Get Your Tournament - Commentary
ROWLAND HEIGHTS - It was a fitting end to the Arcade Infinity Ranbats Season 2. Keno won the last tournament in the series to leave no doubt that he was the season champion. Only one person could catch him going into Sunday's competition.
While it stayed neck and neck, ComboJack couldn't make enough of a run to match Keno. And when the season title was secured, the tournament was still to be decided. Keno came back from the losers bracket to defeat Alex Valle in an entertaining title match. Here's a breakdown of the title match and other parts of tournament.
Title match result
First Final: Keno 2, Alex Valle 1
Second Final: Keno 2, Alex Valle 1
Tournament record
Keno 11-1, Alex Valle 5-2
Match breakdown
Rounds won: Keno 10 Alex Valle 6
First hit win percentage: Overall 62.5 percent, Keno 70.0 percent, Alex Valle 50.0 percent
Lead changes: 1
The title match was over when: Keno ultra'd through a hadouken in Round 2 of Game 2 in the second finals to win it. He had done it four times before in the title matches, including in the previous round where, with 65 seconds remaining, he passed through a hadouken to take the lead for good. Keno won the final four rounds in the match to seal the deal. Keno won seven matches in a row to get to the title match, and then he pulled off back-to-back wins against Alex Valle. At times during the finals, Keno did ultras and supers without a set-up, and sometimes from the other side of the screen. Early on, they were blocked. But the final two weren't.
Player of the tournament: Kevin Dino. He took Kai to the limit before falling in the winners bracket quarterfinals. Then he barely lost again to Mr. KOF in the match following. Yes he's the player of the tournament, but it was his match against Mr. KOF that was an ultimate head-scratcher, because spectators noted that he did not sit on the leads that he eventually gave up. Despite that, it was a notable 3-2 finish. Honorable mention goes to Tatsu for finishing third.
Other news and notes: The bracket was set up to where Keno and ComboJack would meet up in the first semifinals should they win out. But they were both derailed. ComboJack had faint hopes of capturing the season title, but Keno ran the table after losing his third match in the day. On the other side, Alex Valle was trying to win tournaments on consecutive days, a feat only done by a handful, including Valle. Also, the tournament was run on three stations, which led to a 10:05 p.m. finish. If you've been to an A.I. tourney, you know a 10 p.m. finish is almost unheard of. Outside of the tournament, two things were smile-worthy. It's up to you to decide which one gets the bigger smile: Teresa's support sign of Keno, or Sherry Jenix's "No You Cannot" T-shirt.
What's next: We'll have to find out from Shoo when the next Ranbats season will be.
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Sunday afternoon will be the Arcade Infinity Ranbats 2.6 tournament, which also could be called "The Keno Wins the Season and He Does His Victory Lap" tournament.
Only one person can still catch Keno (pictured, right) in the standings, that person being ComboJack. And the point differential is significant enough that this tournament could just be a formality for Keno being crowned season champ. So, with that in mind, here are three things I'm looking for during Sunday's ranbat tournament.
1. Location, location, location
Back to that championship season scenario. Keno has 24 points to lead the standings, and ComboJack is in second with 20 points. For those that are doing the where-do-they-have-to-finish discussion, I have it here for you. If they both place in the top eight (as they have for most of this season), then these are the scenarios:
- ComboJack wins the tournament. Keno must finish at least in fourth to win the season title.
- ComboJack finishes second. If Keno finishes in fifth, they both share the season title. If Keno finishes fourth or better, he wins the season title.
- ComboJack finishes third. If Keno finishes in seventh, they both share the season title. If Keno finishes fifth or better, he wins the season title.
For the most part, what I would hope for is a scenario where they meet up in the winners bracket quarterfinals, and thus the season title is decided right there. It hasn't happened that way lately; these two guys have met really late in tournaments; they went 1-2 in the last ranbat.
2. Battlefield of preference
I believe there has been a request to have a console version of the game available, to help speed up the tournament. If that's the case, then I wonder how many players will opt for that instead of the arcade cabs. However, the rule will be that no console characters can be used.
3. We're talking about practice?
I'm wondering how the players will use Saturday's tournament. Sure, everyone wants to win and/or improve, but out of the 50 that are competing, 48 have no shot of winning the season title. Will they treat it like just another tournament, or will they be trying out new things, considering that NorCal Regionals is just 20 days away after Sunday's tournament?
