Although I didn't plan on going to this tournament at DIZeLAN , even up to the day before, pending other plans, general laziness, and reluctance to (for the first time) enter a tournament using a character other than T.Hawk, something told me I had to do it. I have to give credit to Hugo101 and WonderChef for inspiring me to go by asking for a ride there to test their skills in SSF4:AE, MK9, and MvC3. I only the other hand, was only interested in SSF4: AE. This would be a significant event for me because as I said, would not be using the character I have entered every single tournament since the release of SSF4 (unlike SF4 which of the two or three tournaments I entered, used Ryu).
Hugo101 and I picked up WonderChef and arrived around 11:30. DIZeLAN is an 80 mile round-trip drive so it would be a full day event for us. Joe and BeeJay had just opened up shop and they were still setting up stations. I had to get practicing as soon as possible. I thought the tournament for SSF:AE was scheduled to start at 12 but instead MvC3 came first. This worked out positively for me as I was able to get an hour or so of practice in with Yun and Fei Long. Yun is a new character that is widely recognized as the best in the game. Fei Long is a top tier character (modeled after Bruce Lee) as well, possibly 2nd or 3rd best at this point in time of the ever transitioning tier list.
At first I thought I would play with Yun, then switch to Fei if I lost. The point was not to fall back on T. Hawk. I even registered in the tournament as "No More T. Hawk". I would be using Fei for the first time in a tournament, and possibly for the first time ever ("day one Fei") as I had only tried a few things with him in training mode in the months past. During practice, I felt I learned quite a bit, getting into the motions of muscle memory and and setting patterns down. Some other players were helping me out too. One o'clock rolls around and the tournament begins.
My first matchup I actually don't remember what happened or who I played except that it ended in a loss. It's a total blank. However my second match was against a player who was at his first tournament, new to the game, and using one of the new characters, Oni. We shared one thing in common with our new character choices. I defeated him and went on to my next match against someone who knew multiple characters so I didn't know what to expect. He chose Sagat, and we went all three games and I lost by a hair. Interestingly, I was hardly disappointed but instead content with how I played for only having played Fei for a couple hours. One of the other players was eager to see me play and insisted that I should have won the match. Thanks for the reassurance, wish it would have turned out that way. It was nice to have someone admire a day one Fei.
Yes, I'm hopping on the supposed bandwagon and moving to a top tier character. Some frown upon people who switch and others like the talented Shizza see it in a much more realistic sense. At ReveLAtions, Shizza told me he felt that if you're losing, you should switch and that the majority of other players aren't even seriously paying attention to your decisions-so who cares? T. Hawk takes too much effort and I'll explain this in a future post. For now, he's on the farthest back burner.
One thing that I love about Fei is that Flamekick shortcut (F,B,F,K) this makes it very easy to anti-air an opponent. At this early stage I feel his speed allows me to be more coordinated, it's as if I have cat like reflexes especially with the shortcut. I don't know any of his matchups or specifics so this makes it hard to elaborate on how I played in the tournament. He seems to be a counter character and I think I should be effective with him. Off to study Mago from Japan, and hopefully get some practice from XBlades and Hugo101.
One more thing- sorry IkeTakeda, we were too far out when you called. Next time.
(For the time, I'll format my posts so that the title will contain the event and dates and in parenthesis, will note my wins or losses. In this case, I lost my first and second matches, hence L-L. )
ReveLAtions appears to be the brainchild of Mr. Alex Valle and Tournament Legacy events. It was held at the Proud Bird restaurant, a historical venue in El Segundo near the LAX airport. This marked the first event and I assume we'll see another one next year, similar to most major tournaments that occur annually. The 3 day event held tournaments for several games and hosted many sponsors. Though the tournament processions started on Friday with teams for SF4:AE (Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition) among other games, but I did not register with a team and didn't come down to spectate. Instead I stayed at home, practiced a bit and relaxed to get some rest for Saturday which hosted the singles events for SF4 and Mortal Kombat (MK9) which I didn't play in, but read on for more on that later.
About the event itself- I especially admire the thought that went into the featured sponsors at the event that included a masseuse, the representatives from Power Anime (I think), Dynaflex (a hand and forearm strengthening tool-interestingly enough I owned one of these in 1999), Broken Tier, Autumn Games the developers of an upcoming title Skullgirls, Hori, MadKatz, and HitBox, the makers of arcade sticks. It was also according to Mr. Alex Valle, the first major to immediately payout the winnings after the tournament, and for SF4 offered a prize of $10,000. There was also a raffle spanned over all of the days with multiple drawings.
