Category: News

Repeating the tradition of fighting games having pride of place at SXSW, SXSW Gaming has announced that Street Fighter V will be taking center stage with Fighters Underground. This invitational will see some of the top threats in Street Fighter V battling it out for a stake in a giant $20,000 prize pot. The players invited to compete at Fighters Underground are:

• Echo Fox|Momochi
• ZOWIE|Gamerbee
• Splyce|Filipino Champ
• Echo Fox|Justin Wong
• EG|Ricki Ortiz
• Liquid|NuckleDu
• RB.CYG BST|Snake Eyez
• Red Bull|Luffy
• EG|K-Brad
• BX3|Phenom
• PG|Punk
• Smug
• DNL|Chris Tatarian
• Danke
• RB
• FourWude

To commentate all of these top matches, Fighters Underground will have the likes of F-Word, Logan Sama, IFC Yipes, James Chen, and Ultradavid on the mic throughout the weekend. It’s set to be quite the invitational, so make sure to tune in via the SXSWGaming Twitch channel if you cannot make it to Austin, Texas this weekend.

Source: SXSWGaming

With the costume packs release just a couple of days away, Team NINJA has revealed a few more Arc System Works crossover costumes for Dead or Alive 5: Last Round.

Unlike the last reveal which focused solely on Guilty Gear, this latest one features a bit of both from that game and BlazBlue: Central Fiction. From the latter, we have a Makoto costume for Mila, and, fittingly enough, a Mu-12 costume for Phase-4 (both because she’s an artificial weaponized clone, and because Kasumi is cosplaying Noel). Meanwhile, from Guilty Gear, we have Ramlethal Valentine being cosplayed by the luchador La Mariposa.

Click to view slideshow.

With this, there are only 2 crossover costumes yet unrevealed. We’ll likely find out who these are before the costume set’s March 14 release date.

Source: Team NINJA

For those looking forward to playing some Street Fighter V online after watching the hype action from Final Round XX, it seems that your time to do so may be cut a bit short. An in-game message has just confirmed that the game’s online servers will be going down for maintenance again this Tuesday, March 14.

Street Fighter V’s online servers will go down for maintenance from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM PDT on Tuesday, March 14. During this time, players will not be able to fight online, access the Capcom Fighters Network for replays, nor be able to earn any fight money.

Now the 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM schedule shouldn’t affect those in the western hemisphere too much, since it coincides with work hours. However, players in other time zones will be affected much more, and any looking to get some matches should likely try to arrange for some offline sets.

Could we be finally seeing some of the promised Spring patching? As of yet, Capcom has not indicated any game additions to be arriving during this maintenance period.

Source: Street Fighter V

A year has passed since the country’s last rankings came out and it’s fair to say the ranks have shuffled about a bit. With more Japanese players traveling overseas, character specialists further innovating with their mains and the overall standard of Japanese play going up, this year’s ranking has changed significantly.

Smash 4 Japan Power Rankings (February 2016 – February 2017)
Graphics by @sqrt__
Click the link to see Top 200.https://t.co/EElwSkUHYC pic.twitter.com/e9SU4ys7jZ

— Haruki@harukisb#9649 (@harukisb) March 12, 2017

This new king is now KEN, with his Sonic racking up wins at tournaments like SGC, Umebura 22 and Umebura S.A.T, while turning up as the highest placing Japanese player at events like Tokaigi 2017 and Umebura Tokaigi Qualifier. He takes the crown off of fellow Sonic player 2GG|komorikiri, who has dropped down to second place.

Other players who have seen a rise up the leaderboards are Bayonetta main ikep, the Lucario wonder Tsu and Falcon main Pichi, while member of the Duck Hunt triumvirate You3 has leapt up a whopping 23 places on this ranking. The only brand new entry on this ranking is Kirihara, who got upgraded from hidden boss status, to eighth on this year’s ranking.

Just looking at the regional breakdown, Japan’s two main warring states are Kansai and Kanto who have a bitter rivalry that extends way past Smash. Kanto is currently up in the ranking, with 10 players as opposed to Kansai’s eight, so expect fierce clashes at future tournaments, both home and away. You can check out the entire top 200 player breakdown over on the official SSB4 Player Rankings site.