Picture by Kara Leung. no comments
HAWTHORNE - It was a fun time Saturday night at the Tekken 6 release party. There were plenty of goodies given out, and people were able to play the game for an extended period of time. But among the madness, there was a tournament. Aris finished off Iron Chef in an entertaining title match to win the single-elimination competition.
Click here to see a picture gallery from the event.
Here's a breakdown of the title match and other parts of tournament.
Title match result
Aris 2, Iron Chef 0
Match breakdown
Rounds won: Aris: 6, Iron Chef 4
First hit win percentage: Overall 80.00 percent, Aris 83.33 percent, Iron Chef 75.00 percent
Lead changes: 6
The title match was over when:
... despite having 10 percent health remaining, Aris swept in and rallied back in Round 5 of the second game to defeat Iron Chef and win the competition. It was close throughout and there was never more than a lead of 2 rounds. Aris almost went ahead 2-0 in the second game, nearly rallying from a 90-5 health deficit. But Iron Chef held him off.
Player of the tournament:
It has to be Aris. Single elimination tournaments, for the most part, can be a crapshoot because there's no room for error. Plus, there were a lot of well-known Tekken tournament players (the final four also had 725 and Suiken). The finals was the only match that was best of three.
Other news and notes:
For the Tekken community, this was their moment in the spotlight. A big crowd came on by and competed in casual or tournament play. Whether this big crowd turns into big attendance at tournaments remains to be seen. Perhaps we'll find out next month at the Triple Threat tournament here at HAX.
What's next:
The next notable event is the Triple Threat Tournament hosted by Active Gamers on Nov. 14 at HAX in Hawthorne. It's a direct tune-up for Northern California Regionals, which is scheduled for a week later.
Picture by Kelly Bracha. no comments
Aside from people being all giddy come Saturday with the Tekken 6 release party in Hawthorne, there is scheduled to be a tournament. We'll be there chronicling the event, so you won't miss anything important that happens. But before the tournament takes place, there's three things I'm interested in regarding this event.
1. The transition
Players have had their chance to play Tekken 6 before Saturday, whether it's at Super Arcade or Video 94. So to some players, the movement to Tekken 6 won't be a problem. For others, it might be.
As always with these arcade-to-console releases, I'm wondering how the transition will go. I'm sure it'll be flawless, but who knows what surprises are in store.
2. Two guys in the spotlight
I'm looking at two players to have some sort of impact at this tournament, should they compete. The first is MYK. He currently leads the Video 94 Ranbats standings and those results could translate over to future tournaments, including Saturday's competition.
The other player is Alex Valle. I'm sure followers of the fighting game genre have seen his exploits over the years and, most recently, in Street Fighter IV. Let's not forget he was the Tekken Tag Tournament U.S. champion. I'm sure a lot of people will pin him as one of the two finalists in Saturday's tournament. This might be the start of something special.
3. Character usage as always.
When I attended the last Video 94 ranbat a few weeks ago, it seemed that two characters were in use more than others: Xiaoyu and Lili. Now that was out of a small sampling of players in a tournament that really didn't have worldly implications.
Even in the past with other games, character usage among a small sampling of players has stuck. Just look at these two guys.
I don't think that small sampling will indicate a massive movement toward the two females. The character list is so rich. It'll take just one large-scale tournament (perhaps Saturday if it gets really big) for the character movement to begin.
We'll be live from the release party on Saturday at 6 p.m. for a 30-minute online show, so be sure to check us out as we get you in touch with some of the dignitaries from the event.
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I've known Carlos aka "Rebound" from previous competitive gaming events. He was in New York on Thursday night for the Capcom Fight Club event. In this commentary, he shares his personal thoughts on what he experienced at the fighting game event.
You can read more from Rebound on the Evil Geniuses site.
NEW YORK - Capcom held its second-ever Capcom Fight Club on Thursday night at an undisclosed location close to the legendary Chinatown Fair arcade. The event itself featured not only open stations for Street Fighter 4, but people were able to give a test run with Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. And of course, from the “It's gonna be Super” tagline alone, there was definitely some Super Street Fighter 4 action going on.
Despite images and Twitter statuses that implied that I should have arrived a lot earlier, I left my house a few minutes after 6:30 p.m., figuring that the line wasn't going to be very long. After all, Capcom Unity had initiated, and subsequently closed, sign-ups for the event.