I awoke Saturday in a hurry and started with some breakfast. I prepared for the day with some snacks, my BrokenTier stick bag and jumped in the car for a 20 minute trip on the 405S. I made sure to have my online registration receipt on hand so that I could get in quickly. Upon arrival around 9AM I received my name tag / event lanyard. Of course, I ran into some fellow players, including UltraDavid whom I had an awkward conversation (only because it was in the men's restroom) about the Casey Anthony case. He's a lawyer so I thought he might have been interested in it. Turns out he's not too keen on media circus cases. Nevertheless I always look forward to the opportunity to talk with David as he's a nice guy and thoughtful. As I walked around and met with other players I reminisced about prior tournaments and waited for the doors to open.
SF4 was scheduled to start at 10AM but like nearly all tournaments, had a delay of 30-60 minutes while player counts were verified and people stumbled in. There was very little time to practice- maybe 10 minutes but you had to be quick to get on a station (of which there were only 8) and find an opponent. I didn't get time to practice (more on practicing in a later blog post) but instead attempted to warm my muscles up by doing the motions on my arcade stick. This isn't really a good substitute for warming up but it's better than nothing.
I was called and went up against Prodigy, an 8 year old who shows a lot of potential at such a young age. Prodigy uses M. Bison (Dictator) a nimble character with ways to keep distance and also pressure. By the way - I use the character T. Hawk, a high damage output grappler who unfortunately has difficulty in many aspects of the game. Look for another post in the future with my thoughts on Hawk.
From what I can recall he took the first set (3 rounds, 2-3 matches/sets), I took the second and lost in the third. I lost and made some obvious mistakes. At the beginning of each round, he seemed distracted and wasn't looking at the screen. Because of his age I tried to be fair and wait for him to focus on the match. I've made this mistake before with younger players and have lost because of my empathy. I could have changed the pace of the match if I hadn't waited. I noticed that he had some robotic patterns and I attune this to his underdevelopment of the ability to create mind games and provoke responses that he could take advantage of. I became more confident and only slightly aware of his patterns in the second match and was able to take a win. I was unable to remember what the appropriate responses were to his actions to take a victory in the 3rd match so I failed to react to some of his jumping attacks and mistimed my counters when I did think to react. When the fight was over I shook his and his guardian's hands and gave him praise. He went on to win a couple more matches from what I can remember but was later eliminated. A friend, Hugo101 who was observing attributed my loss to nervousness and distraction. One fight down, and unfortunately 1 more to go-but it had strings attached.
When I lose a match in a tournament I tend to get in my own head and stress out. Nobody likes a loss and I often wonder how most people deal with it. While discussing this with fellow players I got the feeling I was being laughed at for losing to such a young player. That's fine, a little teasing I found funny but embarrassing. Wolfkrone who was near, definitively found it amusing. I was assured by some other players that losing to Prodigy wasn't anything to be sad about as he's a good player and had beat other well known players in the past.
While I waited for my second match I talked with other players and watched some of their matches. One player, Hungbee, is a fellow T. Hawk user that I eagerly wait to watch at other events. I missed both of his matches which ended in losses (Toxy from Australia - Akuma and a player that I don't know his name who used Chun-Li). I'm excited to talk with him about the character but this time I found it disappointing that he didn't seem interested in my request for his help and observation of my matches. I wanted him to watch me play but that didn't pan out.
About an hour later I was called for my second match against a player who I had recently defeated at a tournament at FFA (Family Fun). This match actually appeared to be invalid- in a sense as what seems to be a mistake made by the bracket runners. Without going into too much detail there was a strong possibility that I was supposed to play another opponent instead, as I was called later in the day to fight my supposed second match. My opponent picked one of the newcomers to SSF4:AE, Yun, which on paper, is in my favor. I was defeated in the 3rd match after winning in the second. When I played him at the FFA tournament he picked Sakura and I won with a convincing lead. This time, he adjusted well and took the win. I wasn't as frustrated with this loss (well, a little) for a couple reasons. My competitiveness with him is light and somewhat amusing so I didn't feel steamrolled and we were able to talk a little afterwards. When the issue came up with the brackets he was also cool enough to try and help me out.
Being eliminated from the tournament I went on to again watch my friends play and wondered around until the MK9 tournament started.
