Following its runaway success and the quality of matches on display, the ESL has decided to extend its King of the Hill tournament series for an extra four weeks, starting on the 22nd of November. This decision comes as NorCal currently holds control of the Hill, thanks to EG|K-Brad’s victory over both NYChrisG’s Guile and Ronin|Alex Meyers’ Cammy. NorCal does get to hold the Hill for two weeks, as there will be a week break until play resumes.
Because of the amazing game-play & great reactions from the community we are extending #ESLKotH for 4 MORE WEEKS starting Nov 22 @3pm PST! pic.twitter.com/3svw4CHTpe
SoCal had held the Hill for four weeks, thanks to the combined efforts of Chris Tatarian and Alex Meyers, so it is up to K-Brad and his fellow NorCal residents to defend the Hill from the southern avengers. The contest for the Hill will resume on Tuesday the 22nd so tune into the official ESL Twitch to watch all the Street Fighter V action.
After chronicling the History and Evolution of Cammy, Xuses returns to take a look at both Crimson Viper and Sagat, two characters that could be likely candidates for future Seasons of Street Fighter V.
Starting with Viper, he spotlights a handful of the most notable players who brought the CIA agent into battle throughout the lifespans of Street Fighter IV and Marvel vs. Capcom 3, such as Wolfkrone, Latif, MF|Tonpy, BT|Marlinpie, and Unkn0wn doing what they do best against the likes of RB|Luffy, Chris Hu, Secret|Poongko, RZR|Xian, BST|Daigo Umehara, Kawaguuchi, RDK, and AlukardNY. He closes with a look at Viper’s three appearances in the SFV Prologues of M. Bison, Juri, and Urien, perhaps laying the groundwork for a Season 2 appearance? You can catch the video below.
Moving on to Sagat, who has a much deeper Street Fighter history, Xuses begins by showing him playable in the original Street Fighter (via hacks) before moving on to a showcase of his proper playable debut in 1992’s Street Fighter II: Champion Edition. He also looks at his trio of appearances in the Alpha series, as well as 1995’s Street Fighter: The Movie, Street Fighter EX2 Plus and EX3, as well as his involvement in the Vs. series via Capcom vs. SNK and CvS2, and SVC Chaos: SNK vs. Capcom. Finally, he moves on to the Emperor of Muay Thai’s more recent appearances, such as Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix in 2008, a rare non-fighting game appearance as a Boss Character in Street Fighter X Mega Man Version 2.0, and of course, Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter X Tekken. Like with Viper, Xuses ends the video with a clip from Rashid’s Street Fighter V Prologue, where the Turbulent Wind discovers, through the Street Fighter universe’s version of Twitter, (the Capcom Fighters Network?) where the King may be residing these days, as Abel says that he “Found Sagat, former member of the Shadaloo Kings. What’s he doing here deep in the mountains…” You can see his video below.
Lap Chi Duong is one of the pioneers of running majors in the modern era. His event, Canada Cup, has run annually since 2011, and has seen massive results due to the unique spin that Duong puts on his events. The best-known event in Canada, it has become one of the most popular events on the circuit for FGC members from all over the planet. This year’s event saw players from the USA, Japan, Mexico and a whole host of other nations converge on Canada to fight it out for a coveted CPT Premier Event victory–and plenty of bragging rights.
Before Canada Cup started, I sat down with Lap Chi to discuss the event.
Missing Person: How many Canada Cups is this for you?
Lap Chi Duong: If you’re talking about main Canada Cups, this is my seventh Canada Cup in total.
Missing Person: I remember a few years back you had stated publicly that you were done with organizing Canada Cup. Yet you’re still here. What keeps you doing this?
Lap Chi: You could call me crazy, but there’s something addictive about it. When people start messaging about you, saying, “Hey Lap, when is Canada Cup? I need to schedule the time off,” eight months in advance, and pro players are calling me to say, “Wow, we like what you’re doing, Lap,” and what happens is that we all fall back into doing it. The whole team comes back and says, “If you’re down, we’re down.” So even with all the money we’ve lost and the time and effort we put into it, it’s just addictive. We’re passionate about it, and we want to do a bigger and better event every single year.
Missing Person: And the developers’ support must be helping you out a lot more, as opposed to the years where it wasn’t there, correct?
