Author: Franz "d3v" Co

Some disappointing news has hit the Middle Eastern fighting game community recently: the United Arab Emirates’ GAMES 16 convention has been cancelled, and along with it the Capcom Pro Tour ranking tournament that was set to take place during the event.

Originally set to take place from September 22 to 24, the event was cancelled supposedly due to conflicts with the release schedule of certain titles. As such, the organizers behind the event did not feel that they would have been able to deliver the quality that they had promised and as such, are postponing the event to next year.

The cancellation is a great blow for competitive Street Fighter V players in the Middle East, especially since the cancellation has nothing to do with the game or the tour. In addition to this, it also means that the European regional division of the CPT, which the GAMES 16 tournament was to be part of, is down one event. How this will affect the point spread and whether or not another tournament will take its place is as yet unknown.

The full statement from the GAMES 16 staff, including instructions on how to get refunds on tickets, can be found below.

Source: GAMES Middle East

With Street Fighter V, the Kanzuki Estate stage–a location that previously only existed in the pages of the various Street Fighter spinoff comics–has finally made its appearance in-game. The massive estate was first seen in Masahiko Nakahira’s Sakura Ganbaru manga (where Karin made her debut, prior to Street Fighter Alpha 3) and was shown to stretch for around 200 miles and contained various amenities, including its own personal airport.

During Street Fighter V’s development, the game’s development team was aware of the estate’s size and its many amenities, and more than a few of these were made into concepts for stages. These concepts are the focus of a recent blog post on the Japanese Capcom Fighters Network Portal site.

The concepts range from the more mundane, such as a bathhouse (one of 80 within the estate), a rooftop and various halls around the estate, to the more ostentatious: such as the courtyard that would also serve as a hangar with various large aircraft, and a recreation room with 50 large screen TVs.

You can check these concepts out in the gallery below.

Click to view slideshow.

Source: CFN Portal

If there’s one thing that the Tekken franchise isn’t known for, it’s having any sort of paid DLC to expand the game. Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada has gone on record saying that he believes that fighting games work best as a package, and that things such as gameplay changes should be reserved for a new game.

However, it seems that Harada may be changing his tune due to feedback from the fans. In an interview with Gamereactor during Gamescom, Harada stated that “recently with the digital purchases and such a lot of people, the players especially are saying that they don’t mind paying… that they still want to see some new content after release.” He continues, saying “So since the voices are becoming more and more larger, I guess you could say, it is something that we want to think about seriously and perhaps change our point of view.”

While this doesn’t confirm that Tekken 7 will have paid DLC, this does open the possibility for it. At the very least, fans of characters who didn’t make the cut for Tekken 7: Fated Retribution have hope that their favorites may be added down the line.

Of course, that isn’t the only thing Gamereactor talked to Harada about in the interview. Other topics, such as why certain characters, such as newcomer Master Raven, were included, are discussed in the interview which you can watch below.

Source: Gamereactor

The King of Fighters XIV, like most competitive team fighting games, requires players to pick three unique characters for their team. However, a new glitch has been discovered that allows players to pick three of the same character for their team in online play.

As the video below from Haruhi00 demonstrates, players online can use a glitch involving a combination of the character select timer, and a player’s preset favorite characters to select the same character thrice. Now this glitch only seems to work online, since it uses features exclusive to that mode. Even so, it means that players online do need to look out for opponents using this glitch while grinding Ranked play.

Source: Haruhi00

Another top Street Fighter V player from Japan will be joining the ESL’s Brooklyn Beatdown. Capcom Cup 2015 Champion Ryota “Kazunoko” Inoue has won the Asia qualifier for the Brooklyn Beatdown, going through a loaded field of high ranked players to win a trip to New York this October.

Kazunoko, the only Japanese player to make the top 8 of the qualifier, blew through the winners side of the bracket, including the two top Korean players who who he would later face in winners and grand finals, NL and Tourniquet. Kazunoko first sent NL down to the losers bracket in the winners semi-finals before facing Tourniquet, who is currently ranked at #1 online, in winners finals.

Both these players would later face each other in losers finals, NL having eliminated Razer’s Xian along the way. NL played an amazing set against Tourniquet, bringing out some clutch reads and amazing reversal Critical Art punishes to earn the right to face Kazunoko again in grand finals. NL would again bring these same thing against Kazunoko in grand finals, however in the end, this wasn’t enough and Kazunoko won the set with a convincing 3-1 win.

With this win, Kazunoko joins players such as  EG|Ricki Ortiz, F3|Alucard, NVT|Flash, MJS YDlHaitani, and RZR|Xian who also joined the qualifier despite already being confirmed for the tournament.

Results

1. Kazunoko
2. NL
3. Tourniquet
4. Lineni
5. RZR|Xian
5. Adelloon
7. NarahKof
7. xyzzy

Source: ESL

Featured image c/o Robert Paul

When Tekken 7 was first announced, one of the more interesting details to come out was the fact that it was being made not on a bespoke engine, but on Unreal Engine 4. This put it on the growing list of Japanese-developed fighting games using iterations of Epic’s engine. UK news outlet Metro recently caught up with Bandai Namco’s Katsuhiro Harada at Gamescom, where they talked about Tekken 7’s use of said engine.

According to Harada, while Japan had the lead in 3D game development in the 1990s, Western developers started to catch up during the turn of the millennium as they started to focus on development with the PC–using engines like Unreal whereas Japanese developers continued to focus on using engines built for specific consoles. As such, Western development became very strong in the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era.

Harada continues by stating Japanese developers are now only just catching up with using middleware and engines like Unity and UE4. Off hand, he mentions only a few teams, such as the Final Fantasy team at Square Enix, some teams at Capcom, as well as Konami’s old Metal Gear team (which had at least one former Tekken developer) as being able compete with Western development.

Of course, that’s not just the only thing that they discuss. Harada and senior game designer Michael Murray also address a lot of other things, including whether or not Tekken has the longest running story in games at the moment, comparisons to Blizzard’s Overwatch, and more. You can read all of this in the full interview over at Metro.

Source: Metro

For any newcomers coming into The King of Fighters XIV, picking three characters from the large 50 character roster may seem like a daunting task. To help simplify this and make sure that newcomers make the right choices that help them learn the series’ mechanics, Antinomy has come up with a handy infographic that should help people make their choices.

The infographic, which you can see in the tweet below, places the characters into 3 groups. First up is the green group, characters here are those that will teach newcomers the basic aspects of KOF. Characters in the yellow group are somewhat similar to those in the green. However, they also have some special moves or properties that such as safe blockstring enders, that may not exactly teach players how to properly play the game. Finally, those in the red group will tend to give players bad habits that won’t help them out in the long run.

Are you new to KOF and don't know who to choose? I have some suggestion! pic.twitter.com/p7JsHGWzOK

— Antinomy (@Antinomy001) August 23, 2016

In addition to the three groups, there is an additional black group that’s reserved for the final boss Verse, which players shouldn’t pick–for obvious reasons.

Source: Antinomy (Twitter)