Category: News

With all of these tournament circuits popping up lately, anime fighters often end up being left out in the cold. While the KOF World Cup and ArcRevo gave players a taste of Capcom Cup-esque qualifications for The King of Fighters XIV and Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR- respectively, the Japanese-style events focused on tournament standards Westerners dread–single-elimination format.

Tournament organizer Bear has decided to change that. In his announcement of Burst League–a tournament circuit centered solely around Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR-, BlazBlue: Central Fiction, and The King of Fighters XIV–it looks like the games involved will receive similar treatment to Street Fighter V or Tekken 7. With tournaments like Frosty Faustings, Anime Ascension, and Final Round retroactively added, the first place finishers from each event will be flown in with accommodations paid to CEOtaku 2017 in Orlando. The top spots on each leaderboard will also be brought in for a final championship event, to be announced later.

Source: /r/GuiltyGear

Three dates still remain in this Street Fighter V qualifying series at Xtreme Gaming in Colchester!

Presented by ZOWIE and held at Xtreme Gaming in Colchester, England–it’s the Street Fighter V Extreme Series! Intended as a means to build the community and help discover some new talented fighters, these events are are open to all skill levels and are completely free to enter; the first qualifier on March 25 has already completed, leaving four all-expenses-paid spots remaining to fight for in the upcoming Paris finals.

Each event offers a prize pool of: £500 and a ZOWIE RL2460 esports monitor for first place, £250 for second, and £100 for third.

• March 25, 2017 [top 2 advance to finals] – completed
• April 8, 2017 [top 2 advance to finals] – register on Challonge
• April 22, 2017 [first place advances to finals] – register on Challonge
• May 6, 2017 [first place advances to finals]- register on Challonge

The first event on March 25th saw Mousesports|Problem X take the top spot. The venue remains open for casual matches throughout the day for players to practice. The tournament sets are streamed at www.twitch.tv/banksesports. A word from organizer James Banks, of BanKs Esports:

The ZOWIE Fighter Extreme Series in the UK is about the players, all you have to do is ask the people that attended the first event, and we want to reach as many Street Fighter players as possible, not just due to the prize money and the opportunity to attend a European final event but to learn and grow. It was refreshing to see so many players speaking to the top players about their losses and learning, we want that balance of community, FGC event and top level play that we love to see and get hyped about!

Source: BanKs Esports

Alongside the new stages, music tracks, and DLC characters, The King of Fighters XIV’s version 2.0 patch (available to download now!) brings with it a host of updates to the game and its balance.

The version 2.0 update features some changes to training and story modes, as well as a number of bug fixes all around. The bulk of the changes, however, are to the game’s characters, altering the overall balance. A big part of the balance update involves giving the characters individual health values–characters now have different health levels, instead of everyone having 1000 health like before. On the flipside, each character’s run speed after a Quick MAX activation is now the same. Each character also sees a number of significant changes to their move properties, in an effort to compress the game’s tier list; while the game isn’t badly balanced (and nowhere near as problematic as the previous KOF game), some characters have become conspicuous either by their prevalence at–or absence from–tournaments.

The whole change list itself is pretty extensive, clocking in a 25 pages long. Those interested in checking it out can do so here!

Source: SNK

Following a popular talk at this year’s GDC which discussed the art direction for Street Fighter V, Capcom have released part of their internal anatomy guide for everyone to read. Called “Anatomy: a strange guide for artists,” this document was designed during the height of the pixel art era, showing artists at Capcom the most important areas to exaggerate when creating character sprites.

The portion of the guide mainly focus on the male body, showing artists how to draw and animate characters. Focusing on specific body parts like the arms, shoulders and legs, the document shows how artists can elongate, shorten or otherwise exaggerate these body parts to create art which is both informative and cool to look at. While it is all in Japanese, the very existence of this guide shows just how much care went into designing character sprites for games like Darkstalkers and Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. Even though Capcom has left sprite art behind, the document is still used to teach new artists about Capcom’s “house style” when it comes to animating characters. The guide was actually created around the time of the Street Fighter Alpha series, and the first Darkstalkers game, explaining why Demitri is on the cover. Several famous Capcom artists collaborated on the guide, with Akiman acting as the editor.

The whole GDC talk is a must-watch if you’re interested in character and art design for fighting games, as it tracks Capcom’s process in refining Street Fighter V’s character art. It also touches on how Capcom’s artists would carefully exaggerate certain elements of character anatomy–a length of an arm, size of a muscle, the curvature of a spine–in order to present as much information to the player as quickly as possible.