Lap Chi: Yeah, of course! We were all on our own for the first few years. Almost everything came out of our own pockets. We did have a few big sponsors like MadCatz and Twitch, and if it weren’t for them, the losses would’ve been bigger and we would have had to fold. But everyone, like Capcom, Bandai Namco, and Atlus are coming to me, saying, “Hey, Lap, you throw a great event. We’re looking to do qualifiers.” And I think that’s a great way to promote your game. It is one of the greatest paths to rate of increase is to throw money at these tournaments for the players that support your game, and hold qualifiers to your own tournament series. The amount of marketing you have to put into that isn’t really that much at all.
Missing Person: You’re known for bringing Canada Cup to venues across Canada. Every other major is anchored down in one city. What are the logistical difficulties in doing that?
Lap Chi: Many people may not know that we tried moving to Toronto back in 2012. We had no support from the organizers in Toronto and Montréal. We had to abandon that plan, and move on to Calgary. We did find someone to help out in Vancouver, so we tested it out there and it wasn’t as successful as we thought it would be. That was where we thought, “Well it didn’t work out in Vancouver, so let’s just end it.” But instead, we decided that since we were always testing things out, we decided to run it in Calgary and not run anybody down about the event. If they came, they came, and if they didn’t, they didn’t, but we’re going to have fun. We’re going to entertain the people that show up, and in that year—2014—we didn’t lose any money. That was just from hosting it in Calgary. That’s when I realized that our brand was improving, and people were coming on their own volition. Once I realized that, I wanted to give Toronto another shot. Last year was a pretty big success, and this year doubled last year’s numbers.
Missing Person: Are you thinking that Toronto may be the permanent home for Canada Cup, or are you thinking of heading back to Calgary?
Lap Chi: I could never say that there’s going to be a permanent home for the event. Calgary, however, with the population and demographics being the way they are, is not the ideal place to host the event. We’re considering trying Montréal one day, because everyone always seems to want to visit Montréal.
Missing Person: But of course with that, there’s issues of language barriers in Québec, being a French-speaking province playing host to a mainly English-speaking audience.
Lap Chi: We would definitely have to aim to be bilingual there, but as of now, there are no plans to move out of Toronto. Additionally, DreamHack has already touched base with Montréal, so we may just stick to Toronto. We’ll see.
Lap Chi Duong at the after party for Canada Cup 2016. Photo courtesy Jennifer Lee.
Missing Person: Excellent. As far as you personally, I’ve known you to travel internationally to play in events, like going to Korea and Singapore for Capcom Pro Tour qualifiers. Are we going to see you doing any of this again?
Lap Chi: When I was doing that, I was still taking competing seriously. I’m terrible at Street Fighter V, so for now, no travel plans. Possibly in the future I’ll start back up.
Missing Person: You have Canada Cup which is a big success. Any other things coming down the pipeline, such as collaborations with Toryuken and MAT?
Lap Chi: We would always love to collaborate with them. I think MAT was a pseudo-qualifier for Canada Cup this year for preferential seeding. There may have been additional prizes such as free venue pass or VIP passes, so we’ve done it before with a lot of events across Canada, so we may try something next year. But I feel like there’s way too many events out there, including not just MAT and Toryuken, but locals, and even the Red Bull events. I look at that and go, “Holy cow. That’s oversaturation.” If it’s going to continue like that, I may just focus on running the one event, and may not even bother with qualifiers, just to prevent people from getting burnt out.
Missing Person: With Canada Cup, you’re always doing something exciting, such as team tournaments and regional battles. What other interesting twists do you have up your sleeve?
Lap Chi: We had a crazy marquee match this year between Lupe Fiasco and Sisqo, but they had conflicting schedules. We tried six months in advance to book this, but it’s really hard to book celebrity matches. We’re going try next year, and see what kind of celebrities we can put together, but definitely something fun and fresh. We all know there’s the regular tournament standard systems, but I think the spectators truly enjoy seeing something new and exciting. We’re always willing to test it.
Missing Person: Other than Street Fighter V, which is the biggest tournament, what games are you looking forward to seeing played?
Lap Chi: I’m definitely looking forward to the 5-on-5, but Melee and Smash 4 are both really big, so I can’t wait to see what kind of hype they can bring to their respective scenes in Canada, and to see if we can build them up.