When I signed up for Revelations I entered for MK9 and at the time planned on stepping my game up at a level to at least attempt to compete. However I hadn't touched the game in weeks and was in no condition to even bother trying. I heard my name called by the bracket runner and very hesitantly walked over to the MK9 booth and ran into Chago, a player I had met through a tournament in Long Beach a few weeks back. Chago is a great person and a strong player. I explained to him that I wasn't interested in playing and that I was going over to announce my forfeit. He then had the great idea of transferring my spot to Wonder Chef another player who I had met a few months back. I happily agreed to this. "Chef" did not have the means to enter but was beyond eager to play so this worked out perfectly. He was grateful and did well in the tournament, progressing to top 8. He thanked me many times for the opportunity. Well played! As the matches continued, I nervously watched and rooted for my friend Hugo101, a very underrated player who was determined to succeed in MK9. He made it to top 8 but wasn't able to make it through the finals on Sunday.
Around this time the top 16 event started for SF4 and the majority of the attendees gathered around the main stage to watch the exciting competition. When that ended, the MvC3 (Marvel vs. Capcom 3) event started and I wondered off, tired and almost ready to go, but instead unable to stay away from the action, got to play some games with NeroFenix who had his own Xbox setup in the lobby. It was nice to run into him as I hadn't seen him in quite some time. Although I find MvC3 somewhat interesting, I think the game is too hard. People always find that shocking to hear but it's a very random game and trying to make it not random takes much more skill than succeeding by being random.
Finally deciding to go, I gave Hugo101 a ride home and chatted about the day's events.
Sunday consisted of the finals for each game. While the top 8 was exciting, the final 4 didn't have nearly as much tension and energy in the audience as the finals at West Coast Warzone or SoCal Regionals. Even though the contenders were the heavyweights of the fighting game community, Daigo (Yun) and Mago (Fei Long), I think people were ambiguous to the character choices. They are considered the best in the game and it's rarely exciting to watch a game where the most overpowered characters compete. Sort of like watching someone go through the game with a cheat code. It would have been nice to see more variety in the top 4 or have an underdog fight for the title. Some may disagree, but I think the finals would have been more exciting if Justin Wong or Alex Valle were in the top 8. Speaking of Valle, I think he deserves a win at a major. He's been competing for years, is a prominent figure, and works hard for the fighting game community. I guess those aren't really valid reasons to deserve a win, but it's got to be his time at some point.
After trying my hand in the last raffle and going home empty handed I left, hoping I could get some sleep before waking up at 4:30AM for work on Monday.
In closing, I felt the tournament was a great success, but a couple things detracted from the experience. One was that there were only 8 stations for SF4 and Mvc3. This slowed things down. Nobody wants to wait around for hours, not knowing when they will be called for their matches. I'm hoping I can think of a way to better organize the events and make the whole experience more structured. Another issue was the bracket incident for my fights. Something went wrong and changed my chances at the tournament. Also, I find it totally obnoxious and nonsensical that some of the vendors charge more for their products at an event like this. The goal is to make sales and being provided a great direct to consumer opportunity shouldn't be thrown away. The Hitbox arcade controller is overpriced. It should be much more in line with the TE stick prices. Lastly, the entry fee totaled $63.00. I heard a few complaints about this but I can understand where the cost may have been factored. $50 for the base plus two games would have sat well with me. $63 made me cautiously click the "Pay" button on Pay-Pal.
Until next time,
Welcome to my fighting game journal/blog.
About myself. I'm 28 and have lived in Southern California for most of my life. I grew up near many arcades and was introduced to my first modern fighting game, Street Fighter in 1991, probably at Del Amo mall at Aladdin's Castle or at the KeyStone Lanes bowling alley. I used to go with my Grandmother every Friday night when she bowled on a league and was give a few bucks to play arcade games. Street Fighter caught my attention because of it's complexity; special moves, combos and glitches were fascinating. I remember seeing Guile's "handcuffs" glitch there for the first time. I liked Blanka and Guile at the time but being so young I didn't have any idea how to play.
I've played fighting games off and on throughout the years, my favorites being SF, KI, and MK.
Interestingly enough, my father also played Street Fighter and as I found out only recently that he introduced my cousin to the game when he was younger. It's funny how things run in the family. Or is that just coincidence?
My intent with this blog is to discuss my experiences with fighting games and cover some of my history with them. I'll try to cover each event that I've participated in with what details I can remember and the outcome of the matches. Thanks to Google Calendar I've been able to keep some notes.
