Technical KO

or.. “how I placed somewhere between 3rd & 46th at Super Vs Battle 09″ Sorry no snappy titles for once! .. unless you want to count “I wuz robbed?”

Super Vs Battle 09 Report & Analysis

Despite getting blown up in HDR casuals before the tournament, I settled down and ended up going 5-1 in my group. I was really amazed I’d managed to do this well, as I was really thinking the competition would be way too good for me at SVB. There were about 50 entrants to HDR, but there were great players from all over Europe such as Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy and it was clear this was a really quite hardcore group, unsurprisingly for perhaps Europe’s biggest fighting game tournment.

Chunli1 (left) and Cuongster (sat) playing HDR

We’d been split up into groups of 6 and 7 players randomly, and the top 2 qualified from each group to create a top 16 knockout tournament. I knew some of my friends had gone through from their groups on only 4 wins so I was feeling quite good I was going though. But there was a problem. There was a 3-way tie on 5-1 in my group. The group organiser was confused about what to do and eventually various other Tournament Organisers were brought over to try to resolve it. Firstly we looked at our records vs each other – but we’d each only lost to each other. There was then an idea we’d all play each other again.. however as I pointed out that could mean we’d get exactly the same three way tie again if the results were the same. “We’ll play all day!” I shouted pumping the air – I love HDR so much I thought this sounded like a pretty good solution. But having run quite a few tournaments, I understood the problem from the TOs’ perspective straight away. It was almost like paper, rock, scissors. Myself, maining DeeJay who’d beaten CalmDownMonkey playing Honda who’d beaten Cuongster playing Ken, who’d beaten me.

Eventually ‘The Golden Gunman’ came over to sort out what would happen.

“None of you are going to like this..” he started, “but we’re going to have to use ‘Inti’s rule’”. He went on to explain: We’d have to play a single elimination bracket where one player got a first round bye, and the other two played a knockout matchup, and then, because they also needed to determine a group winner for top 16 matchup seeding, they’d also have a 1st place playoff. I drew the shortest of the straws and had to play again for knockout, against Cuongster’s Ken – the only player who’d beaten me in the whole tournament. Now I’d learnt a bit about how to play him, and I got a 2nd round win and pulled it really close in the 3rd, but as I’d already discovered, he’s a really great player and was using some tactics I’d never seen before until that day, and he won it again against me. Cuongster then went onto beat CalmDown the second time around too, to take 1st place in our group. And so I was out of the tournament despite going 5-1 in real play and 5-2 even including the extra “Inti’s rule” matches. Cuongster was the well-deserved winner of our group, having gone 7-1 with the two extra matches thrown in, but CalmDown was also the same 5-2 in ‘real games’ without the Bye. And of course not only did I have the same record as him, I’d beaten him, so still arguably had a better claim to 2nd spot. However CalmDown was the only player in the group to have taken a match off Cuongster, so those arguments work both ways. However it wasn’t the fact that CalmDownMonkey went through instead of me that was the most striking about the unfairness, it was the fact that I knew  there were players on 4-2 and 4-1 records and had gone through to top 16, even though they’d done worse within their groups than I had. And I was the only person now out of the tournament who’d only been beaten by a single player! I naturally voiced this complaint and one of the TO’s had the audacity to say “You wouldn’t be saying it if you’d won”… hah.. I just shake my head in retrospect at the thought of that; obviously he didn’t and doesn’t know me at all! If he did, he’d have realised what I’m like; I’d have been FAR more vocal and annoyed on behalf of CalmDown or Cuongster had they drawn the short straw and got knocked out at this early stage despite playing so well. I heard mutterings from a couple of my friends in other groups (some of whom had qualified for top 16) that I was a better player than some of those who had gotten through. I can’t say that for sure myself; but certainly the evidence in tournament matches at SVB did back that up.

The Golden Gunman apologised to me for the situation and even shouted “Inti’s rule sucks!” when he saw me later in the weekend. I discussed it with him and he said “well, if you could come up with something better…”. Within an hour of being out I’d already had one idea which he thought was pretty good, albeit it would need some organisational tweaks. By the next day I’d had even more ideas, so I promised I’d write them up for him. Here would be my thoughts on various ideas to help improve the ‘heats-then-knockout’ tournament format and SVB in general:

1. My initial idea: Why was I forced into a “playoff” just within my group? Why not consider all the groups in this? So whenever a top 2 cannot be determined in a group, then look across the whole 8 groups and select the two worst (or perhaps four worst if required by ties) records to play off for the bottom 16th or 15th & 16th positions. Effectively at SVB I ended up being the 17th player and odd-man out of the top 16, but why should one player in a larger 7-man group with a 3-way tie get all the disadvantages loaded onto them? Why not allow all three of us to go through and have two 4-2 players from other groups play-off for 16th place. Or, not quite as good, but possible, would be to do a playoff with the three way tie group and the 2nd place player from another group randomly selected to balance things out and try to prevent giving out a bye. The difficulty with this, as Golden Gunman pointed out, is that it would mean you couldn’t finalise any groups until all the groups were finished. Earlier running groups (in multiple stages, as was the case at SVB) might mean some players had already left etc. However, I don’t really think this would be an issue if everyone knew the rules beforehand, and knew not to leave or they’d possibly forfeit their chance at top 16.

2. The ‘FIFA’ solution. The World Cup of soccer works in a similar manner to SVB, so why not copy it further. They use goal difference to resolve ties – Street Fighter (& most fighting games) has round difference. People aren’t used to it but there’s no real reason it can’t work. It requires a tiny bit more recording by group organisers, but it means ‘Inti’s Rule’ will hardly ever come into play if you still need it as a secondary tie-breaker. It’s worth noting that Magic the Gathering tournaments also use this method of tie-breaking it’s best of three matches.

3. The ‘NFL’ solution – as well as a very detailed system of tie-breakers than go down in order from ‘head to head’ matchup, divisional matchups, right down to points difference, points scored and eventually to a coin flip, the NFL also uses a system of “Wild Cards” to determine which teams go through to the knockout stage. The winner of each division – groups in SVB terms – automatically qualifies, and then two more wild card teams make it through. These wild cards are the next two best win-loss records out of the entire conference (you could potentially split stages like this in SVB terms if you wanted to), so you can have three teams qualify all from the same division if one division is strong enough. This is essentially similar to my initial idea but taken further. The problem with this is that the NFL season also has inter-divisional and inter-conference play, whereas SVB groups only played within themselves. So you’d arguably be increasing the problem of an unbalanced group by doing this.

4. If you are going to use groups, then attempt to avoid unbalanced groups by using some form of seeding, so known ‘top’ players are theoretically spread out across the groups. Again, I believe this the same method the soccer World Cup uses to seed teams into different groups. The obvious difficulty here is the lack of data you have on players to even attempt to seed them. SVB did have the Dramatic Battles as preliminary heats to potentially gather data, but there wasn’t really enough of them to do this. Still, they also presumably had data from previous Super Turbo tournaments that could’ve been used to seed players. Another idea would be to seed players based on geography. NeoEmpire & Electronic Dojo organiser DNA really likes this idea because he wasn’t too happy about the fact that a bunch of good Midlands players were in the same group. Why let this happen when players are travelling a long way to compete, only to match them up against their local competition anyway?

