The question is, can you combo two of Blanka's horizontal rolling attacks in SF2? Allowing bonus stage shenanigans, the answer is yes. This clip is from SSF2.
The trouble with Blanka balls is the lengthy recovery during which he bounces up and back. Connecting meaty doesn't help because the recoil doesn't begin until impact. (And if there's no impact, there's no recoil.) All of Blanka's ball attacks and Cammy's cannon spike have this effect.
The key to this combo is using the bonus stage oil drums to make a ceiling over Blanka and nearly eliminate the recovery. This presents a new problem, however: back charge moves require serious precision on bonus stages because holding back or downback causes you to turn around. The techniques to get around this rely on charging during states that don't allow turning around, such as jumping, the execution of another move, or blockstun. Once the move is fully charged, you can continue holding the back direction and execute it facing backwards, or turn around and aim it in front the usual way.
Keeping an eye on charge timers with memwatch (using the addresses found in the recent research) was essential here. Memwatch told me immediately when charging failed so I could adjust the switch timings more easily. Because there's no combo meter in bonus stages and blocking is unreliable, you'll have to watch the video frame by frame to verify the combos.
0:12
Balrog hits with three chained low jabs, forcing Blanka to face right and allowing leftward charge. They have to be crouching jabs because Blanka reels way back from head-level attacks. If Blanka had started holding left on just the right frame he could have blocked, but it makes no difference for charging. The number of jabs should be kept to a minimum to avoid pushing Balrog back too far.
0:13
Blanka recovers from the hits and does R+HP, but for some reason the ball goes left anyway. If the ball had been executed one frame earlier it would have gone rightward, but it would escape the cave and undergo full recovery. Balrog reaches into the active space with the startup of his s.HP and ends up reeling the wrong way, because this is a backward facing attack. Strangely, if Balrog had tried to just walk into it, he would enter guard stance and the ball would miss because of the way he leans back while blocking. Blanka undergoes impact freeze twice, once from slamming into the drums and again from hitting Balrog. This gives extra time to charge, but it turned out to be unnecessary.
0:14
Blanka recovers from the ball and does a c.MK still holding right, then immediately switches to charging left. The kick goes right because that was the direction held when it was pressed. When it recovers, the charge for the next ball still isn't complete and another filler attack is needed. But any attack is going to go leftward because left is being held. Here's where tool assistance is really required: When you press back to turn around, it takes a few frames to happen and you don't lose charge immediately. (In fact, if you alternate holding left and right for two frames each, you can charge fully from neutral stance.) Blanka presses right briefly for R+MP then immediately resumes charging left. Finally, the first hit of R+MP is canceled into HP ball. Getting the three hits before the second ball to not dizzy required some luck.
0:16
During the horizontal ball recovery, Blanka holds left and, still holding left, executes an LK rainbow ball. Balrog's swaying dizzy animation leans into it just before it goes out of range, causing him to reel the wrong way into a second hit of it. Rainbow ball can naturally hit multiple times so that's not special, but the bizarre setup is.
0:20
The next combo relies on an odd trait of close/far attacks, so Balrog demonstrates this just to make it clear. Even though he's almost pressing against crouching Blanka, his s.HP comes out as the far version, not close. This is because on bonus stages, only the distance to the stage targets determines proximity attacks.
0:21
Blanka does a HK vertical ball, which bounds off the leaning tower of drums and comes down spinning. Balrog crouches to get hit meaty (not really necessary), then Blanka links c.MK, close s.MP xx HK vertical ball. The behavior of vertical ball after SF2HF was changed so it only comes down spinning if it hit something on the way up. Comboing two V-balls in HF is trivial, but a setup like this is necessary in SSF2. In fact, the same setup could have been used to solve the original problem much more easily. Because Blanka is near some drums, the s.MP comes out as the near version even though Balrog is pushed pretty far by this time. The last noteworthy thing here how insanely fast the s.MP gets canceled. Canceling into HF or SSF2 vertical ball interrupts impact freeze, which only happens with a few other moves.
0:24
Now to show some other odd things that happen on bonus stages. Blanka charges back during the second V-ball recovery and launches a HK rainbow ball at the drums. If he gets burned by the flames on one particular frame, he gets instantly dizzy. No idea why. Furthermore, he recovers from the knockdown in an airborne state for some reason, so the dizzy is canceled immediately. The airborne state lasts a very short time but it's long enough to connect a nj.HP on the drums while falling. This particular move has zero startup.
0:26
Blanka lands and begins HP electricity, which sends drums flying, then turns to face Balrog. You still turn around in a bonus stage if you hold back during a rapid fire chain or Blanka's elec, even though neutral state is avoided. You can't turn around during Honda's hands or Chun Li's legs. It's a similar situation in the normal stages if the opponent crosses you during these moves. Blanka's weak point is his hands, and Balrog safely beats elec with far s.MP. Blanka gets pushed into the falling drum on the left and air reset to the right. (Falling drums cause reset while rolling barrels cause full knockdown.)
0:28
Balrog releases the TAP he's been storing and connects meaty, yielding more frame advantage than he knows what to do with. With the drum behind Blanka reducing pushback, you might think it's easy to connect repeated dash uppers, but between Blanka's terrible hitboxes, the need to wiggle around to preserve charge, and the slim frame advantage of rush punches, there's not a whole lot there. In this case, Balrog links a rush upper followed by far MK. In a normal stage, the MK only links on a few characters, and definitely not Blanka, because of the rush upper pushback. The combo could have continued but it's almost impossible to avoid dizzy after those three hits.
0:30
Meaty TAP linked into rush straight. Balrog agreed to be the dummy, but he wants that bonus and he's not letting Blanka's body get in the way.
Holy shit! This video is insane. You've masterfully exploited the bonus stage properties to come up with some really great combos. Thanks for the detailed explanation as well.
Posted by: Remxi | 06/19/2011 at 11:03 PM
Glad you liked it.
Posted by: dammit | 06/20/2011 at 11:47 PM