In the Arcade days, the many players in NJ I played against all over the place helped build my foundation. In MKII, one of my best friends to this day played me in MKII and MK3 on SNES quite a bit. He was more like target practice though. He still tries to play. I would say my first truly competitive gaming experience came from another friend's older brothers. They both played Kitana in MKII on SNES and eventually when I could beat them consistently, they stopped playing against me. This is the truest sign you have leveled up.
dreemernj of course was my sparring partner from the mid 90s until the early 2000s for various fighting games, notably MKT on PSX, MK3 and UMK3 in the arcade, and various SFs, Soul Edge, a little Tekken, some Vs games etc. We helped each other evolve some extremely unorthodox playing styles centered almost entirely around reading, prediction and adaptation. We also tried to get into 3rd Strike and SF4 when it was online for PC.
There was also a very good NJ player in the mid 90s named Eric from my home town. He is as responsible as anyone for me becoming deeply interested in competitive fighting games and ultimately taking that knowledge on to the FGC. He taught me how really to play vanilla MK3 at West Coast Video in my home town. For the longest time,
Check and I would talk to each other about an MK player named Eric we trained by, but recently we discovered it is not the same Eric.
The Prophet - he brought me to a true competitive level in MKT and UMK3, among those also various SF games like Super Turbo, Alpha 3, 3rd Strike, CvS2 and MvC2. He was the first person to ever talked to me about frame data, around the time of CvS2 and SCII was when I frame data started getting thrown around more and more. When I first met Ryan, he beat me easily 7 to 3 in MKT and it took years to even out. The Prophet, I believe, was trained by the same Eric as Check. The Prophet also played against
Tom Brady in MK3, and perhaps other games in the mid 90s.
Julian Robinson was a tough player for me to overcome, the Prophet and I both had to step it up a notch in the early 2000s to compete with him in UMK3 but he was not much of a practicing MK player anymore.
I developed a Reptile strategy against Kabal by playing a little bit against TomBrady in the mid 2000s. I have since modified it bit by bit against other Kabal players and it's a very fun match now.
There were many players on Kaillera for UMK3, XvSF, MvSF, MvC, and SFA3 that I had a lot of fun playing against, most notably Blazt the Speakers and BlazeD. Played SO much Marvel 1 vs them but not enough using LAN connection since there was a huge desire to play 2 on 2 matches where generally it was impossible to get 4 people all willing to use LAN setting on Kaillera. Played a lot of XvSF vs fLoE in the early 2000s. Online gradually got worse and worse though and I stopped playing on Kaillera and online altogether. I would say that I learned how to throw better by playing online because at times it was the only reliable option, particularly in XvSF. Throwing is a huge part of my strategy today which is part of the reason I play Gief and Hugo. I would also say that I influenced many more players than I was influenced by, and I still get personal online requests to this day.
The XBOX Live UMK3 days I played against a great many players regularly and racked up a Ranked Game record of 967 and 33. I believe this is where I spent the most time playing against
Konqrr after he leveled up. Playing on Kaillera was difficult for him because he was on a server with 90ms where I had in the teens.
Over the years, players like
REO,
CRAZY DOMINICAN, LI Joe,
NoDoubt,
summoning,
AC1984 have been my more common UMK3 opponents who have helped me maintain my skill in UMK3 which I think plateaued around 2011.
I hope to get into SF4 when Hugo is released for it, I might even be looking for online training partners for it...and if I missed anyone, I apologize, please feel free to call me out on it.
