The last major US fighting game tournament has come and gone. Results for each of the games at Evolution are available at Evolution's main site. There's a lot to touch on for this tournament, so let's get started.

I could talk alot about the tournament setup and logistics and what not, but it would take awhile, and isn't particularly interesting. So I'll sum it up like this:

• Registration sucked.
• The dreamcast is a pain for big tournaments
• The setup menu in DC Super Turbo is an even bigger pain for big tournaments
• Having a seperate bring your own console room is a great idea
• We need more volunteers to help at these things
• The game show network was there filming (???)
• The game show network picked the most awkward looking people to interview. Seriously.

On to more interesting topics.

As far as atmosphere, this was the best domestic tournament I've been to yet (SBO doesn't count). Having a couple of projectors for big matches in the pools made spectating a breeze, and made it easier to keep track of what was going on. They had Tekken 5 on display, and it was very good looking, and had a lot of pretty interesting features. I don't like Tekken, and even I was intrigued. We'll see what happens when it's released though.

The finals though, were the best part of the event. Like last year, they had intros and music for all of the people in the finals for each game. The crowd was really into it, cheering loudly for underdogs and popular players, while giving lukewarm receptions for people they wanted to lose. And of course, the finals were exciting to watch. I love high level play, and it doesn't get much higher than the finals of a major tournament. There was however, one exception to this.

I'm going to rage a little in the next 2 paragraphs.

Anybody who's read this before knows that I kind of like fighting games. Even though I don't play 3D fighters, I still enjoy watching them being played at a high level, because high level play is (usually) interesting. So, that said, I'd like to take a second to send a big "fuck you" to the finalists in Soul Calibur 2 for wasting everybody's time by playing 4th class characters in the finals. They made an agreement to split the pot for 1st and 2nd place. This is fairly common in tournaments, and I don't usually have a problem with it. However, when people do that, they usually go ahead and play out the finals anyway. These two guys didn't even bother, picking C and D class characters and not even making an attempt at playing for real.

You want to split the pots? Fine. But don't waste everybody's time by playing BS matches on the big screen in front of 600 people. You're only hurting your own game. People want to see the best go at it, not watch you screw around for X rounds. The other matches were pretty interesting, and there was a wide range of characters being used: Talim, Mitsurigi, Nightmare, Sophitia and Cassandra were all represented. The Talim player was really fun to watch; I'd never seen a good Talim before. Having those 2 guys do their little song and dance in the finals was a shitty way to finish off what had been a great tournament.

Aside from the SC2 debacle, the rest of the finals were pretty entertaining to watch, with ST and 3S by far providing the best matches. MVC2 was kind of boring, mainly because none of the matches were close, and everybody knew that Justin Wong was going to win. If anybody reading follows Formula 1, he's essentially Michael Schumaker of the MVC2 tourney scene. Everybody else is competing for second place.

My Performance

I finished up 9th in Super Turbo this year, which is my best showing at the Evolution/B-series of tournaments. I cruised through my pool, going 4-0 with Balrog to qualify for the double-elimination semi-final bracket. I won my first two matches, without much difficulty, playing Ryu in my first one and Cammy/Balrog in my 2nd. I hadn't really anticipated playing Cammy, but my 2nd opponent (Jason Nelson from CA), picked Dhalsim, who I would much rather face with Cammy than Balrog. Straight countering isn't usually my thing, but in a big tournament, the gloves come off.

After defeating his Sim, he switched to O. Sagat, a horrible matchup for Cammy. I came close to winning it, but it's just too much of an uphill battle, so I switched to Balrog and was able to run him over. I then had 2 shots at making the top 8, which would have garnered me a spot in the finals (complete with music!), but I lost those two matches; one to John Choi and one to Kuni Funada.

Choi is a perennial finalist in every game he plays, and I had never faced him in a tournament before. I half debated picking Ryu first, but his best characters are Ryu, O. Sagat and Guile. Ryu can hold well against himself, but the O. Sagat match is tough, and I hadn't fought a good Guile with Ryu, and wasn't willing to test it with a spot in the finals on the line. Balrog performs well against all 3 of his characters, so that was my choice going in.

He went with Ryu first, and I took the first game. Ryu/Balrog isn't too tough until Ryu has his Super charged. Balrog can cover a lot of space very quickly, and one knockdown by him, can lead to a complete guessing game as the opponent gets up. I took that match without too many problems, but as I suspected, he switched to O. Sagat. Choi's Sagat is (in)famous for it's machine-gun like play. A round vs. him goes something along these lines:

Round 1: FIGHT!

TigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTiger standing LK TigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTigerTiger ...