5. Given the “matchup” nature of most fighting games, you should always allow “blind picks” by ‘telling the judge in secret’ in the same way EVO does it. I’ve already some heard some complaints about “character select screen camping” in HDR, although I saw no evidence of it myself – there’s absolutely no reason to allow it to even be a potential issue. Alternatively make people pick a single character and stick to them for the whole tournament, the same way almost all Japanese tournaments are run, and the way Electronic Dojo runs theirs.

The main thing is that whatever you do there must be TRANSPARENCY; you must have the rules for tiebreakers (& especially for seeding if you are doing it) clearly documented beforehand. I would’ve been much happier if we’d all known about “Inti’s rule”, as the organisers clearly did, before we got in a situation where it applied.

However it’s also worth noting that a totally different tournament organisation would possibly be even better than any of these.

Now firstly let me say, it really all depends on what your goal is for a tournament. If your goal is purely to find a #1 then the way SVB’09 worked was completely fine. I’d had just as good & fair a shot at winning the whole tournament as anyone else – it was just that my “finals” came very early. In fact barring the differences mentioned above, SVB was really quite close to the way the NFL works – a league and then into a playoff format for the ‘Super Bowl’. It’s a great method for creating drama and grudge matches – for example if you maintained the same group from tournament to tournament like the NFL retains its divisions. However it’s also frequently rather unfair in the NFL, and it’s unfair here. This is a definitely personality slant of mine, but whilst I can often see the benefits in other ways of doing things, I place a huge amount of value on fairness and balance. It’s why I abhore cheating so much, and is a big part of my love of HDR as it least attempted to improve overall character balance.

If your secondary goal is to give all the players a chance to play a fair number of matches, then again, SVB’09 is a fantastic way of doing it. Unlike the harshness of elimination-style tournaments, every player had a chance to get in at least 5 or 6 matches against serious competition. I see that as an excellent result of organising it in this manner. However if your goal is to give every player a fair chance to advance as far as they can in the tournament, or to attempt to rank players within the tournament, then SVB’s method doesn’t work so well.

A fantastic tournament game

For ranking, it’s really utterly impossible. Whilst I had a fair shot at 1st place, I definitely didn’t have a fair shot at top 16 or top 8. I don’t have all the data (although I’m hoping the organisers of SVB will give me access to all of it), but I might actually be far from the most ‘hard done by’. Cuongster went on to get knocked out in the top 16, whereas CalmDownMonkey went on to finish 3rd (although got a Bye to top 4 due to 2 people not showing up for the top 8!). I don’t know how the groups broke down, but it was possible that one of the other groups had 2 top 8 players (or even two top 4, or the top 2) in it, and someone knocked out at the heat stage who only lost to both these players might’ve technically performed better than me. The top 16 to top 8 cut-off with a single match was also incredibly harsh. In fact one thing that would be really interesting would be if all the results were put through the same ELO-like calculations used to create the XBox Live ratings – and create an “offline tournament rating” in effect. It would probably be best to take the tournament result itself into account by going through all the matches twice under ELO to “double weight” them. Under that kind of scoring I could’ve easily ranked somewhere in the top 10, having beaten the person who’d placed 3rd, and only lost to a player who placed somewhere between 9th-16th. Note that this is exactly how DCI ratings work in Magic the Gathering – incorporating the results of every single match of every officially judged tournament you play in and weighting them by tournament size & organisation. That sort of thing would be absolutely fantastic for any offline game, and especially for Street Fighter, but it would likely need to involve backing from an organisational body like Capcom to work (just like the DCI is backed by Wizards of the Coast).

In so far as advancing, it’s worth noting that under a double-elimination format (eg. the way the Midlands Dramatic Battle by Electronic Dojo was run, or the way EVO is run in the USA), or naturally a triple-elimination, it is impossible to lose a tournament by being beaten by only a single player- that cannot ever happen until the finals or top x playoffs if they are used. It’s also impossible in the ‘matchmaking’ style of Magic the Gathering tournaments… which having thought a lot about this now, I think is probably the best solution for running a tournament of this nature. Now of course there’s no completely fair way to do it, other than a likely unmanageable round-robin of all the competitors. And even then, as Fulan and I discussed at SVB a single tournament can never truly define a ‘best’ player – it is only a snapshot in time of that small period of the event. However I think the DCI’s method for Magic is the fairest that still allows players to continue even if they lose their first two games. It’s pretty simple really, and there’s even a piece of software (DCI Reporter, that I believe is based on chess matchmaking software) that does all the potentially complex matchmaking & round pairings for you. Basically if you have 50 players it just creates 25 matches for the first round and every round after that, but it also allows for players to drop from the tournament at any time, re-calculating matches (and byes if required due to an odd number of competitors in a round) as it goes. After that, it tries to matchmake similar records as much as it can each round. So if you’re at 2 wins and 1 loss in the fourth round, it will match you against someone else with 2 wins and 1 loss, or the best matchup it can make. This can then go on for a set number of rounds based on the time available & then use tiebreakers as required to calculate results, or it can can on until you have an outright winner, or a calculate a top x cutoff at any point. It’s essentially similar to double elimination with a bit of added fairness put in & without the harshness of a quick knock-out (although going 0-2 can likely means you have no shot at winning if there aren’t really enough rounds for the top people to lose 2 games). It’s also particularly nice in a matchup-heavy game like Magic or HDR. Using this style, you’d probably want o run longer rounds too with perhaps best of  5 rounds or best of 3 matches if time allowed.

One last point before anyone claims I’m whining or making excuses – not at all! If I want to do better at HDR, there’s only one focus on my mind, and it’s nothing to do with tournament rules – I need to learn to beat a player like Cuongster and his great tactics against me! I certainly learned a lot at the tournament and came away with more things to work on. But the thing I found most fun was that as I generally find in high level play at HDR, execution of combos is not that big a part of it. I didn’t once get a chance to land one of DeeJay’s big combos – that I would’ve likely messed up anyway! – simply because these players were too good to fall for the usual crossups or risky jump ins. However some other aspects of my play in various situations and matchups need a lot of work. More thoughts on that in a future post. I also found that, as before at the Dramatic Battle, when the heat is on, my results get better. Even when I’m losing – for example against Cuongster, the guy was absolutely pasting me in casuals before & after, and the only time I almost beat him was, sure enough, when it was a knockout tournament match.

Now having said a lot here about how it doesn’t necessarily represent as much as it appears Here’s the Official Results of HDR at SVB’09 (from NeoEmpire):

Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix:
1: Orf
2: Chunli1
3: CalmDownMonkey
4: Alan Da Man
5-8: Angel Killer
5-8: Prodigal Son
5-8: SMQ
5-8: Kaosflare

My own notes on characters: Orf played Ryu, Chunli1 played Chun Li and switched to DeeJay in top 8, CalmDownMonkey played Honda, Alan Da Man played DeeJay, Angel Killer played Chun Li but missed top 8 due to transport problems, Prodigal Son (Ryan Hart) played Ryu, but didn’t turn up for top 8, SMQ played Boxer, and I don’t yet know who Kaosflare played.

Shout Outs:

Well people are doing this over at the NeoEmpire forum, but I thought I’d do it here.

The, quite literally here, split ST & HDR groups! ST in the background, PlanetRV, Spatz1 & Orf in order nearest playing HDR in the foreground while TastyC watches

Firstly I wanted to say a huge thank you to all the organisers for running it. I know from personal experience how much work these things can be and how little reward it can seem at times! So, I, for one, really appreciate everything it takes to pull this off. Special thanks to the Golden Gunman and BulletProof for being especially sound gents whenever I spoke to them. And HUGE thanks for running HDR. It’s the best fighting game I’ve ever played!