Sources: CFN Portal via Madman’s Cafe; GDC Vault

Following the release of Catwoman’s gameplay trailer yesterday, NetherRealm Studios’ Ed Boon has revealed more Injustice 2 news on Twitter. First, part 4 of the “Shattered Alliances” trailer series, focusing on the Society, will be released on Thursday. Also, the next Watchtower live stream will be held tomorrow–April 5th–featuring character breakdowns for the recently revealed Captain Cold, Bane and The Flash, from whom we haven’t seen any gameplay since he was first revealed in the game’s announcement trailer.

You can see the Tweets below, and, as usual, the stream will begin at 3:00 PM CST (1:00 PM PDT) on https://www.twitch.tv/netherrealm.

Come CHIILL at the WATCHTOWER where in a FLASH you'll learn to be the BANE of Injustice2 player's existance.pic.twitter.com/MhkZ6BiUzI

— Ed Boon (@noobde) April 3, 2017

The world welcomes its new masters – the Society. Find out more in Shattered Alliances Part 4! Coming this Thursday, April 6. #injustice2 pic.twitter.com/KZN3Lf4eSB

— Injustice2 (@InjusticeGame) April 4, 2017

Sources: Noobde (Twitter); InjusticeGame (Twitter) via Test Your Might

About half a year ago, some members of the King of Fighters community started mobilizing a large-scale survey to compile data on their players. This data collection is as of now complete, with the organizer of the survey posting their findings on Twitter.

So, we're done! #KOFSurvey analysis article is done for #KOFXIV. Here it is! It's 25 pages long. Enjoy! @Fata_Con https://t.co/QTmsbuDAaE

— James Alderson (@Reiki_Kito) March 31, 2017

The linked document contains strategies for raising awareness and broadening the playerbase of KOF, as well as solid numbers about crossover with other games, how long players have been playing, whether players are interested in attending their first event, and what would attract them to actually making it to their local scenes to play. This information should be interesting for everyone–but it’ll be particularly helpful for anyone wanting to grow the KOF scene.

Source: James Alderson

Hoping to put to rest one of Melee’s longest-running feuds, Yahoo! Esports has announced a special 16-player invitational, titled Smash Rivalries. Ever since the early days of Melee back in the mid 2000s, there has been a fierce rivalry between the East and West Coast. Bringing together players from both sides of the USA, this invitational should hopefully end a beef which has been raging for nearly 15 years.

This event will run this coming weekend from April 8th-9th, with a main 8v8 crew battle, alongside a doubles and singles bracket. The teams are as follows:

East Coast

Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma
Jason “Mew2King” Zimmerman
James “Swedish Delight” Liu
Justin “Wizzrobe” Hallett
James “Duck” Ma
Ryan “The Moon” Coker-Welch
Sami “DruggedFox” Muhanna
Daniel “ChuDat” Rodriguez

West Coast

Joseph “Mango” Marquez
Zachary “SFAT” Cordoni
Weston “Westballz” Dennis
Jeffrey “Axe” Williamson
Dajuan “Shroomed” McDaniel
Kevin “PewPewU” Toy
Johnny “s2j” Kim
Joey “Lucky” Aldama

The commentators for this tournament are well versed in this long standing rivalry, with veteran commentators Wynton “Prog” Smith, D’Ron “D1” Maingrette,  Brandon “HomeMadeWaffles” Collier, Phil DeBerry and Kris “Toph” Aldenderfer lending their voices to the proceedings. All the action will be streamed live from the Yahoo! Esports Twitch channel, with games kicking off at 12:00 PM PST on April 8th.

Source: Yahoo! Esports

Evolution Fighting Championships: continuing to evolve!

Tony Cannon took to reddit today to describe at length planned improvements to Evo 2017 in the Evo 2017 Planning Megathread. Cross-posted on r/StreetFighter and r/SmashBros, it discusses points raised by the community from last year’s Evo, and what steps are being taken this year to make Evo an even better experience for competitors and attendees.

To answer concerns about crowding, the venue space has been doubled over last year’s, from 125,000 to 277,000 square feet. This will allow every game to have its own dedicated screen and viewing area while it’s being played, as well as feeling less cramped in general. The 80-foot big screen from Evo 2015 will also be making a return this year. You can view a rough, tentative venue map to get an idea of what’s being planned on the Megathread.

To address bracket/seeding issues, the switch to smash.gg has already been made. Seeding at the event itself will use smash.gg’s own system, and smash.gg will be providing on-site support at the event to keep the brackets running smoothly. The pool of available TOs will be expanded to ensure TOs are familiar with the games they’re running brackets for!

We endured a sweltering walk between the Westgate hotel and the event hall  last year; to avoid that this time, the event is consolidated in Mandalay Bay this year. And if you don’t want to line up for your passes when you arrive, smash.gg can send you a personalized pass in advance when you register!

Evo 2017 is at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada on July 14-16, 2017.

Source: r/StreetFighter