we had SRK, I’m sure you knew right [gestures to Igor], old school ST player and we…

S: There’s pages upon pages of Viscant’s- I wouldn’t call them diatribes, but explanations.

I remember I used to read them…

C: Yeah, really looking at the game critically. And the thing is, Viscant’s always been like this. Some of his theories can be pretty outlandish, that kinda thing. But at the same time I would love to just…I remember I would see any of his posts on the forums and I would just make sure to sit down and read the whole thing.

I remember he had some stupid Sailor Moon avatar…

M: (Laughs.)

C: And anytime I’d see it- and he would always sign it with like viscant@aol.com and all that…

And for reason he didn’t believe in paragraphs! I don’t know why, he’s like an expert writer…

S: Yeah, it was just a block!

M: (Laughs.)

C: Yeah it was just a block and sometimes his punctuation- he would use question marks and periods like interchangeably, I dunno why. But anyway.

He was so insightful. He’s the old-school king. I’d see his picture at Marvel 1 tournaments, Tips & Tricks kind of thing. And I would bug him on AOL kind of thing, I would add his name on it, because viscant@aol.com, oh he must be on AOL, to just chat. I’m adding him on my buddy list and I saw him and I was bugging him about guard break…

I didn’t know…guard breaks had just been discovered, I mean, guard breaks not just been discovered, I should say: Cable Hyper Viper Beam. Yeah, the gun, the guard break. And I asked him about it and I remember [that] he took his time to explain to the scrub about how it works and how Anakaris had the…good to practice on Anakaris because he floats and all that.

And to this day I have a lot of respect for his ability to break down games, not only to break down games but to articulate it to others. Because at the end of the day if you’re articulating it to others you’re trying to help out the community as a whole, you know?

23- S: So speaking of Viscant, how has being on Team Broken Tier helped you as a player?

M: Yeah! Do you get to bounce ideas [off Viscant], now that you’re on the same team as Viscant, have you been using him as a resource?

C:Uh, yeah, but not as much as I should be. But really it’s just fun going to the diffferent tournaments and we have our own room and we just kick it together that kind of stuff. It’s been a lot of fun travelling to the different events and being…

Even just saying that I’m on the same team as guys like Marlin Pie and Yipes and all that…it is just awesome. So I think we might have some…even two weeks from now, for everyone listening, I don’t know when this thing is going to be out, but we’re going to be in Arizona, at Koogy’s place, it’s going to be me, Viscant, Viscant (French pronounciation), I should say.

M: Le Viscant.

C: Yeah. Angelic, Marlin Pie got some time off, so he’s going to joining us, and Yipes, and we’re going to be grinding out some Marvel, little mini-FGTV streaming the whole time. We’ll be working on some stuff, hopefully have some kind of programming schedule so people can tune in. And know what to expect when they’re tuning in. Have it be structured that way, it should be a lot of fun.

S: Yeah I met Koogy in 2011. He’s a very cool guy.

C: Yeah he’s cool. He knows what he’s doing. The reason why I trusted Koogy over…you know when fighting games started blowing up. You had all these outside companies trying to come in, organisers and companies and a lot of them didn’t…you would wonder about their motives kind of thing. Because fighting games aren’t like the biggest thing, so a lot of it was them just trying to make money, a quick buck kind of thing. But Koogy is a player you know, he’s an old-school Guilty Gear player, he’s one of the top players, so that’s why I knew…

By the community, for the community, from the community, that kinda thing.

S: Yes. That’s what I was going to say.

C: Yeah.

S: That works very well.

C: Yeah I think so.

S: I think one of the best things that I knew…when Koogy sort of solidified him as a legitimate sponsor, when Latif got picked up Razor, and Koogy said publically: look, he got a better offer, and I’m happy. And I wish him all the best.

C: Yeah.

S: And I think a lot of people basically…he just became legit at that point.

Because Broken Tier was still up and coming, they were sponsoring a few things but now they sponsor Battle Circuit, they sponsor every stream that I’ve watched from the U.S., they’ve sponsored us previously, Shadowloo Showdown previously. Shoutouts to Koogy.

C: Yeah. He tries his best to make things happen, basically.

S: There is one question, actually.

24- Do you ever see yourself ceasing to play fighting games?

C: Hm….