XBox Live REPRESENT! So impressed that tons of XBox Live players made good at this tournament, making up at least half the top 8 and two who were already on my XBL Friends List who I’d had matches with online. I was really sorry for Angel Killer who got caught in a London transport foul-up to miss his top 8 matches in HDR. The look on his face when he found out he was too late said it all. Congratulations of course to Orf for being a fantastic winner. Hopefully get some more matches in with you online sometime. And also congratulations to CalmDownMonkey & SMQ for their top 8 finishes. I think it all shows that no matter how much some people may not like it, ‘online’, and games with good enough netcode to allow it to develop like HDR, are becoming the present and is future of this gaming genre, and I’m starting to agree with what Bruce Askew said here about how good online play really does count. What’s great about this is that it will only improve the ‘offline’ game and the real-life tournaments as well. Thanks to everyone who plays with me on XBL. I wouldn’t have had a chance to learn any fighting game to anything like this degree if it wasn’t for you and for playing HDR. So thanks too to Capcom, Backbone, and Sirlin for getting this game out with good netcode that allows me to even have any competition!

It was really great to get to meet PlanetRV face-to-face after much chat over XBox Live before, oh and don’t forget… TUNA SANDWICH! Great also to meet SMQ (91), C0rbul0 (SIX Elephants!), TastyC & Fulan for real. Hopefully I’ll hear no more accusations of turbo eh SMQ?? Fulan.. loved your smile after hours of HDR casuals on Sat night and loved your explanation – cos you were beating ME! *shakes fist at you and then grins* GGs… I was really tired and off-form though after my Friday peak… you’d better believe I’m better than I showed then! Still, I learnt some new stuff which is what it’s all about. Oh and NICE custom stick TastyC!

Good to get to know CalmDownMonkey, Spatz1, SpinalBl00d and Chunli1 a little too. Congrats Chunli1.. I really wish you played on XBL; I could really learn some stuff from you. Great DeeJay in the finals… and painful, yet somewhat comforting to see you lose to the exact same stuff I lose to when its vs Ryu myself. Still, I’m sure you did better than I would’ve done there. Nice! CalmDown – definitely no hard feelings about the heats; shame that all you Scots seem to play Honda! I already know how to play vs him. Spatz1 – hopefully play you more in future, I need some serious training in that matchup.

SamStyle102 – cheers, dude – you and your 360 really made this event for me as far as casuals go. I really was going to leave on Saturday when it looked like we’d get NO HDR love whatsoever (& not even any ST) but between you, DNA, PlanetRV, Spatz1 and others we kept finding a way to keep SF2 alive, no matter the cost!

Ethan & The Bleeper- good to see you both again after over a year since BOD. Thanks Ethan for helping to keep HDR going somewhere no matter how much crap you got for it. GGs Bleeps… ok sorry, Obi your Claw’s much tougher now!

DNA for many of the same reasons. Thanks for being the first friendly face there at SVB to greet me, and once again for the Midlands HDR Dramatic Battle. I know I’m new on the offline ’scene’ but you’ve really made me feel welcome. Thanks for being a great supporter of HDR too. Maybe if you get something regular going in Brum I’ll be able to make it down more often. Although hopefully one day I can get something going in Yorkshire too.

Killer7 for saying hello even though we’ve still not played in months, you were still a really friendly dude!

Ups, Raks & Kamal for coming down even though you only had a few hours on Saturday & for being the only other guy there I know of from Sheffield. I hope this inspires you to get back into fighting games perhaps.. ?

and finally..

Marc, for doing this: Super Score Tissue 2 Turbo

The Man with the Golden Gun

The Golden Gunman's awesome Dudley AV

Not quite “STOP THE PRESS” but I sent this article to Golden Gunman before full publication and he told me this:

“It appears that during that tiebreak scenario, I made a whopper of a mistake, and in fact, you should have had ANOTHER chance to make it through.

My mistake was that you guys were all tied for first place, not second place, and the rule works differently according to each situation. In your situation, the winner of you against Cuongster should have been the the group winner, and the loser should have played the player who sat it out to see who went through as runner-up.

That way everyone has to win at least one game to make it through, whereas in this case, one player made it through without playing a game. Although he later played Cuongster, he was already through, so the result didn’t really matter.”

!!!

He’s also apologised far more than is necessary, cos he’s a great guy, and also offered me some monetary compensation; which I’ll trade in at my next big Neo Empire event. Also, as I said to him, this would’ve still put CalmDownMonkey in the same unfair position I  had been in, had I beaten him in a rematch, he’d have been 5-2 and only beaten by a single player; and yet out of the tournament, so I believe the points I’ve raised here in this article still stand completely, even though it would’ve been a fairer situation overall that no-one got through with a ‘free’ win.

DeeJay’s power is to.. produce maracas from the ether

Some discussion on this here.

The Spectator Spectre

I recently had an interesting discussion about an article at Tap Repeatedly, and one of the things that fell out of it is how difficult it is to even watch high level play at a fighting game and really understand what’s going on. SRK’s Ponder also wrote a really accurate and amusing rant about this fact, albeit from a different perspective, but many of his points apply to anyone watching a video game.

These are some of the underlying reasons why I believe fighting games don’t currently make good spectator sports for the majority of people. This applies to video games in general, in fact many types of game, especially those with a first-person perspective even suffer far more problems than fighting games do in this department. Whilst the “but I can do all of that!” factor mentioned by Ponder might even help get players interested in playing a game (albeit not to a high level), I’m not sure it’s necessarily a selling point in getting people to watch them. Of course even for the layest-of-laymen watching video game tournament footage there’s the usual “see who wins & loses” and the natural drama associated with any competition – it’s why one of my friends enjoyed watching hours of live EVO footage, even though he himself only knows the basics of these games and can’t even pull off hadoukens with much consistency. It’s just that in many of the popular televised ‘real’ sports the visible signs of what’s going on tend to be more obvious. Most of them have the “wow, I can’t do that!” factor. People are also traditionally more impressed with obvious physical skills than the more mental ones that many video games test; witness the failure of attempts to televise chess, as interesting as I personally found it. I feel this is likely the root cause of the traditional scrub’s love of combos as a measure of ’skill’ as well, as it’s an obvious relatively ‘physical’ dexterity test they can clearly observe happening, or not happening. Fighting games are also simply so fast that observing the real nuances, even if they can be fully understood and correctly interpreted by the viewer, is incredibly hard to see at full-speed. I’ve recently been watching some videos of high-level play at SSFT2 and HDR to try and improve my game, and I end up clicking rewind and watching the same sequence over and over again to spot what really happened and why. It’s hard to even pick the right timestamp to wind back to though at times, because the game is just so darn fast. And someone new to the game won’t even get much out of that rewinding as they’ll just “see the same thing” again.