You get the idea. He wears you down with fireballs, just pinning you on the other side of the screen, waiting for you to (foolishly) try to jump in, whereuopon you're greeted with a tiger uppercut. As Balrog, My first goal is to try and stay close, keeping him pinned down with rushes, standing fierce and headbutts, using the Turn around punch on wakeup for block damage and to stay close. If he pushes me out, then I backpedal to charging meter by going through tiger shots with Balrog's headbutt move, until I have super. At that point, I'll inch forward, looking for an errant fireball to super through. He knows this is my plan, so once I get super, he has to turtle to try and bait out my super.

The first game was close, going all 3 rounds. I almost gave one of the rounds away though. I had him dizzy in the corner, with a super meter, and I botched the super motion and got standing jab instead. I thought I was sunk, but I held on to win the round. He still took the 2 games from me though. When trying to get through fireballs, I missed timed several headbutts, resulting in damage from the initial headbutt, and block damage from the 2nd one he would throw after as I was getting up. This execution problem meant I wasn't gaining any ground on him, and he was slowly picking away at my life meter. There wasn't any one botch or any single thing I can point to that cost me this match. His execution was much better than mine, and I wasn't able to get my game rolling.

My second chance at the finals came against Kuni, one of the best ST Zangief players around. Kuni is somebody else I've known for years, but haven't had an opportunity to play in a tournament against. Unfortunately for me (but good for Kuni), this was his day to shine. I went with Cammy because Balrog/Zangief and Zangief/Ryu are both at best even fights, and he has FAR more experience in both of them than I do. Unfortunately, I was totallly off of my game and wasn't able to execute anything right. He was ready for Cammy; he used the lariet to hit all of my hooligan attempt (all 2 of them anyway), and I lost the ground game completely. Once he had taken away my ground game, I was at his mercy for jump-ins and piledrivers.

I'm glad for Kuni though. He was one win away from the finals last year, and was taken out by Alex Valle, and had been sent to the losers bracket this year by Valle as well. He went on a tear in the finals, getting revenge on Valle by eliminating him in the finals, and having a very entertaining run to the finals of the losers bracket before being eliminated by Choi and taking 3rd. I'm looking forward to seeing all of those sets on the Evo2k4 DVD (Coming soon!)

My perforamce in GGXX Was ok. I squeaked out of my pool 3-0 to qualify in winners, and my first opponent in the semi-final double elim bracket was David Hem from Texas, a Johnny player and finalist from last year. Johnny vs Bridget is a good matchup for Bridget. Johnny cannot really come at Bridget from the air, and Bridget's 6P does a good job of shutting Johnny down on the ground. I'm still very bad about countering throws in that game unfortunately. He was able to land several blocked strings into dash into throw against me. That's been a weakness of mine for quite awhile. Thankfully, he also jumped into several of my anti-air combos, which is what kept me ahead in the damage game.

My next performance was me participating in the making of a combo video against one of the Japanese. It was so bad that I had two of my buttons reversed in the first game and it didn't really matter. Kendevu (an Eddie player from Japan) basically kicked me up and down the Evolution competition hall for 4 rounds before mercifully letting me slink back over to ST. I can't even say I gained anything from that match except for a new appreciation for how good a character Eddie is.

My final match was against Genius, a Dizzy player. This was a match I really should have won, but I'm too used to #Reload. I found myself doing the Roger Hug lock-on move, which is total ass in XX because you can't really call it back. I had problems doing my super motions as well, which didn't help me either. I found myself doing the ROger Hug, then spamming throws because I couldn't get anything else to work properly. Thankfully, I will never have to play XX again, and can concentrate on #Reload from now on.

Memorable Moments from Evo2k4:

- Kuni tearing through the ST Finals bracket As mentioned, Kuni had been denied a spot in the finals last year. This year however, he made the most of his chance, dispatching Valle and Justin Wong, both who played Sagat. His Zangief is very entertaining to watch, and should be a highlight for the DVD.

- Daigo's performance in 3rd strike If you haven't seen this clip (12.1MB) of Daigo in the 3rd Strike finals bracket, and you like fighting games, you owe it to yourself to watch it. In my years of tournaments, I've never heard yelling like I did for that moment.

- Ode to the 2-Hit Combo ANybody who's seen any of James Chen's videos or read his FAQs knows that he puts out quality matieral. His latest video though, surpases everything he's done before. Weighing in at 323MB, and going for 20 minutes, James spent 2 years working on this project off and on, and it shows. Again, if you like fighting games, go check out The Ode to the 2-Hit Combo. There's a link to it in the headlines. I have a mirror of this file located here if anybody has trouble with the other link.

With Evolution in the books, there's going to be a lull for awhile. I'm pretty fighting game'd out for the time being, and i've accrued quite a backlog of games in the past couple of months. I'm plowing through Tales of Symphonia currently, and have been sitting at the last boss of Zelda: WW for an embarassingly long time. Disgaea and La Pucelle also managed to creep onto my Pile as well, and Doom 3 was just released. So I think it's time to put the dragon punches and yo-yos aside for a few weeks.

At least, till the next tourney.