So I believed that the event, while being public knowledge thanks to the Internet, was still going to be a somewhat intimate, private, and exclusive event. I was unfortunately mistaken. While there was a list of individuals who had signed up to attend, there was no physical list of names to weed out the random people who either knew of the location through word of mouth, or were hoping to get in through association a la “I'm with the band.”
As such, the location was already full to capacity, and the line to get in stretched (with the odd gap here and there to avoid loitering offenses) nearly around two corners, and stayed that way for much of my wait. I arrived at 7:30 p.m.
The long wait cause several individuals to eventually give up on trying to get in and instead, walking to Chinatown Fair. And because of the long wait, I was unable to see Justin Wong and Martin “Marn” Phan demoing Super Street Fighter 4. Sanford Kelly came and went from the event, and so he had a lot of information on what was actually going on inside.
Hired people from Capcom went through the line, handing out some of the things that were in the special gift bag: Officially licensed T-shirts, a Tatsunoko vs. Capcom towel, a licensed Street Fighter headband (red like Ryu's), and what appeared to be a mass reprint of an old Street Fighter II comic.
The other people in line and I talked about a lot of different things both relating to Street Fighter and otherwise, as we waited in line for what became three hours. Sometime after 10:30 p.m., I finally got into the event location itself.
The event was in a marketing company's gallery and encompassed two floors. The top floor had plenty of game stations where people were trying out TvC, playing Street Fighter IV, and Marvel vs. Capcom 2. The bottom floor of the building was exactly the same, only with more stations for games, and a DJ booth near the back.
This room was also where Sanford played Capcom community head Seth Killian in Super Street Fighter 4, as they (playing as Juri and T.Hawk, respectively) showed off some moves for the crowd. The entire demo lasted roughly 15 minutes, and some tidbits about the multiple ultras and other game changes were dropped. There was talk about T. Hawk's ultra being nerfed. Soon after, the organizers and staff closed up shop, and I left about 11:30 p.m.
Ultimately, in marketing and running Fight Club 2, Seth and Capcom only dropped the ball in only two ways, although they became significant issues later on. The first came in the marketing. From the tagline, to the posters, this event was being hyped as more of a Street Fighter and Super Street Fighter-centric event, with many people (myself included) hoping for new information regarding SSF4, such as a planned change to the game mechanics, or another character reveal.
What the event actually ended up becoming was a lot more generalized, with a higher percentage of TvC stations to SF stations. In fact, some people whom I talked to thought that the event was more for TvC rather than SSF4. Further, the demo as it was run was very similar to the footage now available on the Internet from the recent Tokyo Game Show.
No new characters were revealed, and only noncommittal answers to some of the yelled questions, such as “Will Guile finally be able to link into his Ultra?!" This left many people disappointed with the event as a whole, as the consensus was that it was things that were already known from watching YouTube videos of TGS.
The second, and more glaring error, was the way the event was handled from the beginning. After it was known that Capcom would be holding a second Fight Club, and after e-mails went out for those who had signed up, it inevitably came about that the rest of the Internet would know the location. This in of itself is not a problem, as the only reason people knew was presumably that they found out either from a friend, or a from a newspost such as the one on Kotaku.
However, none of the security individuals at the event had a physical list of the names of those who had signed up. So, even though I expected tighter security and brought photo ID for the occasion, I found that all I had to do was stand in line. The sudden influx of extra people made for a long and generally unsatisfying wait, for what ended up being more of the same things we had already seen.
Barring the actual content of the event itself, the fact that it didn't matter whether one was on the list or not ultimately blunted and removed any feeling of 'exclusivity' that those who did sign up felt. Even giving those who signed-up an earlier time to arrive, and letting the general public in later would have been a simple and effective solution to what ended up becoming an un-necesary problem with an otherwise fun event.
I did end up enjoying myself, and it was great meeting new players and talking shop. But, if they're going to have a list, make sure that they stick with that line of thought all the way through.
Pictures by Carlos Mercado. no comments
You can read more from Rebound on the Evil Geniuses site.
NEW YORK - Capcom held its second-ever Capcom Fight Club on Thursday night at an undisclosed location close to the legendary Chinatown Fair arcade. The event itself featured not only open stations for Street Fighter 4, but people were able to give a test run with Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. And of course, from the “It's gonna be Super” tagline alone, there was definitely some Super Street Fighter 4 action going on.
