Kick off March with this battle for control of Central California!
If you’re going to be in California in early March, you won’t want to miss Cen-Cal Standoff, Central California’s first-ever Regional FGC Event! It takes place at Bitwise Industries in Fresno, California on March 4, 2017. Expect a lot of NorCal and SoCal’s greats to meet in this middle and throw down at this competition.
Cen-Cal will feature the following games:
Street Fighter V
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U
Super Smash Bros. Melee
In addition to over $2000 in pot bonuses, Cen-Cal Standoff with also feature commentary from Tasty Steve, Sajam, UltraDavid & James Chen!
Head over to the Cen-Cal Standoff website to register! Late registration starts tomorrow, so if you’re quick you can still save a few bucks.
Relative newcomer to the world of esports–and one of the handful of fighting games in the platform fighter category–Brawlhalla hasn’t been shy about making waves. Between the rare free-to-play model for a fighting game and the professionally-dressed nature of its scene, the game and its community have been making big strides into carving out their own niche as an FGC.
Despite having a World Circuit that’s running full-throttle this year, Brawlhalla hasn’t cut back on its constant influx of new characters. The latest character reveal shows off Nix, an apparent mid-range character with long-reaching command grabs that help her control space and get kills. She can use a scythe or twin guns, which seems to give her a balance between pure damage and superior zoning potential.
Former boxer Michael Watson and his carer, Lennard Ballack were hospitalised on Thursday night after the former world title challenger was dragged out of a car.
Watson, 51, was in the passenger seat, with Mr Ballack driving through Chingford in Essex when the vehicle was struck from behind.
The attackers sprayed a suspected noxious substance into Mr Ballack’s eyes, punched him, and pulled Watson out of the car and dragged him along the street, in what is believed to have been an attempt to…
This past Wednesday at the Folsom Street Foundry in San Francisco, CA, Capcom and well-known hip-hop artist Lupe Fiasco teamed up for some festivities to celebrate Fiasco’s new album–DROGAS Light–and to kick off the next Capcom Pro Tour season of Street Fighter V by letting attendants try out the newest DLC character, Kolin (who will be officially released on February 28). There was also an eight-person single-elimination tournament, and exhibition matches with top SFV players which included Echo Fox|Justin Wong vs. RB|Snake Eyez, EG|Ricki Ortiz vs. Liquid|NuckleDu, and PG|Filipino Champ vs. HyperX|Daigo Umehara.
In case you missed all the SFV action, you can catch up on the whole event at Capcom Fighters if you have a subscription. Commentary was provided by Stephen “Sajam” Lyon, Steve “Tasty Steve” Scott, EG|K-Brad, and Lupe Fiasco himself at times.
SFV Exhibition Results
Echo Fox|Justin Wong (Karin) defeated RB|Snake Eyez (Akuma, Zangief) 3-0
There was also a free-to-enter single elimination tournament with the prize being a Razer Panthera Arcade Stick for PlayStation 4. Unfortunately it wasn’t streamed.
SFV Open Tournament Results (76 entrants)
1st: Ultima (Rashid)
2nd: FS|Pavocado (R. Mika)
3rd: Brass (Guile)
3rd: Spoons (Laura)
5th: No Respect (Urien)
5th: DM|John B. (Ibuki)
5th: DM|Casual Phil (Rashid)
5th: DM|Burn Notice (Laura)
The event which was emceed by fighting game players/personalities Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez and Mike Ross, and was lively and entertaining for casual spectators and competitors throughout the night. There was even a mini-cosplay contest towards the end of the night, with prizes that were given out. The spectators ate it up as the cosplayers strutted their character outfits on the main stage.
Last but not least, the newest DLC character Kolin, was available to play and test out on multiple setups in the venue. I got to try her out a bit, figuring out what her normals and specials were as well test out some things that were safe and unsafe on block. I didn’t get to try out her V-Skill and V-Trigger all that much, but from what I observed from people playing, the latter seems strong so far. From my time with her, Kolin has excellent mobility both on the ground and in the air with lots of combo and mixup potential. Kolin’s main weaknesses so far seems to be on defense, since it seems like she doesn’t have anything to get the opponent off of her and her normals, while having decent range, are somewhat slow on startup. I’ll have more impressions on Kolin once she is released later this month.
I managed to record footage of Anthony “Crackfiend” Nguyen and Eliver “Killer Kai” Ling playing a Kolin mirror match and testing what she is capable. Check it out below, and sorry for the shaky camerawork.
The King of Fighters XIV World Championship just went down in Tokyo; aside from the tournament itself, many were excited for an expected big reveal at some point during the event, and thankfully we were not disappointed.
There was an announcement that Classic Iori would be available Febuary 23rd, but the most eventful news was that there will be 3 new costumes, 2 new stages, and several new characters were on their way. While no solid release date was given, the costumes were said to be available “Spring,” so the wait shouldn’t be too long.
You can see the alt costumes below. Meitenkun’s Pillow transforms into a stuffed cat doll, while Sylvie’s purse transforms into a tiny wolf bag. Kula doesn’t seem to get any noticeable model additions aside from the dress (though we do get a clear look at her normally-covered hands), and Angel gets darker skin and horns along with her attire.
