Month: October 2016

Big news for the world of Super Smash. Bros 64, as the Japanese scene is planning to stage their biggest ever tournament. Run by ToukaiSmash, the first Toukai tournament is set to run on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in an unannounced location in Nagoya, with the goal of determining Japan’s best 64 player.

Thanks to sponsor support, this event is actually looking to have a prize pool which is rare for tournaments in Japan. So far, the sponsors have put forward ¥200,000, which is roughly $2,000. Unlike many 64 tournaments, Toukai is also planned to be streamed on both Twitch and NicoNico, meaning players will not have to wait ages for the local recordings to be uploaded to see all of the action. You won’t have to watch camera recordings of sets played on a projector, like the matches recently uploaded from Kanto 2016.

More details are available over on the official site, which has been helpfully translated by The64Story over on r/smashbros. If you are a 64 player in Japan or want to watch some 64 in between carving the turkey on Christmas Day this year, Toukai 2016 may be the thing for you.

Sources: ToukaiSmash via r/smashbros

With as specialized as the genre is, it’s rare to see fighting games be crossed over with other video game genres. As such, it’s refreshing to see an indie developer do just that with Honey Rose: Underdog Extraordinaire.

Just released on Steam Honey Rose: Underdog Extraordinaire combines fighting games with a life management visual novel. Players take control of Red, a university student who’s also an amateur masked fighter.  Players need to balance Red’s studies on her last chance to graduate from university, with her dream of fighting in the masked fighting tournament and facing her idol, Big Blue.  It’s an interesting mixing of genres that’s both fresh and somehow not unexpected, considering how many fighting games (BlazBlue, Persona 4 Arena) borrow from the visual novel genre for their story modes.

However, the hybrid genre isn’t the only innovative thing about Honey Rose: Underdog Extraordinaire.  The game sports an interesting payment model that its developers are calling “Pay-What-You-Liked”. The game itself is free, to support the developers, they’ve put up 8 pieces of “DLC”. Note that we put the term in quotes because, the DLC actually has no content at all. What they are instead are 8 donation tiers that anyone who wants to support the developers can use to do so.

This “Pay-What-You-Liked” model is an interesting use of Steam’s DLC system to implement what’s basically the “Pay-What-You-Want” model seen in places like Humble Bundle.  The fact that it makes the game itself free to download and play however makes it a much more interesting experiment – it allows players to actually try the game out, and then pay for it if they enjoyed it.  If this new model sees some some modicum of success, it may be a way for other indie fighting game developers, to attract people to play their games and experience the genre.

Source: Steam via Steamed