Super Street Fighter IV – How to Quickly Spam Charge Attacks

With charge characters, there's not much you can do to hide the fact that you are charging (for the most part, sliding input buffers allow you to mask charge somewhat).

However, this is part of the balance of the game, moves that require a charge such as this usually have quick recovery time.

In your specific example, Guile has the fastest recovery time in the game with his projectiles (outside of Seth).

Ryu (even though he has a great projectile) has some recovery time and you can punish him easier than you would Guile.

Speaking about Guile specifically, you can perform a Sonic Boom and retain the charge for the Flash Kick. If you hold the controller down and back, the charge counts for both down and back. If you perform the Sonic Boom like so:

Then you'll be able to perform the Sonic Boom while still retaining the charge for the Flash Kick. If someone jumps late enough, since you still have the joystick in the down position and retain the charge for the Flash Kick.

Note that joysticks with square gates make this much easier to perform than on pad (with a square gate joystick, you can move the stick along the bottom edge, as opposed to a pad where you have to roll your thumb across the D-pad or roll the thumbstick, which is round).

I can only answer from my experience of playing on the PC, some of this may or may not apply.

1. The timing of everything in SF is based on frames rather than actual elapsed time. If you are on the PC like me, the first thing you'll want to do is to make sure that vsync is on and that you are getting a steady frame rate of 60 fps. If your frame rate fluxuates, it will become extremely hard to land any difficult combos with any degree of precision.

2. I've found that while getting the timing down (to build up muscle memory), it helps a lot to look for specific animation motions rather than trying to sense the time. Specific example: for Fei Long's bread and butter Rekkukyaku - standing fierce - Shienrenkyaku combo, it was extremely difficult to get the combo down until I started watching Fei Long's legs during the Rekk recovery. I eventually learned that at the exact moment when his legs crossed after the attack was the moment I should be hitting the fierce to continue the chain. After a few times of watching that to get the timing down, it became much easier to do.

3. For linking, you may want to practice them outside of really long chains in order to get a feel for them.

4. There is a technique called plinking that can lengthen the number of frames to link your combos but the only way you can get this down is by pure habit and muscle memory. Plinking doesn't really apply for trials as the extra buttons will consider the chain lost, but it should be used in actual matches.

5. Finally, when in an actual fight you have to decide ahead of time the combo you are planning to use should your initial hit succeed. There is really no time to decide you want to work in a FADC into the combo once you've started.

Here is an example for plinking: