[quote name='JEKKI']real talk, these are the 2nd and 3rd dumbest things Ive read all day.
first off, the trials are not useless. They give you situations which are possible within the SF4 engine and thus provide the player the opportunity to learn the execution to perform said combos, ultimately granting the player a better understanding of the system overall.
in regards to the info on SRK, all coz something was discovered in 2009 doesnt mean it doesnt work today. It's not like time evolves the input for a freakin hadouken

[/QUOTE]
Thanks JEKKI, I'll go bash my head against a brick again for the next twelve hours. That'll surely make me a better SF4 player.
I maintain that the trials are useless, because there's no indication of timing or your inputs, so it's hard for them to TEACH you anything. You either have to figure it out by brute force of 1200 tries in a row or hope someone put something up on youtube to help you try to glean the timing you should be aiming for. At least the older Tekken training modes had training to show you the timing for the moves or combos... I believe the newer Blazblue does too. But SF4 and SSF4? Good luck, man.
As an example, I was attempting trial 10 with Chun and I can do the first part of the combo, but I can't figure out the timing on the m.sbk. Without fail, I jump, hold down, execute the first two hits and immediately try to buffer the m.sbk, but I can't get it and I've been too annoyed to try to check anything timing-wise on youtube. Meanwhile, I moved on to trial 11 and I can do the entire thing up to the EX.sbk. I suppose I've learned (as stated below) a string which I *can* use in normal play, but still, I want to learn how to do complete combos, not half-assed partial combos.
Besides, while you may figure out portions of things that could be used in actual gameplay, the general consensus I've read on the trials (SRK and elsewhere) is that most of the trials don't teach you viable combos for actual use -- they might teach you theory or timing, I suppose... but without something to help you figure out that stuff, you're still probably effed in the a.
[quote name='kainzero']i don't like it when people say they've been playing SF since whenever.
there are people who have been playing since last year that are already way better than people who played SF since it started.
combos: nothing has really changed since the game came out. you should be able to do trial mode combos easily. some of them are impractical but generally combos take like an hour to learn and then you can already play against people. ken's basic one is something like c.lpx2 - hp shoryuken, don't do the shoryuken if the opponent blocks.
honestly to be better than most people all you need to do is--
1- know your combos
2- know how to tech throws and use throws
3- anti-air whenever they jump in for free[/QUOTE]
That's the problem. From everything I've read about SF4 combos, they're much different than the old SFIIT(HDR) combos because of the whole linking frames rather than having inputs cancel into the next move in most cases. When I end up open and someone decides to combo with Ken and it's got a bunch of jabs/shorts/tatsus and takes 1/3 of my life -- that's what I'm looking to learn. The best thing I found so far was the event hub character pages for the game... for some reason the stuff I found in the character forums at SRK are usually either hard to understand or too complex for my current skill level. Though if what Uraizen/distgfx and panzer has been saying is accurate, I'd have enough input lag in online play to not be able to hit the links half the time anyway, so I'm not sure why I'm bothering at this point... ^___^
And I only mentioned that I've been playing for x amount of years so that Jimbo would know I wasn't new to the SF basics. I in no way intended that to come out as "I'm really

ing good at older SF games because I'm old and played them since they came out." Sorry.
