A lot of people have been asking me about what I've been able to come up with for Dr. Strange so far in UMvC3. As far as I know, no one is doing anything even remotely like the setups I'm revealing here, and the key to making them work is j.S. Don't understand? Check out In the Lab: Strange Mixups and see how to use j.S to your advantage to set up your mixups.

I'll be doing my best to put these mixups to use on tonight's stream, so come check it out!

http://www.option-select.com/stream
http://www.twitch.tv/optionselect

The recording of episode 2 of the Breakdown has been uploaded to youtube! This episode is a little shorter due to the topic being covered in training mode, rather than by analyzing matches. This was necessary since I wanted to cover a topic specific to Marvel, but the game hasn't been out long enough for there to be enough matches to look at.

The topic this week was Pushblocking, specifically looking at some common types of teleport mixups which can be avoided by proper pushblocking. After the portion of the show that was put on youtube, I answered questions from the stream for about 30 mins relating to pushblocking, so if you're looking for more on the subject, you can check out the raw archive of the stream on twitch.tv/optionselect.

Hope everyone is enjoyed UMvC3! See you guys on Mixup Monday for more UMvC3 action!

Although I've done a handful of episodes of The Breakdown so far, I'm considering them all pilot episodes until now. I felt like last week's episode was strong, and worthy of being the first official episode. If you missed it live, you can catch episode 1 of The Breakdown on our youtube and then fix your mistake by tuning in this Thursday for the next episode.

A quick sidenote: still having problems with my recordings getting corrupted by xsplit, so again, the show is uploaded directly from the twitch archives. I apologize for the slight audio desync, but I'm working to resolve the issue in the future.

Also, don't forget we're streaming our usual Mixup Monday tonight!

In case you missed the stream this last Monday (9-12), D'Nyc3 and I announced that we were going to be holding another donation drive to benefit ZP. I've already discussed how with the help of the community (both local and otherwise), we were able to raise enough money to help ZP stay alive. However, now that we're past that point, we don't want to stop there. We don't want ZP to just "survive," we want it to be the best it can be. So with that in mind, we're holding this donation drive to try to raise even more money to be put towards more, better equipment, and just general things the store needs.

Last time, donators were able to get an Option-Select shirt from the few I had remaining. This time, the prize for donating is being sponsored by D'Nyce and ClassClowns. You can win a custom Swag Shirt! The winner can pick whatever color for both the shirt itself, and the Swag text, and have it made and sent to them. ...

I haven't written a blog entry in too long, and I really wanted to fix that, even though entry will probably be on the short side. I originally wanted to write this entry before Evo, to hopefully give people something to think about before the biggest tournament of the year. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in my news post, my PC died a little before Evo, so a lot of projects for put on hold. Nonetheless, I feel like this topic is still a relevant one, and that is:

Getting the right mindset

This probably isn't going where you think it is, so I want to get one thing straight from the beginning: I'm talking about all the whiners, complainers, and crybabies fixing their attitudes. Alternatively, I want to look at how the advent of patches for fighting games has affected the community. ...

A lot has been going on lately, not only for Option Select, but for myself personally, including the SFL fighting game community as a whole. So, I wanted to take some time to give everyone some updates on a lot of what's going on.

General site updates

First of all, as far as the site goes, I had mentioned recently that I was working on a bunch of things, including, but not limited to: general site upgrades/maintenance, getting the match video database up to date, updating character info for AE, new tutorials, and some other smaller stuff. This is all still happening, but has all been put on hold, because my main PC died right before Evo, and all my free time since then has been spent trying to get it back up and running. So I just wanted people to be aware, that the progress hasn't stopped, it has just been severely limited by the fact that I don't have access to my PC right now.

Shirts

On that note, for people who inquired about ordering shirts: this has fallen into the same category. I had a list on my PC of inquiries, which I'll have to go back through my email to recreate. Don't worry, I still have your emails, I just need some time to do this. ...

As promised, here's part 2 of my MvC3 Team Combos. This is basically all stuff that I've come up with since I made the first video.

In the first video, I kept every single combo realistic. In other words, they were all real combos that are useful, and I do in real matches, consistently. This time, I took a few liberties in a few combos, and added in a few things that I wouldn't consider consistent/realistic for real matches. For example, a Crazy Dance DHC glitch, and a few Acid Rains here and there. However, even in the few cases where I used Acid Rain loops, I kept it "realistic" by only doing it in the corner (the Ammy to Dante DHC always takes you to the corner), and limiting it to two reps, which is considered "universal," since Acid Rain reps are character specific.

Anyway, hope you guys enjoy this one as much as you did the last one. More stuff is coming! Again, if you wanna see these combos in action, come by our stream every Monday (9PM EST) and Thursday (7PM EST). Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and of course the Justin.tv page to be notified when we go live!

Just wanted to remind everyone that we're running our usual Throwdown Thursday stream tonight. However, it will unfortunately also be Timothy's last stream. Sadly, Timothy has to leave us for a while, so to wish him farewell, tonight's stream will be focused on him. We'll likely do a Timothy Gauntlet, some FT5/10 exhibition matches, and maybe even some live training mode exhibitions and/or QA sessions.

So if you've enjoyed Timothy's work, definitely come by the stream tonight and watch his last matches for a while, and make any requests of what you want to see!

The response to Timothy's play on the stream was awesome, especially once the videos got released. So, (in very mayoral fashion) to give the people what they want, Timothy worked with me to record some of his amazing combos and setups with his team of Haggar, Doctor Doom, and Spencer.

One or two of the combos are a little strict and unreliable for a real match, but almost everything you see Timothy is doing on a regular basis. So if you like what you see, and want to see how he applies it, make sure to tune into the stream Mondays and Thursdays!

More stuff soon!

Man, been a while since we've had an update, huh? After Marvel came out, I know things have been kinda slow around here, and I'm gonna make an effort to change that. New SSF4 content probably wont happen until AE drops, because honestly, what's the point? So instead, I'll be doing some MvC3 videos. There are still no plans to implement any kind of "Marvel section" or anything to the site, but our youtube will still house tons of MvC3 match videos and strategy/combo videos.

So to start, I'm filling the most common request I get, every time we stream: people wanted me to make a video showing my Dante combos, with notation. Done and done. I even went a step further and did a video of team combos for all my characters. The transcript is in the video's description.

Hope you guys enjoy. If you wanna see these combos in action, check out our stream every Monday (9PM EST) and Thursday (7PM EST). Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and of course the Justin.tv page to be notified when we go live!