Let's get ready for some real hard-hittin' action

This is where an insightful and entertaining commentator needs to step in, and much like ‘real’ sports on TV, offer insights into the ‘what & why’ that the viewer can’t otherwise see. John Madden coming out of retirement to commentate on Street Fighter?  “And y’see what you see here is he throws out that big ol’ Shin Shoryuken and BOOM!!” *telestrates large red blob explosive hit effect all over the screen*. EVO made a great start at this, I suspect my friend wouldn’t have watched more than 5 minutes without the commentary team, and many Japanese tournaments do the same. But it’s still very basic and e-sports are playing catch up to real sports badly at this – we need slow-motion replays, telestrating, different angle shots, observation views, stats-tracking and all the other things you see in televised sports today. Of course the handy thing about video games is that, being run in software, all of these types of things can easily be done within the program itself. You don’t need some advanced graphical overlay calculated by multiple cameras to put something like a visible First Down marker on the televised version of a e-sports NFL football field, you don’t even need five kinds of alchemy and wizardry orenchanted magical yellow ants to get these kinds of features- all the graphical and statistical technology is already there. However such post-game analysis tools are ironically still in their infancy and completely under-utilised. Bungie.net post-game reports are a nice start on the stats front, but no other game has managed anything close to it, and most games don’t even offer a simple capture & replay option – most people need to hook up additional PC video capture equipment to even get to this point. Even new games like SF4 are hugely dissappointing, only offering some rudimentary playback facilities as part of their game. Again, Halo 3’s replay features are forging ahead far more with this kind of thing. Shame it’s an FPS!

You can probably already hear the Zerg about to swarm this article. A fantastic example of a lot of this in action is Starcraft in South Korea. Here they have a lot of advantages the rest of the world doesn’t for the most part and, whilst some aspects mentioned may be cultural traits, most of these must have been slowly developed over time rather than just appearing overnight. There is a widespread understanding about the game, appreciation of the skills needed to play, experienced (& I’d assume dedicated and entertaining) commentators, one standard game to play (not dozens of different versions of essentially the same game), and of course not to mention, money involved. But I believe a lot more games in other countries could potentially develop in this way if games developers were serious about it and actually even tried to develop for these things. For example I expect the replay functionality that was added very late into Starcraft’s life (as a free patch nonetheless) was likely a big part of Blizzard supporting the Korean scene. It added a huge amount to the game for even a low-level player like me too. Hopefully Starcraft 2 is going to take the lead on things like this, and I expect it will, as the fantastic battle reports shown so far are already showing signs of a whole host of features for commentators and post-game analysis.

Video games are easily popular enough to warrant some becoming true e-sports and having the money come from the spectator interest; it just needs the right vision, the right kind of game – fighting games being one of the closest we have right now, and the right backing for a developer to say “why not my game?”. It’s much easier than televising chess! A lot of factors involved in Korean Starcraft may be just down to dumb luck, timing, culture and community; but at least devs could make a start by putting the building blocks in place to facilitate more successes like it.

Journey of the Tourney-fag

After the fun I had at last year’s Battle of Destiny event from Neo Empire, I’m starting to really look forward to their event this year, Super Vs Battle!

I’d really encourage anyone to go if you’re into fighting games, whether you want to enter a tournament or not, I am sure you’ll have a great time. Of course this year I’m going to enter the Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix competition and see how I do. In the meantime I thought I’d try and get a bit of practice at the game at least, and I discovered an European-only tournament being run over XBox Live & via shoryuken.com that some of my XBL Friends List were involved with. I gave that a shot and duely lost in the first match, only then to discover it was only single elimination – and so I was out immediately. At least I discovered later the player I lost to ended up placing 2nd overall

… BADA DADA DA DA DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! …

Now, fight a DRAMATIC BATTLE!

When looking for news on SVB I discovered there was a preliminary “Dramatic battle” tournament running in Birmingham. Whilst it was quite a way to travel, it was the nearest HDR tournament to me by far. So after forum reassurances that I’d be able to borrow a TE stick to play on – because they were using the horrible PS3 hardware to run it on I wouldn’t have my own, I started to sort out my travel arrangements. In the end fellow Sheffielder & gaming blogger id0ru, aka Marc from Dead Pixel Skyline joined me for the trip, so with a navigator on board I decided to go by car as the most efficient option.

Marc's tiny Dic leads the way!

But as expected finding the place proved to be an immense challenge in itself. After numerous wrong turns, illegal manoeuvres, giving up and deciding to park in a shopping centre carpark, seeing the ridiculous prices at shopping centre carpark & giving up on that, throwing the as-usual ridiculously inaccurate googlemaps directions out of the window, and relying on the map printouts I had and despite the fact the road we kept missing turned out to not have the same name as on the map or the directions, we eventually arrived, ready for a fight!

Remy77077 & id0ru. Don't mess with us, sir, we've got some powerful moves. Oowww!

The Global Gaming venue where the event was held. Where's Ryan?

The event was run really smoothly by the guys at Electronic Dojo, one of whom turned out to be an old friend of mine I’d not seen in years, with an excellent set of tournament rules (better than some of Neo Empire’s rules in my opinion): double elimination format, characters selected once at the start of the tournament and no changes allowed, ie: Japanese style. However I wasn’t exactly brimming with confidence anyway, or worried about the rules – as long as it wasn’t one and done – I mostly just wanted to go for the sheer experience of it and to see just how much I had to learn. However I fully expected to go 0-2 and out immediately. When I recognised ‘Prodigal Son’ Ryan Hart outside the venue – probably the UK’s top fighting game player & also known for this money match against Justin Wong, I became even more certain this was going to be a lot of fun but any wins at all would be a very good result I thought. As I’d driven all the way there for over two & a half hours and there were spare slots available still, I decided to enter 3rd Strike as well just for a laugh – even though I haven’t played it properly in many years  - just so I’d get a few more games of something in. I started taking some quick notes in my phone after my matches as to how my matches played out so I could try and play them back in my mind later and learn from whatever mistakes I made, and also to remember which characters I needed more practice against. However I then discovered the organisers were actually video capturing all the games anyway. Brilliant!

My first game was on HDR and I beat a rather cagey T-Hawk 2 rounds to 1 with DeeJay. T Hawk is one of those odd ‘unstable’ matchups for DeeJay where I feel he really has the advantage and holds all the cards, yet one mistake can spell defeat. As long as I can keep my cool and there’s not horrible lag, online, I’m pretty confident against all but the very best Hawks though, so despite the fact my opponent was playing as pink T-Hawk (who as we all know does extra damage on all his moves),  I was pleased I didn’t blow it. I was finding the “but it’s not mine” effect on the joystick rather weird as well – it definitely felt looser than my TE stick. I was also really struggling with the button config and menus on the PS3 with its stupid shape symbols instead of simple button letters – everything felt so unfamiliar. I ended up always leaving it up to my opponents to navigate the menus.

Marc fighting for the future!

Next my name was called for 3rd Strike and I quickly & unsurprisingly lost 0-2 to a Chun Li, although it was amusing being asked which character I wanted to play, given my signup name. My next game of HDR I lost 1-2 to a Ryu player called Jinty who played some really good rounds and got me in a perfectly timed & spaced fireball corner trap in both his wins. This put me at 1-1 and quickly into the ‘losers bracket’. I managed to actually win a game of 3rd Strike against a Ken. It was only during this match that I remembered you could actually ’super jump’ on 3rd Strike, which made me laugh as to just how much of the game I’d forgotten. I also discovered I couldn’t reliably even do a flash kick motion on the PS2 joystick I was borrowing; already not taking my 3s games at all seriously, I didn’t really care. My bottom-tier Remy quickly lost to yet another Ken on 3rd Strike so I was done with that anyway. As expected almost all the players were playing Ken-Chun-Yun, although it was fun that there was actually another Remy player there. I never thought I’d see that.