Source: harukisb

As promised during last night’s Killer Instinct presentation at the Killer Instinct World Cup, we finally have the balance notes for the upcoming 3.7 patch for KI. The biggest recipient of changes in this patch is Jago, who has been thoroughly hit with the nerf bat, with Glacius getting frame data improvements, General RAAM getting a well-needed buff, Ultratech debugging Kilgore’s programming among other changes.

Jago is considered by many to be the best character in Killer Instinct, with the patch notes even conceding that he “doesn’t really struggle at any range or with any matchup.” While having a powerful defensive kit, Jago could close gaps and deal damage up close without any real trouble, making him a jack of all trades and a master of many.

As such, the balance team have set about rebalancing Jago to preserve his defensive options, while making his close combat and gap closing tools that bit worse. This has involved making all of his Windkicks worse on block, reducing the range on Neck Cutter and lowering his standard Endokuken damage by 20% and his charged Endokuken damage by 10%. Jago will probably still be top five following this patch, but he should be less ridiculous both far away and up close.

Looking at the rest of the cast, Glacius received frame data improvements on Ice Lance, both standing heavy kick and heavy punch, alongside crouching heavy kick. General RAAM’s Kryll Cancel now only takes a half a meter, meaning he can deal with some offensive matchups and Kilgore’s potential damage output has been reduced by roughly 60%. There are a ton of other changes to characters like Kan-Ra and Maya, along with a whole host of bug fixes which can be found over on Ultra Combo.

Source: Ultra Combo

There is a special kind of challenge that every community faces when it starts, and that’s how to let people know about their game. Players need to, in and of their community, learn how to promote their game and ensure new players can get caught up. It’s not an easy undertaking, and we do see many communities struggle with it, and perhaps the best way to ensure success is to learn from communities that have come before you.

That’s just what Pokkén Tournament’s community has done here, with a new spectator guide. This guide aims to ensure new players know what they’re seeing when the game is being played, and it does so by mirroring the Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 spectator guide that released a few months back. This imitation is very welcome, and hopefully more communities will take up similar methods to help newer players get into the game properly.

You can enjoy the spectator guide with this link here.

Source: BurnsideBH

Alongside the big Shin Hisako reveal, the special presentation at Killer Instinct World Cup released a whole bunch of news about new content packs coming to Microsoft and Iron Galaxy’s fighter. First off is the announcement of the new Rash statue, which is coming courtesy of Project Triforce. Pre-orders of this will be starting in a month’s time, with orders of the cheeky Battletoad set to be fulfilled later this year.

We are releasing a Rash Statue created by @ProjectTriForce. Preorders in about a month. Releasing later this year. https://t.co/ujgT1eurY2 pic.twitter.com/4BTqZDy70A

— Killer Instinct (@KillerInstinct) March 11, 2017

Next up is the next set of Ultimates, which were actually leaked via Killer Instinct’s in-game store. This new pack of Ultimates will be for Kilgore, Fulgore, ARIA, Sadira and Riptor, with the panel showing off Fulgore’s Ultimate. Let’s just say Fulgore’s Devastation Beam got a bit of an upgrade. As with the last Ultimate pack, this will be free for everyone.

On the skins front, there are two new Gold skin packs coming in the near future. Gold Skin Pack 3 will release on March 21st with golden skins for Mira, Sadira and Glacius. Gold Skin Pack 4 will release on April 11th, with golden skins for Spinal, Kan-Ra and Hisako. There are plans for every character to get a gold skin, with there also being a Platinum skin hidden within there, to possibly compliment the pre-existing Platinum Gargos skin.

Gold Skin Pack 4 features skins for Spinal. Kan Ra, & HIsako. Releases April 11th. pic.twitter.com/HiCSWHZwuO

— Killer Instinct (@KillerInstinct) March 11, 2017

As for exclusive character skins, Gargos’ herald Omen will finally be getting a color pack later this summer. It’s taken a long old time, but the old glowing blue demon will at last get some color variation.

The Omen Color Pack is releasing later this summer. pic.twitter.com/Cy0VtC3men

— Killer Instinct (@KillerInstinct) March 11, 2017

Finally, besides the obvious Shin Hisako announcement, Kilgore will return to the KI Store on April 4th at the lower price point of $4.99. Iron Galaxy are set to reveal how much the Kilgore Community Fund has made later this weekend, so stay tuned for that figure sometime tomorrow.

Source: Killer Instinct (Twitter)