Didn't feel like playing Strive [having fun at least, stuck bouncing between floors 8-10 and occasionally failing miserably on my Celestial challenges because I don't deserve to be there and I just got lucky beating up people on floor 10], and Melty is pissing me off [I'm genuinely bad at it, but like, dumb nonsense also keeps happening mid match and I don't feel like I'm actually learning anything while fighting people], so I popped in
KOF2002 Unlimited Match.
Still lost a bunch [many matches came maddeningly close], but man, I needed that. Yeah, there are still some ridiculously weird hitbox interactions [man, Athena's air dive attack has a disturbing tendency to just push harmlessly against some attacks], there's a ton of 2002-era nonsense despite all the improvements [nearly every day back when I played original KOF2002, I saw new and unique hitbox bullshit and just had to accept that the game was utterly baffling], but good lord, it's at least familiar nonsense.
I really need to practice again. Gotta get my damage up since I really don't capitalize on anything properly, gotta do less unsafe garbage [whether with intent or on accident -- why does Bao's ground blanka ball thing suck so much compared to the air version, I basically lose the round if I mess up and don't tiger knee it because it's the most free thing with YEARS of recovery lmao], and I gotta find a third character because like, Athena and Bao can do stuff because they're extremely agile and have really good keepaway and mixup options and stuff that is
absurdly active [people keep running into Athena's foot on her divekick roll thing lol], and then whoever I pick as my third just eats shit.
I used to be better with Kula, couldn't land any of my actual combos on anyone. Played K' with my friends, but they were loads worse than online players, so he died even more easily too.
Also, I really need to learn that stupid max mode combo Bao has, where he repeatedly does the reflect ball to keep you juggled for days. It's so dumb, but it's so good.
It's also wild just how much better the netcode is in 02UM vs Melty and the only bad matches I had were also around 250 ping. No one wants to crank the delay past 1 frame and I cannot blame them, but it also does mean that once you're rolling back more than 6 frames, things stop being particularly reactable because everything you're doing is based on reads/guessing.
Also, playing some more KOF again really has me excited for KOF15 now. It's been too long.