But then after a wait for the winners brackets to be resolved, it was back to HDR. Losing in my 2nd game I was deep into the losers bracket hole & found myself up against another excellent Ryu – who is also DeeJay’s worst character matchup at least ‘on paper’, yet I just managed to scrape out a 2-1 win with a ‘Sobat Carnival’ (Super Dread Kick) as Ryu tried to land a j.LK on DeeJay on wakeup. My opponent lamented he was trying an SF4 tactic of a LK crossup when it was hardly the right thing to do in HDR! I completely understood as I’d found my own HDR game got worse back when I played SF4 any amount at all. The TE stick I’d borrowed for this match (from a fellow DeeJay player M. Turbo, who luckily played blue-pants DeeJay to my purple-pants so there was no squabbling) felt a lot nicer and actually felt identical to my own.

Next HDR match up was my friend Marc! I joked that I wouldn’t give him a lift back home to Sheffield if he didn’t ‘play possom’ and let me win.. but then I told Marc seriously it was actually the opposite – he’d better play his best against me or I wouldn’t drive him anywhere! But his Cammy went down 2-0 to my DeeJay; it’s another matchup I fortunately feel very confident in & once again, the TE stick I had felt perfectly familiar. The TO told me to stay in my seat because the way the brackets worked I was up next. And then again, and again. I somehow beat past a Honda, another Ryu & the fellow DeeJay player without losing a round. I think having a run of games in a row like that really helped me though, and I suspect a lot of the players were distracted by also playing other games too.

DeeJay Wins!

So somehow I’d made it out of losers bracket and through to the HDR final! I was absolutely overjoyed already that I’d managed to even win a couple of games – this was far surpassing my expectations already. I’d read all about “bedroom champions” and “internet warriors” falling flat on their face their first time in a real-life tournament. I fully expected I’d end up the same way the moment the pressure was on me to perform on the spot. But whilst I’d been playing pretty badly, missing combos and setups I do regularly at home, and forgetting basic things like to LIGHT Jackknife-Kick a Honda butt drop from underneath it,  I’d still managed to do ok and had managed to keep my cool despite my errors, and I’d even managed a few moments of clutch play that I’d had no idea were in me. However I found that something else I’d read was completely true; that in a tournament setting combos that you find easy normally you completely mess up when the pressure is on. But fortunately it wasn’t just me making these mistakes, it seemed to afflict my opponents just as much. Plus I’m not very good at combos anyway, so it probably hurts me less than most. Another major thing that was very strange was that the game seemed so slow to me. I don’t know if it was the fact I almost never get to play offline and so it felt much more responsive to me than online matches, or whether I’d somehow developed the Sirlin super power to slow down time (!!! ); but I actually suspect it is the much complained about speed differences on the inferior Ps3 version of HDR. However I can’t really complain because once I’d become accustomed to it, I feel it was actually helping me a lot. I frequently find HDR online on the 360 actually feels too fast for my reactions, yet I never felt that problem all day at this Dramatic Battle. It may equally well have just been that I was wide awake, I’d been sleeping, eating & drinking pretty well the whole weekend, and I wasn’t playing drunken at 4am as I somewhat prone to doing.

However despite this speed ‘advantage’, I was already thinking about how I was going to write up an agoners blog post about how I was so thrilled to come 2nd in my first ever real fighting game tournament. I now had to play against the only guy who’d beaten me all day, in technically DeeJay’s worst matchup, I didn’t really think I had much hope, but I knew it would definitely be great fun when I realised they were going to hold the finals so you each had your own screen and everyone else at the event would be watching – Fantastic! However I had to wait for quite a while before the HDR final would come along.. in the meantime I did everything I could to keep my focus. I sat down where I couldn’t even see any other games (in truth I’d not been very interested in watching anything other than HDR matches anyway – to me it’s so much more interesting than the other Street Fighters these days), and did mental ‘reps’ about the Ryu vs DeeJay matchup. How did I want to start the round? What did I want to try after the way Jinty had beaten me before? I kept going through various theory fighter games in my head again and again to keep me concentrated on nothing but HDR…

“Don’t psyche yourself out man! Just picture the fight in your head. How will the battle shape up? How will you win? Let’s get started!”

When I finally sat down for the finals with my friend Lom in the ‘judges seat’ between us, he announced that because I was in the losers I had to beat Jinty twice to win. I knew about this from watching how Evo was run this year, but I’d actually completely forgotten about it until I was reminded. I didn’t really think too much about it though, as I thought the finals would have been more sets anyway. I was still just thinking about Ryu vs DeeJay. We did our button configs, then went into a match and picked our characters. As my opponent pressed to pick “Ryu stage” I’d already started to hold down-back to charge at the start of the round, and so the stage selection cursor moved down to China as he hit the button. I said “sorry” across to him & I meant it – I actually much prefer Ryu stage graphically & musically . As the round started I walked back away from Ryu and then threw a Hard Max Out.. and my DeeJay Dread Kicked his merry way across the screen! “My buttons are wrong” I said matter-of-factly but loudly. The annoying PS3, like the pox on the video-gaming world it is, had chosen that moment to dish up it’s known bug of actually being unable to save the button configuration between the options menu and an actual game.

Is there no end to the bad comedy that is the PS3?

Luckily for me not even a single blow had been landed and the TO kindly immediately stopped the fight and allowed us to redo our button config, twice, so that we knew it had actually worked.

Then to my complete surprise I managed to go on to win twice in a row to win the final! I was so focused on playing the individual rounds that I can’t recall much other than setting up a bunch of start-of-the-round guessing games pretty well, but apart from that they were really rough & ready games with lots of mistakes on either side – as others commented afterwards, and I readily agreed, they weren’t very good performances. I felt we’d actually both played much better in our earlier game where Jinty had won. I recall I did win one round when I managed to cross up Ryu, not quite finish him off – I most likely fluffed a combo as usual – and I just decided to play clock and distance as there was no way Ryu was going to beat me with fireball chip damage at that point and couldn’t gain a super either. So I just blocked, Max Out & slid about and tried to bait a jump in that never came until the timer ran out. I remember this because I was glad I managed to keep my head enough to do this in this situation. I don’t even know what the round counts were in the finals though, I was so concentrating on just playing each round as it came and I was really glad I was able to focus in that way as it’s something I’ve actively worked on doing a lot when playing SF.

The winnings. Propped up, like me, by 'the lucky lucky Street Fighting drink'!

I also wasn’t sure what, if anything, I got for winning this.. it turns out I won a ‘Gold Pass’ to SVB which is free entry and a free game entry. Nice!  However I’ve already paid for SVB and my entry to HDR and I can’t really play any other games I might have tried since they haven’t been released on the 360 yet, so I need to find out how I can actually use this Gold Pass…  but it does manage take away my disgust and disgrace of playing a video game for the first time in my life on a PS2 or a PS3. At least no cooty-infested Sony control pad got near me though.

But it was the fun of the whole thing that was the best thing to “win” anyway. I’ve thanked the organisers already on their forums for this, but I have to re-iterate it was absolutely amazing to be able to play the game I love the most in this kind of atmosphere. I do really love playing with an audience – even if I was concentrating so much I was barely aware of their presence for the most part – it feels like old times in those all too rare occasions I’d get to play in an arcade and when I’d manage to draw a crowd. I do wish there was something like this closer to home, and I have to admit I’d really like to try and run an event like this someday locally, if I could ever find a suitable venue for it.