Despite images and Twitter statuses that implied that I should have arrived a lot earlier, I left my house a few minutes after 6:30 p.m., figuring that the line wasn't going to be very long. After all, Capcom Unity had initiated, and subsequently closed, sign-ups for the event.
So I believed that the event, while being public knowledge thanks to the Internet, was still going to be a somewhat intimate, private, and exclusive event. I was unfortunately mistaken. While there was a list of individuals who had signed up to attend, there was no physical list of names to weed out the random people who either knew of the location through word of mouth, or were hoping to get in through association a la “I'm with the band.”
As such, the location was already full to capacity, and the line to get in stretched (with the odd gap here and there to avoid loitering offenses) nearly around two corners, and stayed that way for much of my wait. I arrived at 7:30 p.m.
The long wait cause several individuals to eventually give up on trying to get in and instead, walking to Chinatown Fair. And because of the long wait, I was unable to see Justin Wong and Martin “Marn” Phan demoing Super Street Fighter 4. Sanford Kelly came and went from the event, and so he had a lot of information on what was actually going on inside.
Hired people from Capcom went through the line, handing out some of the things that were in the special gift bag: Officially licensed T-shirts, a Tatsunoko vs. Capcom towel, a licensed Street Fighter headband (red like Ryu's), and what appeared to be a mass reprint of an old Street Fighter II comic.
The other people in line and I talked about a lot of different things both relating to Street Fighter and otherwise, as we waited in line for what became three hours. Sometime after 10:30 p.m., I finally got into the event location itself.
The event was in a marketing company's gallery and encompassed two floors. The top floor had plenty of game stations where people were trying out TvC, playing Street Fighter IV, and Marvel vs. Capcom 2. The bottom floor of the building was exactly the same, only with more stations for games, and a DJ booth near the back.
This room was also where Sanford played Capcom community head Seth Killian in Super Street Fighter 4, as they (playing as Juri and T.Hawk, respectively) showed off some moves for the crowd. The entire demo lasted roughly 15 minutes, and some tidbits about the multiple ultras and other game changes were dropped. There was talk about T. Hawk's ultra being nerfed. Soon after, the organizers and staff closed up shop, and I left about 11:30 p.m.
Ultimately, in marketing and running Fight Club 2, Seth and Capcom only dropped the ball in only two ways, although they became significant issues later on. The first came in the marketing. From the tagline, to the posters, this event was being hyped as more of a Street Fighter and Super Street Fighter-centric event, with many people (myself included) hoping for new information regarding SSF4, such as a planned change to the game mechanics, or another character reveal.
What the event actually ended up becoming was a lot more generalized, with a higher percentage of TvC stations to SF stations. In fact, some people whom I talked to thought that the event was more for TvC rather than SSF4. Further, the demo as it was run was very similar to the footage now available on the Internet from the recent Tokyo Game Show.
No new characters were revealed, and only noncommittal answers to some of the yelled questions, such as “Will Guile finally be able to link into his Ultra?!" This left many people disappointed with the event as a whole, as the consensus was that it was things that were already known from watching YouTube videos of TGS.
The second, and more glaring error, was the way the event was handled from the beginning. After it was known that Capcom would be holding a second Fight Club, and after e-mails went out for those who had signed up, it inevitably came about that the rest of the Internet would know the location. This in of itself is not a problem, as the only reason people knew was presumably that they found out either from a friend, or a from a newspost such as the one on Kotaku.
However, none of the security individuals at the event had a physical list of the names of those who had signed up. So, even though I expected tighter security and brought photo ID for the occasion, I found that all I had to do was stand in line. The sudden influx of extra people made for a long and generally unsatisfying wait, for what ended up being more of the same things we had already seen.
Barring the actual content of the event itself, the fact that it didn't matter whether one was on the list or not ultimately blunted and removed any feeling of 'exclusivity' that those who did sign up felt. Even giving those who signed-up an earlier time to arrive, and letting the general public in later would have been a simple and effective solution to what ended up becoming an un-necesary problem with an otherwise fun event.
I did end up enjoying myself, and it was great meeting new players and talking shop. But, if they're going to have a list, make sure that they stick with that line of thought all the way through.
Pictures by Carlos Mercado. no comments
