Saturday 14 August 2010

Street Fighter: The Beast is Unleashed

Daigo Umehara (梅原 大吾 Umehara Daigo, born 19 May 1981), is a renowned Japanese arcade fighting video game player. He specializes in 2D arcade fighting games, mainly those released by Capcom. Known as "Daigo" or "The Beast" in the west and "Umehara" or "Ume" in Japan.

Daigo is most famous for the dramatic comeback video clips on YouTube, his most famous being the Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike competition at Evolution 2004 held in the USA. Daigo made a dramatic comeback against Justin Wong's Chun-Li. In the final round of match 1, Daigo's Ken was down to his last pixel of vitality. At this point, any special attack would knock Daigo's character out if connected, since special attacks deal chip damage even when blocked. In an attempt to win the round, Wong attempted to hit Daigo's Ken with Chun-Li's multihit Super Art move "Hou Yoku Sen" (鳳翼扇).  However, instead of avoiding it, Daigo chose to "Parry," a technique whereby an incoming attack is blocked without the player losing any health, but by doing so requires moving toward opponent's direction in the same time a hit lands. After the move was launched, not only were all fifteen hits Parried, but Daigo also managed to get into a good position to unleash his own Super Art Move thus knocking Chun-Li out instead. This moment was recorded and later spread on the Internet, gaining immense popularity and is now considered one of the greatest video game moments of all time.

Here's the clip: (watch the crowd, in the bottom left hand corner, go insane)




If you know anything about Street Fighter you'll know just how awesome the display of skill on show here is.

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