My other prize! Thank you Dee xxx om nom nom, it's lovely Sheffield's finest

When I got home it was gone midnight but I was still so mentally into Street Fighter there was no way I could sleep, so I went onto HDR, and promptly got my ass handed to me online. I’ve hopefully made it clear enough that although I’m really happy about this result (if you can’t enjoy winning at your favourite game then I don’t know what you can enjoy!) I’ve got no delusions of grandeur, nor would I want to brag about my performance in any way as I genuinely felt I was pretty bad for the most part – as you’ll be able to see on the videos most likely soon enough. I felt I got lucky a bunch of times in this tournament, and I’m absolutely certain that a fair few of the players were much better than me overall and will I am sure will beat me the next time we play. I actually found it a great shame that Jinty, who I most wanted to play against again (as he beat me!), was only on PSN so there’s really no way we will get any matches in.

In any case, this will all mean absolutely nothing once SVB starts, and I’m still expecting to scrub out 0-2 there if I don’t manage to up my game and play much better. I’ve got so much to learn and improve still, but that’s exactly what makes fighting games so much fun – the endless challenge!

Afterall, the answer lies.. in the heart of battle!

Max Out.

(Note: At this Dramatic Battle some people also played some games of SF4 apparently)

Four Play

I’ve lamented the death of arcade culture over here before, especially for someone outside of London, who must go on some crazy pilgrimage, or to a tournament to even play games in this style. However to my amazement, Capcom decided to run a mini Street Fighter 4 UK tour with some actual arcade cabinets in tow. Despite the fact I’d have my hands on the game itself in only a few weeks  - what made this truly special was that it was going on just a half-hour drive out from my home city. As an SF nut, I just had to show my support for this, no matter what. Sadly on the first day, the whole of the shopping mall in question, Meadowhall, was snowed out; my calls to the shops there going unanswered, the helpdesk did eventually answer me to to explain that the whole place was pretty much closed down and that the SF4 event wouldn’t be going on. I’d later find out that it had been on, but virtually no-0ne had showed up due to the weather & the fact most of the mall was closed. I would have been more upset at missing a chance at this, but I’d had a fantastic evening gaming on HD:R and GoW2 anyway so I couldn’t be too miffed.

The next day however, the snow had died down and melted somewhat, and I had a roving informant already at the mall who eventually tracked down the cabinets and confirmed it was on and would be going on until later that evening.

I was shattered after being at work all week (and too many late nights gaming, naturally), but nothing was going to stop me, as I dug my car out from under the snow and ice with gloves and an ice scraper, and then proceeded to try to drive it off the icesheet that called itself my road. No go, it was literally impassable without some snow tires or something. But instead I managed to slide my car back down the hill on the ice, and managed to get it around the corner and onto the, thankfully clear, main streets of Sheffield. Whew! When I got there I knew exactly where I was headed… yep, I walked straight past the SF4 cabinets with a grin, and wearing my ‘Sonic Boom’ t-shirt like a true SF geek, went on my way to Starbucks. I grabbed a vital double espresso to go, and made my way back to the SF4 stand.

There wasn’t too many people about so I almost immediately got a go, and supping on my espresso, went to select Guile and discovered I had to play as f**king Ryu as the previous person had actually won despite vacating the machine. But I hate Ryu I thought to myself (and perhaps sung out loud)… but proceeded to play anyway. I immediately noticed something was terribly wrong. What was this.. LAG??! On a cabinet? How on earth was this possible? It was actually really horrendous slowdown at times – and as I discussed with the Capcom booth staff on hand later, apparently these weren’t “full spec” cabs, and didn’t have the correct graphics cards or RAM or something. Of course their reassurances to me that the console version would be fine weren’t really necessary as I knew this was some really freaky problem, having played at least a little on SF4 cabs that were perfectly fine before; but talk about a terrible way to promote your game.

Still, it was free, and so my quarter-circle-punch’ing went on unbowed by this unfortunate turn of events. I discovered I couldn’t seem to get out a Super or Ultra move though, despite the fact I find Ryu’s double fireball motion easy most of the time. My opponents weren’t exactly taking advantage of the flaws in my game though, and three easy wins later my opponent was motioning wildly at my win counter for some reason. Bemused, I then discovered this had earned me an SF4 t-shirt for my troubles, and I also realised as his arm waving got more exasperated that he was in fact using sign language. Sadly I don’t know any sign language, but I still managed to communicate through the universal language of Street Fighter, smiles and points at the screen with both him and his friends during the course of the evening. There was only one competitor all night though who could give me anything like a good game (wushudude, who’d travelled from Manchester), but I was still having fun, and we were more interested in experimenting with focus attacks, dash cancels, different characters and the like. I even discovered that due to the slowdown on the machines that Ultras and other complex motions could be performed, you just had to input the motions incredibly slowly for the game to register it.

A day away later, I woke up after hardly any sleep after playing Drunken SF HD Remix all ‘night’ until 8am, and in a very short space of time somehow managed to get myself back to Meadowhall, for more coffee & SF4, this time with a couple of friends with me, including fellow blogger Navan Daughn. SF4 does seem to be associated with a lack of sleep for me now. This was quite a different experience to the other night, as the weather had cleared further, and the mall, and the machines were packed. The bad news was it took some time to get a go and you probably wouldn’t stay on the machines for the maximum 3 wins unless you got a run of weaker opponents. However it was great to chat with a lot more knowledgeable players and bigger fans, and to get some good competition – not to mention the tantalising “oooh” of the crowd when spectacular moves and near misses occured. Of course that competition was really dulled by the amount of experimentation with the new game systems going on, and not to mention our total exasberation with the slowdown, causing some stages of fights to become utterly random. 3rd Strike player SrWilson has put up some videos on youtube of the SF4 games at Meadowhall.

Yes that's really agoners own Navan Daughn on the nearest cab putting in his first real-life appearance on this blog!

So yes, all in all it wasn’t an incredible experience thanks to the dodgy cabs, but there were some real highlights for me. The chance, if only for a few brief hours, to play games in this kind of arcade environment was really fantastic for me. In fact it was arguably better than ever before for me, as now I’m a converted stick player, I don’t feel like I am playing with one arm tied behind my back just because I have to use a joystick. In fact the Viewlix cabs had absolutely gorgeous controls – and it was great to really start to get to hands-on with them, knowing that my Tournament Edition Madcatz SF4 joystick is only a few weeks away, and it itself is modelled off these same cabs; even using almost the same parts. But it was the comaraderie and audience of the crowd that makes this kind of gaming just so special. Not to mention the game itself. I’ve been pretty harsh on SF4 in general, as it’s taken a number of design turns that I really disagree with, completely counter to say, the great decisions made in HD Remix. However I have to say with actually a few hours of play under my belt now, the game is warming on me. The amount of mind games and techniques based around the focus attack is really impressive, and the mixture of some of the best elements of Street Fighter 3 is really a great idea. Not to mention giving anyone with a good grounding in SF3 a huge initial advantage at SF4 I would suggest. I’ll never agree with choice to maintain (and even worsen) the overly complex commands, and I’ll lament the atrocious character roster until hopefully one day something like SF5 makes amends for it. But until then, it was good to see some more good in SF4 than I expected – and I’m really looking forward to the home version much much more now, thanks to this UK Tour.

