Has Phil ever addressed why he is still so average at a game franchise he has been playing for close to 30 years? I just can't imagine 'dedicating' so much time and money into something and still being mediocre.
He's not even average at a game franchise, he's just above average in skill at one specific version of a game in that franchise. Now I know this has probably been said thousands of times already, but for as much as he bigs himself up by saying that he's got good fighting game fundamentals his fundamentals are actually trash because they only really apply for Super Turbo. The more far away a new fighting game he plays is from Super Turbo the more of a visible skill gap there is gonna be between him and those Day 1 Scrubs when those Day 1 Scrubs start figuring out the game a bit more and become Week 2 Scrubs. Notice how when he was destroying scrubs in the first 2 Shun streams he said that he liked VF because it's an "old-school fighter" with "old-school fundamentals", but during the post-ragequit cope rant suddenly the game became a "mahdernized fighter and I don't like those"? Funny how whether a game is old school or mahdernized depends on whether Phil is currently winning or losing, huh?
He can't learn anything by himself and never was able to, you need to tell him every solution to every possible problem or he'll bitch about how there's nothing he can do and how the game sucks and doesn't explain anything, even if the game has an actual tutorial mode. He went through VF5US's tutorial mode and he couldn't even remember how sidesteps work. I wasn't kidding when I said that Tee Carter (RIP) the guy he credited with teaching him Super Turbo was like a proto-streamchat in that he probably had to tell him which move to use to beat another move in a specific situation. Phil can't learn like a human, he can't learn to apply a thing he's learned in a variety of scenarios, he can only learn like a machine and reproduce what he's been programmed to do.
In the last part of my autistic rant, I'll talk about how whenever he gets blown up he feels narcissistic injury because his self-image of this robust mature fighting game master with good fundamentals gets shattered, after which we get narcissistic rage where he accuses other people of things he himself is guilty of. When he started getting blown up in VF he accused other players of being spammers and mashers who don't mean to do the things they do. That's exactly what Phil is. He doesn't understand that there's such a thing as "turns" in fighting games and that you better not press any attack buttons when you're at a heavy disadvantage and you're supposed to be on the defensive, or you'll get countered. Remember this?
Virtua Fighter also can expose someone's inputs, but that would require someone who played him to have saved the replay file and then upload it, otherwise we can't access it. However, there is kind of an indirect way of seeing someone's inputs, or more precisely seeing whether they were pressing attack buttons before they got hit or not. Virtua Fighter put in ways to tell while you're fighting whether you for example performed a correct sidestep or not. If you sidestep correctly, your character will grunt, if you don't, your character will be silent. That way you don't have to wait and visually confirm if you're going to sidestep your opponent's move correctly, it immediately shows if you're gonna do it by making your character grunt.
Similarly, there's a visual way to tell whether you've been hit with a normal hit or you were pushing buttons and got countered. If it's a normal hit, your character will flash yellow, if it's a counter, it'll flash red. In the latter case, you were pushing buttons when you shouldn't have. There is only one situation where attacks hit as counter hits even if you didn't push attack buttons, that's if you get hit after getting staggered (the stick wiggle indicator will show up on the screen in that case) or if you get hit by a move while you're still recovering from getting hit by Jean's 66P move, which is a unique pseudo-stagger.
I think the second match against the Wolf player he fought shows off his scrubby mashing the best, I'll timestamp it here. Just look how many times Phil keeps flashing red because he's addicted to pushing buttons on wake up or even AFTER ALREADY GETTING HIT BY ANOTHER MOVE NOT EVEN A SECOND EARLIER!
Timestamp is 1:45:17 in case it doesn't work
