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!

Hello everyone! I'm here with some exciting stuff: the announcement of our first Snapback Saturday! I know we have briefly mentioned on the stream here and there and we made an official announcement about it a couple of weeks ago on our Mixup Monday stream but we haven't had the chance to work out all the details until recently.

That being said, Snapback Saturday I will be our first official tournament, with stream! This is our initiative to do so. This also arose out of lack of much initiative from our community to host tournaments themselves. We took it upon ourselves to not only host this first one and hopefully many others to come, but also more importantly stream it!

This goes out to all of you OS'ers. We need your help. For anyone that watched us on a regular basis that is local to us, please join us on 4/16/11 for a day full of hype and entertainment, along with meeting all of us as well! For all of you that are not local, please tune in to the first Snapback Saturday stream that will be going on the day of the tournament. ...

Last night's stream was going great...until our LAN center completely lost internet, and it never came back. They called their provider and a technician is going over there today to figure out the problem, but unfortunately for us, that meant the stream cut out suddenly, and never came back. Thanks to anyone who saw my tweet and helped out by letting people know what was going on. They'd been having internet issues recently, but only where the internet would cut out for a minute and then come right back, so I thought we'd be back up in a few minutes. So my apologizes for anyone that stuck around waiting, but it was out of my control.

However, beyond that, the stream went well, and it was great to meet up with 8ighty 6ix and play some games in person! I'm looking forward to lots more Thursday streams. Their format will vary from week to week depending on where we stream from and how many people show up, so be prepared for that. If you tuned in a week ago Thursday, it was a much smaller session, and we had a mic by the players so it was a little different. I liked that a lot, and we'll definitely do that again in the future when less people show up.

Another great Mixup Monday. Thanks to everyone who tuned in to watch some Marvel. We didn't get to SSF4 on the stream tonight, but honestly, the night flew by and before I knew it, it was past when I wanted to leave by. However, this Thursday will be the first official Throwdown Thursday, and it is likely we'll play some SSF4 like we did last Thursday Stream.

But anyway, the real reason I'm making this news post isn't about the stream, it's about past streams. If you've been watching us for a while, you probably know what a Servbot Fiesta is. If you don't, educate yourself real quick. This got brought up on the stream again tonight, and the idea was suggested that we make a shirt of it. This will happen. In fact, Tod Seitz (@tod9000 on twitter and www.thenicestuff.com), an awesome viewer, took the initiative out of no where and sent in his concept for the shirt.



Tod: I will be in touch in the next few days. This will happen.

Hey everyone,

Ryan and I have been discussing for some time that we need to make some changes. Along with our new layout, we also realized we should change what we stream. I know MvC3 is the new hotness, but it's getting stale very quickly. Everything has already been found and gets continuously exploited. We can't support a game like that.

As for SSF4, we don't have AE. There's no real point in playing Street Fighter if we don't have the latest version. Feels like we're selling ourselves short. Maybe we'll pick it back up when AE is released for consoles.

We're switching to Arcana Heart 3. I'm playing Kira. She's so baller. Basically the Haggar of the game. Get hype!

We'll see you then guys. Thanks for watching, and your continued support.

-sighrAx

Ok, first off, thanks to everyone who took some time to help think of names for the Thursday stream. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who was having trouble coming up with names and I appreciate the effort you guys made. There were some really good suggestions like "Think Tank Thursday" and "Throw Tech Thursday." However, ultimately, I didn't feel anything was better than the original idea of "Throwdown Thursday."

However, since that was the suggestion that sparked the whole idea, it leaves me with no winner, which would not be fair to all of you that suggested ideas. So, the winner is the name I liked the most, which I heavily debated on: "Thunderdome Thursday"! In the end, I just felt that our laid back casual Thursday stream could never live up to such an epic name, and would never do it justice. However, if we start doing events or tournaments in the future on Thursdays, brace yourself. ...

Of course tonight we'll be streaming Mixup Monday, which you can find at all the usual spots. I'm going to get there around 6:30-7PM EST, so look for the stream to start around then. I'm pretty sure I'm going to move up the official start time of Mixup Monday to 7PM, because I want to start ending a little earlier, like 2AM EST at the latest.

Besides that, you may have noticed there hasn't been much in the way of updates lately. That doesn't mean there's nothing going on, though. If things get quiet around here, it's likely because my time is being spent working on things in the background, which is the case lately. I'm aware of the lack of updates though, and I'm going to fix that real soon. I have scripts in my head for 2 In the Labs for Marvel that I'm going to try to get shot and released this week. Look for one around Wednesday...-ish, and then one at the end of the week. I also have the topic for one more after that, but I have to think about it a bit more. ...

Yesterday's stream was real fun. If you came by and watched some of it, you would have seen the tone of the stream was a little more laid back than our Monday stream. Smaller group of players, and we kept a mic by the players the entire day.

Also, we finally got SSF4 back on the stream. I was pretty accurate in my prediction of it taking about a month for the initial Hype of Marvel to die down enough for people to want to play SSF4 again.

It's hard to decide what to stream on Mondays, because I know there's definitely people (myself included) that want to see SSF4. However, I feel like right now, even the people that want to see SSF4 still enjoy watching Marvel, but people who want to see Marvel wont watch SSF4, so streaming Marvel pleases more people. It's a tough situation.

I'm going to get the Thursday stream back on the SRK calendar, and add it to our Gamescast schedule, so we'll hopefully have a bigger audience next time, but this one was kind of a final test run anyway. If you want a taste of what you missed, here's a pair of highlights I uploaded of myself vs Simply Ph33r in Marvel. ...

Just got to ZP and about to start streaming. Right now, Kelso and I are just messing around in training mode, but we're gonna start playing some casuals soon. Come by the stream and hang out with us.

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

Just a quick reminder that we're streaming tonight, and I'm going to head out early again today. Not sure exactly when I'll start, but I'm gonna aim for about 6:30 EST. Will probably be mostly, if not all Marvel again tonight. As always you can catch the stream here on the site, on Justin.tv, or on Gamescast.tv.

See you tonight!

Lots of stuff!

First off, my In the Lab video for my Marvel team is finally up! Had to upload it to youtube a few times, so it took longer than expected. If you're interested in my team or its characters (Amaterasu, Hsien-Ko, Dormammu) check it out!

Second, we're about to start streaming! I want to start getting back into streaming Thursdays, so now that Final Round is off my mind, I'm going to focus on this more, starting with tonight. I was going to start streaming earlier in the day, but..

It's my birthday today! So come say Happy Birthday to me on the stream here, on OS, on Jtv, or on Gamescast! We have a small group here and we're going to play casuals and just try new stuff. I have some new stuff for my team to try, and Flash will be debuting his Iron Man!

See you guys on stream!