Um…

M: Because all of us are pretty much [30], he’s over 30 [points to Igor], I’m closing close to 30 and so are you…

C: And I’m 30 as well…

I think if I ever stopped it wouldn’t be my own…

For example like in 2012 I really didn’t do much in fighting games. I was working full-time, it wasn’t because I didn’t want to play but it was just…I was just so busy and so tired because of all the work that I was doing that the chances that I did get? I would go out to big events and I would just get killed because I hadn’t been practicing and I would just get blown up. So if I did stop playing it wouldn’t be because…If I have the time and will to play, I’ll play, and if I did stop playing I’d imagine it would have to be for some kind of external reason.

Fighting games…for better or for worse, nah I shouldn’t say for better or for worse. But as it stands right now, I am the person I am because of fighting games. And specifically because of the fighting game community. I wouldn’t even have that job at Superbot if not for fighting games. And people…I don’t want to say that.

I don’t feel like I owe it to fighting games to keep playing, but I play fighting games because it’s fun, you know? That’s basically what it boils down to.

S: I think that’s a really important point. I think as fighting games are growing and growing I think people really need to remember the fundamental thing: this is all about having fun at the end of the day.

Sure there are sponsors and there are other things, but if you’re not having fun playing…

I don’t think you’re doing it right.

C: Yeah you’re going to be miserable. Yeah dude, do something that you have fun with. Why make yourself miserable. You know I think this game design thing that I picked up on…Good game design doesn’t come from putting clever things in your game. Rather good game design is making the player feel clever playing it.

And when it comes to fighting games, I mean, you never feel more clever than when you’ve outplayed your opponent, when you have them fall for something that you’ve planned, that kind of thing.

And that’s what keeps fighting games fresh for me.

And that’s despite characters or tiers or tournaments or anything like that. That thing, it just makes you feel great.

S: Yeah actually to be honest, I don’t think there is a better feeling that I’ve had when I’ve outplayed someone, or you just hit him with a mix-up that you’ve been sort of…training him to over the last few games. So that’s something.

25- M: You’ve just talked about your Superbot stuff. But after your experience in the game industry, what else have you learned from the industry and do you see yourself returned to it?

C: Um…I think the main thing that I have learned, and I’ve learned a lot of stuff really. And I probably on the plane I’ll probably go…oh I should have said this, I should have said that.

But off the top of my head…let’s see. One of the big things I learned is that there was definitely a distinction between publishers and developers and a lot of times the developers they’re really…they’re just trying to work with what they have. Make the best, the most fun game that they can, you know?

Obviously I haven’t been working in the industry too long, only a few years and I…I can’t, I can only speak from my short experience with it but at Superbot- we had an uphill battle just from the get-go. Just by virtue of what the game was about. It was about all these IPs and everyone was, people just pass it on as a Smash clone, so it was just tough from the get go kind of thing.

It’s just baffling to me when you read…like not even just like forum posts and stuff but even “game journalists” and stuff just having these…these such ignorant opinions on things that they don’t even know about. And you’d people just talk so much crap and they haven’t even tried the game, that kind of thing. And it’s just…it would pain me to read this stuff, because I know a lot of the co-workers that I’ve come to be friends while working at Superbot, they’re reading this stuff and its like…

These guys are just trying to make a fun game for you, you know? And people would just shit on their work without giving it a second thought. When in fact developers are humans as well man.

I just didn’t see the point in the negativity, you know? And for me it was important to see the…not only the human side of development but just really how much effort and work it is, you know?

So when I heard people talk about “oh Capcom doesn’t know what they’re doing” and shit like that? Shut the fuck up, you know? These guys have made games that have become so iconic to this point, and we forget about that you know? We forget about how clever it is that Frank West has this level up ability or how Akuma he’s so different than Ryu in Marvel and how awesome they made Spider-Man in this game. He zips around…

S: He really feels like Spider-Man.

C: He feels like Spider-Man!

Ammy feels like Ammy. Strider…

Ugh! (Face of disgust.)

M: (Laughs.)

C: And that’s one of the huge things I’ve learnt, working at Superbot is that…yeah I’ve just come to appreciate it more. And that’s one of the reasons why I’ve been thinking so much about Strider’s game, because yeah man, a lot of character design, even just game design, it starts with a strong vision. And they try to see that vision to its end. And with Strider, I’m sure whoever was designing that character definitely had a vision when they were creating his playstyle and why each move has this amount of recovery, does this much damage, and that kind of thing.