Yes, there really is a guy who's cut his hair like Zangief! What a dude!

BOD

Despite my 7am start, having to make it from Sheffield to London meant I was there theoretically pretty late, I still ended up queueing for a while outside as the whole thing seemed to kick off well over an hour late. Ah well, I was rather impressed immediately by the posters up outside and the venue. It seemed to be basically a student bar / nightclub area that had been converted for the event, and they’d done a good job.

I oughta mention one of the doorman/bouncers was a really cool dude and we spent a fair bit of time discussing chess. He also saw me pull a massive win streak on HD Remix

At first we were only allowed into the lower floor.. but I wasn’t at all bothered really as I instantly clocked what I was really excited about… HD Remix:

The hot & sweaty downstairs pit!

My camera unfortunately does a poor job in dark conditions like this, but you can see they had 4 TVs arranged with 360s, sofas and Hori EX2 sticks around them for playing HD Remix, there was another setup of 360s just to the other side of the room that had a mixture of joysticks and 360 pads as well. Although quite why anyone would choose the pad over a stick I have no idea! And HD Remix it was on freeplay all day… however it was fully taken right now, so I decided to scope the venue out first. As you can just about make out there was a raised level behind the HD Remix sofas with a bunch of consoles and TV’s, this was mainly dedicated to Street Fighter III Third Strike all day. Behind that was another level, running Super Turbo off consoles.. and behind that yet another level with yet more TVs and consoles and this was where the actual tournament games were run.

They weren’t letting people upstairs at this point, however the venue was far from packed and it was only a surprisingly short wait to get a go on HD Remix. First reaction… terrible, terrible dissapointment! Why? - No playable Guile. So I’m still left waiting, impatiently, to see what I can do with a Guile with a super move I can actually perform, a useful HK Flash Kick and a top-down… oh well. But on the HD Remix code they had running at BOD there were 6 playable characters:

Ryu (yawn), Ken (yawn yawn – but had his broken juggles fixed at least), Claw, Gouki, T-Hawk, and Dee-Jay.

With no Guile, this made it a simple choice from this lot… kickin’ it Jamaican style with my mon Dee-Jay, who is actually my 3rd or 4th SF character anyway, possibly even my 2nd on Super Turbo, even though I have actually played very little with him. My positional play with him is decent, but my lack of knowledge of any vs matchup or any combos whatsoever hurts me… at first. But I was learning a lot with him throughout the day and it was a whole load of fun to not have to play as a shotokan scrub at least. I did play all the characters throughout the day, except for Ken obviously. And although Hori EX2 sticks are not the best, they are decent, and I felt really at home with them as I’ve been using one for many months now on my 360. Although oddly these sticks felt much nicer than my own. I asked the organisers if they were modded with Sanwa parts or something, but apparently not, they said they were out-of-the-box standard kit. So it would seem there are different models of Hori EX2s around though, as I am 100% certain these were different, but I’ve been looking at the model code of mine and I’ve never seen any other model available online for sale anywhere yet. These felt like they had an 8-way gate, whereas my stick feels very ’square-gated’. The stick also had less travel and the buttons felt more responsive too. To try it out I went to Ryu and just did jab dragon punch after jab dragon punch and I wasn’t whiffing any nor doing any accidental cancels. Perhaps it was the double espresso I’d had when I got off the train, but it is a very rare day indeed I can do that on my own EX2. One interesting side effect of all this gaming on the day, I’ve been converted to being a lap-joystick player rather than tabletop!

Eventually I got off HD Remix and discovered the upstairs had been open for ages and I’d been having so much fun playing I hadn’t even noticed. But upstairs… wow. Sadly my camera proved completely ineffectual in capturing it, but this was like a breath of fresh air after the dingy club-like basement area – it was clearly the “presentable” floor of the event. Although it still got rather warm and stuffy as the day progressed. A large hall area was surrounded with XBox 360 pods on a balcony level and against the walls, more tables with rows of consoles & even PCs running fighting games around all sides of the floor, a RetroGT t-shirt stand, and a large stage with a huge-screen running the BOD promo video.. and in front of the stage six network-linked Street Fighter IV cabinets… and a constant queue of people waiting to play it!

STREET FIGHTER FOOOOOOUR!

Waiting in line for my first go I hear the guy behind me comment “Oh you can only play as Ken and Ryu”. I had to laugh and correct him… nope, everyone was playable, it was just this was your typical scrub-fest sadly. Obviously not for me. Guile was IN FORCE. Although the organisers weren’t exactly cracking whips you were meant to get off as soon as you lost or if you won 3 in a row. There was an immediate dichotomy to the experience for me, because obviously I want to try to win, especially as losing could mean another 10 minute wait for a game, but then I also wanted to experiment with the FOUR-ness. Two scrub Ryus defeated, and I was on my third match against a really good Dictator player and I started messing about a lot more though – since I knew I’d be leaving the cabinet anyway. Managed after a load of horrenous whiffs to perform Guile’s super move…. grrr. It’s not gotten any easier over the years. I then discovered the hard way I couldn’t use Focus Attack super-armour to blow through Dictators Ultra move… “Koko ga kisama no hakaba daa!” I shouted in unison with Dic towards my opponent – who was a few cabinets down, because the cabinet network play meant that you could be playing anyone on any of the cabinets. I got up and congratulated him on his victory and spectacular finish – and that I was really glad I didn’t lose to a boring Ryu or Ken. Although I would once later in the day – but it was a really good fight though with a rare excellent Ryu player.

Hey! A non-Ryu player!... having to fight yet another Ryu *sigh*

As expected though overall, SF4 does feel like a step backwards from HD Remix. It does feel oddly slow & oddly “floaty” on the jumps. Nothing I won’t get used to, and I do actually prefer slower speed Street Fighter. But it really feels like a combination of Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 3, and, dare I say it, Street Fighter EX! I also didn’t like the concentration on meters that the game seems to have. I won a ton of fights just by mixing in ES-Sonic Booms which would blow through a fireball and hit the confused scrub Ryu on the bonce. Now obviously beating Ryu players with fireballs is always funny, but I am not sure I’ll like the emphasis on the meters so much for ES moves and Ultra’s etc. But at least it’s no Zero 3 and does have a standard gameplay across characters.

SF4 feels like a good but not great game to me. If it wasn’t for the existence of HD Remix I would be ridiculously hyped waiting for it on a console I can actually play regularly, but we are where we are and HD Remix just blows it out of the water in both concept and gameplay. You can tell everything about HD Remix is at least aiming to be the most superb Street Fighting experience yet made.. yet SF4 is being made for flash and to “pull in the punters”. And well, they are certainly getting that bit right this time anyway – as noted you had to wait for ages to get a game on SF4, yet I managed to play HDR for over an hour uninterrupted at one point; against Triforce (Justin Wong’s housemate) – some absolutely great fights there! We played long enough to be getting ridiculously into each other’s head too. I was fooled by so many fake FBs it was annoying But I’ve learnt more about Dee-Jay vs Ryu there than I ever have in my life before now. The new throw motions and changes to the Condor Dive was a breath of fresh air for me on T-Hawk too. I was having so much fun with him that I’ve never been able to have before, it was absolutely awesome. I was so excited I started exclaiming T-Hawk was my new main character… until my new fighting friend Ethan kicked my butt anyway… “yeh, T-Hawk was always rubbish, just like I was saying..” :P I don’t want to sound too down on SF4. With an improved home character roster and time to play and really experiement with the new Focus Attacks and meter-based techniques I do think it will be a lot of fun. It’s just that I am tremendously up for HD Remix – and stop that giggling, it’s a figure of speech ok.

