Category: Fighting Games

On the first day of 2018, 2GGaming announced the formation of the SoCal Smash League. Consisting of a number of weekly tournaments and employing the support of a few top Smash organizations, the newly formed league is a collaborative effort to unify and improve the southern California region’s dense Super Smash Bros. community.

The official announcement video can be seen below:

It’s no secret that SoCal is a hot spot for competitive Super Smash Bros., and it’s great to see a new year starting off with such an organized push to continue to garner support for the scene. To keep up with the Socal Smash League’s official events, you can check the schedule on their official smash.gg page. For additional information or inquiries, you can view a FAQ document here.

Source: 2GGaming

The release of indie platform fighter Brawlout on the Nintendo Switch has received notable success, with its player count reaching 50,000 within 2 days of its December 19th launch.

Since its initial PC launch on April 20th, the overall player experience for Brawlout seems to be a positive one so far, but a few complaints have stood out in the game’s budding community, particularly those regarding the game’s online latency and matchmaking.

According to a recent tweet from the official Brawlout Twitter (embedded below), a patch aimed at resolving these online multiplayer issues can be expected to go live very soon.

Our networking engineers worked even over the holidays and we’re submitting the patch to greatly improve matchmaking (and fix the network lag) in less than a week

— BRAWLOUT (@brawloutgame) January 2, 2018

The tweet definitely signals the Brawlout team’s commitment to their players. Hopefully the patch can successfully address the online issues as well as other minor bugs that fans of the Smash-inspired platform fighter have been experiencing.

Source: Destructoid via BRAWLOUT (Twitter)

Hideaki Itsuno, the Capcom developer behind beloved works such as Rival Schools, Capcom vs. SNK 2 and the Devil May Cry series has tweeted that he has been working on a new game that is currently, in his words, “under climax.”  You can view Itsuno-san’s full tweet below:

Happy new year!
I am sorry that I can not present a new project last year. The development of the project is now under climax. I am making a great game so please expect it.

— Hideaki Itsuno (@tomqe) December 31, 2017

While it would certainly be jumping the gun to automatically assume that this near-finished project is a fighting game, Hideaki Itsuno has been keeping hope of a new Rival Schools installment alive for years. There has certainly been no lack of interest for a new CvS game either, and with the wild surprises we saw in 2017 regarding the future of fighting games, it would be unwise to count anything out.

Whatever is in the works, it sounds like it will be completed soon, and it’s possible that the Capcom designer will have updates for us this year. Hideaki Itsuno is actually pretty active on Twitter, and you can follow him to to keep up with his updates directly.

Source: Hideaki Itsuno (Twitter)

Japan is shaping up to be the spot for top level fighting games this weekend. Not only is the Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Cooperation Cup happening, but for fans of Guilty Gear, Mikaten 3 will also be showing off some top-level Guilty Gear Xrd REV 2 first-to-tens on Saturday and Sunday.

At 4:00 PM JST on Saturday (11:00 PM PT on Friday), Omito’s Johnny will take on former Evo champion Ogawa’s Zato-1, followed up by Omito facing off against Herken’s Sol. On Sunday at 2:00 PM JST (9:00 PM PT on Saturday), Herken will fight Ogawa, followed up by Tourio’s Ino going up against Fumo’s Elphelt. All of this will be streamed in both English and Japanese, with the English stream taking place on Joniosan’s Twitch channel.

Source: majinobama

With the release of Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition just around the corner, Capcom has put together a quick summary of some of the things that are coming to the update over at Capcom-Unity. While most of what are in the post are things that we already know about from their previous posts, there is a bit more information here concerning the new Extra Battle mode.

For players looking to earn Rashid’s Viewtiful Joe crossover outfit, more details have been revealed about the process. While we already know that the outfit can be earned by joining and completing four weekly Extra Battle challenges (at the cost of 2,500 Fight Money per challenge), now we know when these can be earned. Specifically they’ve now given out the dates for each challenge, and the icons that have to be won from each to earn the costume.

Repeat completions of the above challenges will earn players extra Bonus Rewards to be revealed on January 16. Also, Capcom has issued a disclaimer that schedule and rewards for Extra Battle may “change unexpectedly.”

In addition to this, they’ve also detailed the first set of special challenges for special titles and the Golden Shadaloo soldier challenges. Completing the Dark Revenger challenge will earn players a special title with the same name.

Meanwhile, the first batch off Golden Shadaloo Soldier challenges are as follows. Take note that, unlike the previous challenges above, these have can only be played a finite number of times.

Other things shared in the post include a sampling of the update’s new second V-Triggers, a re-post of the Team Battle mode announcement video featuring WWE Superstars, and reminders about the game’s exclusive retailer pre-order bonuses.

They’ve also announced that they will be doing a stream featuring the entire path of Arcade Mode with Sakura on January 9.

Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition hits PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on January 16.

Source: Capcom-Unity

2017 was a great year for Rivals of Aether. From the conclusion of the first ever Rivals Championship Series at Genesis 4, to releasing three new characters and having a packed year of stellar events, the indie platform fighter has gone from strength to strength. It’s not all been sunshine and rainbows though — as lead developer Dan Fornace detailed his thoughts on how 2017 was for the Rivals team.

With the addition of new characters Ori, Ranno and Clairen, alongside new features like Money Matches and continued community support with event skins, the development team have started to notice the cracks in Rivals of Aether. Xbox One players have had to struggle with delays on updates and new characters, while the relative age of Game Maker Studio 1 means that fixing bugs can be an absolute nightmare when implementing new features. Negativity has also impacted the team, with certain vocal people constantly running the team down whenever they do add something new. When you consider the Rivals team is only composed of five permanent staff, this toxicity is bound to have an effect on productivity.

It’s not doom and gloom by any means — and the openness of the Rivals of Aether team about development issues is refreshing when compared to bigger studios. 2018 is looking promising, with Dan hinting at some of the things (hopefully) coming this year. First off is Rivals of Aether‘s first alternate skin which will launch later this month, followed by the next original character which is set to be revealed in either February or March. Based on a recent poll on Twitter, this character is set to be a snake piloting some kind of mech — Metal Gear anyone?

Rivals’ final guest character is set to arrive in spring, with the team being “90% sure [as to] which character [they] will be creating.” From there, Rivals of Aether is set to get its own Definitive Edition sometime this summer, which contains every DLC character. The team are also hoping to add additional features like Steam Workshop support for custom stages and even characters in the future, as well as rollback netcode.

Finally, the biggest announcement is that the Rivals of Aether team are hoping to launch the game on more platforms in 2018 — with the Nintendo Switch being their main goal. This won’t really happen until the Definitive Edition is complete, but Dan and the team are looking to launch on Nintendo Switch, Mac, and Linux sometime in 2018, if everything goes to plan.

Source: Medium