The stages that were announced can be seen in the slideshow below. These are said to be free for all users, and feature one train-themed Mount Rushmore stage, while another features what looks like a section on a race track.
As for the new characters, our best look at them is this silhouette. It’s anyone’s guess who they are presently, but more details should be released next month.
While at first glance it appears to be 3 characters, it may in fact be 4 new additions; you can most easily see this by counting the number of left legs you see on the right side of the image (there appear to be 3) and then of course the character crouching on the left side of the image. While it’s hard to make out right now, that hasn’t stopped fans from outlining who they believe to be hidden in this image:
Capcom is continuing to give us updates on their Nintendo Switch-exclusive title Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers. We have already seen previews of their first person mode, but it appears that that is not the only casual trapping that Capcom is releasing with the title.
Newly revealed is a color edit mode, which we are now seeing glimpses of on Twitter. This will allow players to change the color of not only their character’s costume in the game, but also their skin and hair color as well.
Color editing has long been a hobby of many players, with the most prominent usage of this in the community being custom mixes of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 on Dreamcast–something done via third party programs using unauthorized burned copies of the game. This feature was also released officially in Street Fighter X Tekken, with a mixed response.
There is currently no word of any further balance updates.
Despite being over 15-years-old now, Super Smash Bros. Melee is still incredibly popular. It enjoys a lasting community and tournament scene, despite having two sequels–which for nearly any other game would have more or less put an end to that. This wide popularity does beg the question though: just how much longer is Melee going to keep kicking?
This question, among others, are addressed in Yahoo Esports’ latest Melee Mailbag episode. The host of the show, Daniel “Tafokints” Lee, estimates the time left for the game, considering the fact that it’s still going strong, and growing each year. He also addresses whether or not the Melee meta is stagnant, and looks at some of the things he’s excited for in the coming year.
BigBoysToys have teased their forthcoming figure with a digital mini comic that begins with the toy versions of Ken and Ryu engaging in a friendly squabble, and ends with Ryu undergoing a strange transformation.Though everyone’s first guess is probably that the ominous presence is Evil Ryu, the transformation of the toy Ryu seemingly causes him to triple in size.
Seeing as that a size increase is not a typical part of the Dark Hadou’s powers, it can be assumed that BBT is hinting that their next product will be a larger figure, which is a different take for them as their current line of Street Fighter collectibles have all been a consistent, matching size, with the same stylistically stout appearance.
Check out the comic below, and see if you can guess with the “big” news is.
Recently it was announced that some last minute Skullgirls changes would be tested through the Beta to address some new one-reset-kill tech that was found. The first of these changes went through testing a week ago, and after as much testing as a week allows, a final list of gameplay changes has been announced. The list of changes is pretty short, and thankfully doesn’t change much for most players; they’re mostly designed to soften the damage just enough to prevent those optimal routes from killing as efficiently.
As for the changes themselves, they primarily focus on lowering the potency of damage and resets at maximum undizzy–called Drama in-game–and they also offer a few character-specific changes to reduce the damage they can do at max undizzy. Here’s a list of the non-bugfix gameplay changes from the Steam page (there are several bugfixes and non-gameplay changes in the full patch notes), including the character-specific changes:
Overall Gameplay Experiments
ALL damage when above 240 undizzy is simply scaled by an extra 45% (to 55%, 1000 -> 550), with the same minimums as normal.
When undizzy is at 240+, the bar waits for 6f after recovery from hitstun before starting to decrease, so that resets must give the defender a larger window before no longer being penalized.
Snapping out a character on a trio now locks out both assists, not just the one you snapped out. This also locks out DHCs to both characters, and in general makes playing a trio riskier.
When undizzy is at 240+, the attacker always gets the minimum damage-scaled metergain and the victim always gets the maximum.
Big Band
All versions of A-Train are now IPS tracked, and can grant undizzy or IPS bursts if not chained into. (For IPS it counts as a separate special move from Brass Knuckles.)
He now can’t use taunted supers during the same combo that he gained the taunt.
Taunted Super Sonic Jazz -190 damage. At full scaling having a taunt gives almost exactly one extra super’s worth of damage now, instead of more than that.
Beowulf
Non-super versions of Canis Major Press are now IPS tracked, and can grant IPS and undizzy bursts if the grab-mode-starting attack wasn’t chained into.
Cerebella
Pummel Horse is now IPS tracked, and can grant undizzy or IPS bursts if not chained into. (For IPS it now counts as Excellebella, because they are both combo-able grabs.)
The last hit of Excellebella assist only and all followup damage is force-scaled to 33% maximum. (Raw assist 1650 dmg to 1047 dmg.)
j.HP scales damage to 75%, to give her slightly less reward for how much blockstun and priority it has.
Valentine
Purple poison now decides whether it will be max-undizzy-scaled or not when the syringe hits, and doesn’t change any time after that.
It appears that the Capcom Pro Tour season is gradually starting to flesh out some more! We already got some information on the Tour’s upcoming European leg; now the first stop is getting itself set up for early April.
Sonic Boom IV has officially announced its dates for the tournament, which will be in Madrid, Spain, on April 1st to 2nd. The event will feature The King of Fighters XIV, Ultra Street Fighter IV (3v3 teams), Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR-, Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, and Street Fighter V (teams and singles). Registration is now open, and accessible here.