It also turns out that despite the disappointing lack of a full character roster, we were actually being treated to the very latest HD Remix code anywhere in the world. A lot of people, myself included, have been subsequently shocked by this, and wished we’d taken more notes, photos and videos etc. But I thought this was what everyone the world over would have already seen. I suppose I should’ve been tipped off by the fact that Claw’s “lost battle” face artwork hadn’t even been coloured yet.. but wow. I know HD Remix is running really late, but I think it will be towards the end of 2008 before this gets anywhere near XBox Live really.

I even checked out some other games. There was a lot on, and not all fighting stuff (but 99% was!). Akatsuki Blitzkampf is a PC 2d fighting game I’ve heard of before, but this was the first time I’d seen it in person. I watched a few fights of this – one guy had a modded Sega Saturn pad hooked to the PC too – very impressive It looks waaay too combo based for me, but it does look very nice. However seeing it running on a PC reminded me of the “fun” I’d had trying to get GGPO running online with a joystick actually performing the correct commands on my PC.. erm yeh. I quite literally enjoy my day-job more than trying to get all that configured. Maybe if I could pay someone to set it all up for me… but nah, I think I’ll just play on a console.

I would have loved to get some games in on Street Fighter III 3rd Strike, even though I would’ve had to rinse the foul stench of playstation from my hands had I done so – but I was even offered a joystick to play on. But the trouble was it was just too popular and crowded all day long to wait for a game. I mean, seriously. I’d heard this game had a huge hardcore following these days, but seeing it here really bore that out. Not to mention the fact its relatively easy to get an XBL match on it these days. Just such a shame it has such awful net code and matching system & if there’s one game that really hates lag, it’s SF3.

Speaking of Street Fighter III 3rd Strike, that was the game that USA tourny Champ Justin Wong was taking on a huge queue of all-comers on the big screen during the afternoon I was there. And this was just ridiculous really. Wong was playing as Chun Li. I think one guy playing as Gouki got him close, to murmurs from the audience, but the rest of it was just a ridiculous whitewash. The daft thing was many of the people taking him on didn’t even seem to know how to play SF3 whatsoever. I have no idea why they waited in line for ages just to have their butt kicked on a game they don’t even know how to play.. takes all sorts I guess. But it meant it wasn’t even really interesting to watch due to the lack of skill of most of the challengers. I just used the reduction in queues for SF4 to get in as much on that as I could at that point.

I saw some Tekken. LOLZ is all I have to say about that.

Soul Calibur 4 was also there on the upper floor, and before it’s launch too. I didn’t bother to try it, even though it was easy to get a game on it because It didn’t seem to be getting much attention at any time I checked. It was good to note that most hardcore fighting gamers aren’t too impressed by this one, as I am not. It has some very flashy graphics, and bewbs, so I am sure it will be a big hit with the masses though… In fact I have this game on my 360 now and I doubt I’ll be talking much about it here, because it’s actually even worse than I imagined it would be. The usual terrible Namco effort.

And so it came to the end of the day and everyone was ushered downstairs for a time while the upper hall was re-decked with large lines seats and the stage was cleared of cabinets etc for the finals of Super Turbo and Dance Dance Tekken Revolution Fisting 5 or whatever the other game was. The dry ice floated across the stage and lasers lights danced before the crowd as the classic Transformers songs “You Got The Touch” and “Dare” blared out…

… and that was all I got to see, since the event had ran so late I already had to catch my train home.  A real shame as I’d booked everything based on the original event timings, and while a few kind people offered me places to crash in London, it would’ve cost me too much to pay for another train ticket - plus I had a club to get to back in Sheffield and a whole lot of vodka’s with my name on ‘em

If you’d like to see the full results of BOD though, they can be found here:

http://www.neoempire.com/forum/showthread.php?p=104948#post104948

But as for BOD itself,  I just have to say the staff were in the whole really REALLY great. Yes things didn’t all run smoothly I’m sure, but everyone I talked to was really helpful and friendly. Actually.. a lot nicer in-real-life than these guys act like on the internet I might add. As I say, I was offered places to stay, controllers etc. I of course voiced my complaint that running a solely PS2-based tournament totally locked out many players from playing, notably me. But they did point out that they’d be up for lending joysticks etc another time. I think a few of them were pretty jazzed I’d spent 70 quid and travelled all the way from ‘The North’ just to spend a day there too really. And I would’ve so dearly loved to have been able to compete properly in something, even if it wasn’t my best game, just to make the trip more fun & worthwhile. The feeling just grew as I defeated a good many of the tournament players in casual games of HD Remix. I’m sure I wouldn’t have a shot at winning, but there’s no doubt I could definitely hold my own with most of this crowd.

…And what a crowd it was - the people there were generally great bunch! I saw the odd bit of frustration displayed when losing, and hints of the online “arrogant act” I’ve witnessed before. But I watched a fair part of some of the Super Turbo heats and it was really it was nothing like I expected it could be - and certainly far from the worst excessives of other tournament atmosphere’s I’ve been to, eg. childish fits and rages etc. But instead people here were generally competitive but friendly. What was really cool was when playing new people and we both agreed to ”get serious” as tourrnament warm-up, and neither of us took the results any worse. I do think that perhaps my general friendly banter on games usually makes people chill anyway. It was also really fun to be with so many people with clearly likeminded tastes in games. For example geeking out over the new backdrops and moves in HD Remix.

As well as missing the finals, I also missed the infamous “Money Matches”, but they have now been youtubed if you are interested to see how they went down:

Sinity vs Justin Wong @ Marvel Vs Capcom 2

Ryan Hart vs Justin Wong @ Street Fighter III 3rd Strike

Overall it was a great experience and one I really hope to repeat soon, especially if there is a game I can actually enter a tournament for. I really hope the organisers take on board my recommendation to at least spread their games cross-console to get a wider appeal… but if not, with luck I’ll have a joystick that will be compatible in future too.

THE Battle of Destiny (it won’t be for me)

Just a short post to say.. yes, it’s finally confirmed I am going to this!

It will only be a day-trip for me though and I’ve still not decided which day to go on. I won’t be entering any of the tournments, because thanks to the sheer idiocy of the Sony-loving organisers means I cannot play any of them. And that’s as pleasant a comment I can make about that…

So moving swiftly on before my rage-gage fills to untold levels, I’ll hopefully get my fill of SF4 and SF HD Remix I hope whichever day I go, but I also want to watch the tournaments for entertainment. So the choice between seeing tournament matches Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (on Saturday) or Street Fighter III Third Strike (on Sunday) is an incredibly difficult one to make. Note that CVS2 only barely qualifies as “entertainment” to watch, and Tekken? Umm, right, I’d rather watch two toddlers brawling in a playground than that rubbish, thanks all the same.

There’s also the hilarity of a certain amount of “money matches” going down – but it’s unclear from forum reading as to exactly when those will take place, so I think I’ll just have to hope I get lucky in witnessing some of these.

Expect a full Agoners report later.