Paragon Fury said:
So having played BB:CP...I'm not entirely sure I'm digging the style of BB games now. A lot of visual noise, and flow seems very...weird. Also, looking through the controls - where is my basic grab and my command grabs, to get people when they turtle and block spam? (Maybe that is the point in BB and I'm just too used to punishing consecutive blocks with grabs in games like SF and DoA).
Are you sure you did the tutorial? Cause they explain the grabs in them. Grabs and airgrabs are done by pressing BC, you also have backgrabs with 4BC which have different properties outside of simply putting your foe behind you. Finally, unlike SF, you have a reactable window to tech grabs in BB, and you can also do mid-combo grabs which have a HUGE techable window as opposed to normal green grabs which you shouldn't do but if you do land one of those it does unscaled damage. Point basically is you gotta be ready to always tech while being comboed just in case someone tries to get a purple grab in cause in the end of combos a purple grab adds as much damage as like 2 supers.
Command grabs are special moves but not all chars have those, just go through the command list to see if they do. As for the flow and visuals, yeah, a lot of stuff happens and you need very high awareness of all parts of the screen as well as a general understanding of the places that people can get to such that you do not get surprised when, say, Valkenhayn turns into a wolf and flies off the top of the screen.
As for opening people up, you mainly use overheads, not grabs, to do that. Of course, when you fight the AI which reads your inputs, as I explained above, it'll have superhuman reflexes so overheads will SEEM not as effective but when fighting actual humans, overheads are the go to moves for opening people who defend a lot.
BB discourages turtling through the negative penalty system. If you back away a lot you enter a state where you lose out all of your resources and you take double damage and to exit the state you have to do offensive actions such as hitting buttons or moving forward.