And I’m trying to get into the developers head when it comes to how this character- how they envisioned this character playing. This doesn’t mean to say a character is supposed to be played the way it was meant to. [Take] Marvel 2 that kind of thing, heh.

But at the same time, just the way the game is designed, I feel that with that strong character design can come strong gameplay, an idea of what that character- that’s character’s abilities when played at a really maximum level, you know?

M: Really interesting.

S: That’s fascinating stuff, yeah.

M: No more questions?

S: Actually I really want to ask the Sanchez question.

M: Alright, go ahead.

S: No you can ask that one. Since you came up with it.

M: Oh, I ask all the troll questions?

C: Oh yeah, let me hear a troll question!

M: Okay..

26- Sanchez describes doing “the Clockw0rk” as raising the crowd’s hopes and dreams up to the highest level….

C: (Laughs, cracks up.)

M: And dashing everybody’s dreams cruelly with one bone-headed mistake.

C: Oh god. Sanchez…

M: Fair statement?

C: That’s pretty fair…

It’s funny, I used to think about that a lot. I’m not going to try to beat around the bush kind of thing, but I do have this…for the most part I usually have the crowd’s [support] kind of thing. In Marvel 2 it’s mostly because of the style I play, people wanted to see that different style of play besides Magneto and Storm and all that.

Lately, if you’re just thinking about how you don’t want to disappoint these people that have hopes of your winning and all that, it’s not going to help you, you know? So I’ve been trying to really just not worry about any of that. And just…

And really…for example, this Shadowloo Showdown. Of course I’m going to get a lot of shit when I get back. Even on twitter I was getting a lot of shit for losing, but at the same time, for me it’s more about…

It was more significant to me, well not significant, but I was more disappointed in myself than anything else. And not more like letting people down kind of thing. I guess at the end of the day my true friends and my true “fans”, they’re not on my side because…

M: Because of your wins.

C: Yeah, because of my wins, obviously not, I’ve not really had many big wins! But just… at the end of the day I just try my best, that’s all anyone can ever ask of you. And it’s really that…internal private victory that I’ve interested in. Yeah I let people down and all that, but to be brutally honest…it’s not that I’m not concerned with it, but I can’t be concerned with it.

M: Can’t let it affect you.

C: Yeah, can’t be concerned with it. So yeah I hope people just understand that, and I’m trying to win out here. (Laughs.) You know?

S: At the end of the day you always play for yourself.

C: Yeah yeah, for sure, for sure.

27- S: Last one, do you have any shoutouts?

C: Oh yeah, dude, shoutouts to Ali he’s been taking care of me man. Like I couldn’t say enough about the guy. He’s been playing…I can see that he’s playing mummy pretty much throughout the entire weekend, just carting everyone around…

M: Yeah, he’s like a zombie…

C: Taxi-ing everyone around and all that. Shoutouts to him and whatever powers that got me out here. The entire Shadowlogic crew and all that. Shoutouts to you guys of course, and all the players that I’ve met out here. I’ve met like millions of people out here, the Queensland guys, the Sydney guys, everyone that was kicking it at Crown that Sunday night, geez. Shoutouts to Snake Eyez, he’s a real cool dude, I’ve never really got the chance to hang out with him until this weekend. And yeah, we had a lot to talk about.

And shoutouts to everyone in Australia that I met, and the dudes that couldn’t make it out.

You know it’s funny I had a lot of people…

This happened like four or five different times. Where someone would be like, hey Clock, and either that person would be dragging somebody towards me or pointing at someone; like hey, so this guy’s like your biggest fan but he just doesn’t want to say anything kind of thing and this happened like a million times…

M: (Laughs.)

C: And it’s like dude it’s not…And I think (cracks up) that might have happened with Muttons too! (Laughs.)

M: If you don’t know what happened…

S: Yeah I know, Ali put you on blast.

C: (Laughs.)

M: Ali put me on the spot! When Clock got into [Shadowloo HQ] he [stood next to Clock from the other side of the room and] called me over: Muttons come over here…

C: (Laughs.)

M: He’s like the Chinese auntie introducing the son to the daughter…

C: Yeah yeah yeah, to the daughter kind of thing!

S: (Laughs.)

M: And I was like, screw you Ali, I hate you so much right now.

C: Ahahahahaha. Yeah so that’s happened a lot now, I gotta say hey that’s cool man, just say what’s up man, I’d love to hear about it you know?

And yeah, shoutouts to just anyone that I played and anyone that was cheering for me. To win the tournament, I’ll try to do better next time. And just shoutouts to all FGC and all that good stuff man.

S: I must say, you’re a lot taller than I thought you would be…

M: (Laughs.)

C: You know it’s funny that you say that!

S: I guess you thought Tokido was a lot taller too?

C: No no no, so the very first time we went to East Coast, I had never heard that up until I went to East Coast. And when I went to East Coast for the first time, one or two years ago whenever that was, and I had six or seven different people come to me: wow you’re a lot taller than I thought what you were going to be.

M: (Laughs.)

C: And I was like what? I don’t understand where that comes from. And I felt like there’s a reason- I’ve never heard up until that point!

But I guess it’s like a normal thing now. When I came here and I had a few people tell me, yeah you’re a lot taller than I thought you’d be, and I was like, what?

S: The reason why is when we first saw Mago, Gamerbee, and Tokido in 2010…

M: Basically every famous player…Mike Ross…

S: Yeah Mike Ross. Everyone was a lot shorter. But they look a lot taller on stream.

C: Mm.

S: So when we see you, it’s like:

M: Oh wow!

S: …Oh! He’s about right!

C: Yeah yeah yeah…(Laughs.)

M: That feels strange! (Laughs.)

C: Yeah, yeah I guess like Tom Cruise has that same thing where he’s actually like 5’2 or something like that?

M: (Laughs.)

C: Actually you know, Jason Statham’s supposed to really short too.

S: Yes.

M: Ahh.

C: He looks like he’s six foot or something…Actually you know what the big one is, did you guys ever used to watch Ninja Warrior?

S: Yes.

C: Makoto Nagano?

S: Mm.

C: He’s like the first guy or like the second guy to complete the course, like the biggest all-star and all that, this guy’s like 5’1 or something! But he looks like he’s a behemoth when you’re watching him run through the course kind of thing, you know?

M: Heheheh.

S: Mm mm.  It’s just…I was just so used to seeing everybody who I saw on stream to be about a foot smaller…

C: Yeah hahahaha.

M: Because this dude’s (Igor) like six foot four…

S: And then you come along and it’s like, ah!

C: Yeah yeah yeah, I’m about like 5’11 or 6’. Yeah.

M: I guess that’s considered humongous by stream standards…(Laughs.)

C: (Laughs.) Yeah I’d imagine Tokido is like 5’4, 5’5. Same thing like Mike Ross.

S: Yeah because like Mike Ross is like…(Raises his hand to just below nipple level.)

C: Yeah! (Laughs.)

Yeah that’s funny.

…Maybe he has to like sit on books when he’s driving…

M & S: (Laughs.)

C: But yeah it’s funny that you say that. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it, and it’s always shocking to hear about…

M: That’s really funny heh.

Alright, guess we’ll wrap it up. Thank you very much…

C: Ah yeah, thank you so much!

M: Thank you sir.

S: Thank you.

C: Thanks again man.

M: Hope to see you next year…

C: Yeah, oh yeah- shoutouts to Queensland! Yo Yooo!

M: (Laughs.)

Bonus SS GIF:

Filed under: Don't be a Scrub Podcast, Interviews, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Tagged: Abegen, Ali Abdo, Baxter, Broken Tier, Chris G, Clockw0rk, Combofiend, Daniel Maniago, Dark Prince, Dirty Sanchez, Don't be a Scrub Podcast, Doom, Duc, EVO2010, Filipino Champ, Flemington Race Centre, Hari, Honzo Gonzo, Justin Wong, Koogy, Melbourne, MVC2, NefeliousG, Neo, Queensland, RF, Sanford, Sentinel, Shadowloo Showdown 2k13, She-Hulk, Spiral Sentinel, Strider, Superbot, The Greater Force, Tokido, Tom, UMVC3, Viscant, Xian, Yipes