Missing Person: And you are currently hosting the largest Super Street Fighter II Turbo tournament that the west has seen in a long time. How do you feel knowing that the whole world is coming for this one event?
Lap Chi: It’s a community effort, and the community worked really hard to try to everyone in for this event. I cannot thank them enough for that. They have made Canada Cup hype for Super Turbo, and I for one and am shocked at how big that event became. It was shocking, it was not like that at all last year. This year had tremendous support.
One of the most prestigious events in the Smash calendar occurred last weekend. Smash Summit 3 saw 16 of the world’s strongest Melee players all under one roof, competing in various tasks over four days. To catch fans up on what the event was like, Beyond the Summit has uploaded this recap video to their channel.
There was tons of content with some truly incredible sets over the event. Between team battles and Iron Man contests, not even to mention the main tournaments, it was an amazing weekend. While all of the sets have yet to be uploaded to YouTube, we have here a selection of some of these side events.
Take a ride on Rashid’s private plane before the scheduled departure time.
Street Fighter V servers are down to (at least) pave the way to introduce Rashid’s new high-flying Skies of Honor stage; if you don’t want to wait until they come back up (or if you want a better look at what you’d be laying down Fight Money–or real money–for), SFV PC dataminers have already pulled the stage out, along with its background music, for your preview pleasure. Check it out below.
As expected: new content means an SFV server shutdown day.
Those looking forward to flying high in Street Fighter V’s new Skies of Honor stage will have to wait until 4:00 PM PST, as Capcom has shut down the SFV servers for the usual maintenance window that has come to accompany the addition of such new content to the game.
#SFV servers are down for maintenance until 4PM PST. Thanks for your continuous support!
Last weekend saw the Capcom Pro Tour’s North American Finals at Red Bull Battle Grounds. This being such an important event, none other than Street Fighter V producer Yoshinori Ono was in attendance; Red Bull’s Anne Ellis was on hand to talks to Ono about a few things about Street Fighter V.
As part of the interview, Ono addresses Street Fighter V’s content issues. Here, Ono admits that they know that they didn’t put out a complete product, and states that the launch was a “learning experience.” That said, their team has been listening to the community and is working to add more content. “We try to progress forward and listen to the fans more, and see what they want and continue adding new modes and things to the game.” Ono states, “What that content will be, we don’t know, but we’ll continue to get feedback from the users on what they are wanting.”
Aside from this, Ellis and Ono also talk about the evolution of Street Fighter V’s competitive scene, from its days back in arcades to the big events that we have now. In particular, Ono comments how live streaming and services like Twitch have influenced the growth of the community. He states that, back in the day, it would probably have taken a decade for the scene to develop to the level where Street Fighter V’s scene is now.
Of course, that’s just part of what they talk about. You can read the rest of the article over at Red Bull.
Unbeaten heavyweights Joseph Parker (21-0, 18 KOs) and Andy Ruiz Jr (29-0, 19 KOs) will fight for the vacant WBO title on December 10 at the Vector Arena in Parker’s native New Zealand.
Parker, who is the WBO’s number-one ranked heavyweight, has already fought four times this year, including outpointing Carlos Takam and knockout wins over Solomon Haumono and Alexander Dimitrenko, and he will have home advantage when he fights the 27-year-old Mexican, in the first ever heavyweight title clash…
“Super Street Fighter Carnival 2016”, or SSFC2016, is the currently ongoing Japanese multi-month tournament series at Mikado Arcade. This event pays tribute to a variety of arcade fighting games, popular or obscure. If you missed the action, there’s plenty of great matches to catch up on!
If you’ve been following along, you know that these titles run the gamut of “classic” to “crazy.” Given its near monolithic legacy in the FGC, most will put Capcom vs. SNK 2 in the former category. This is a game with a decade and a half of tech and passion behind it–as the matches here show.
[A timely choice, seeing as Capcom’s teaser reveal of Akuma for Street Fighter V at Red Bull Battle Grounds last night utilizes the same kanji featured by Shin Akuma in CvS2! – Editor]
But CvS2 wasn’t the only sequel to show up! SNK’s classic weapons-based fighter, Samurai Shodown 2, had its own intense tournament. Light on combos and heavy on smart poking, SS2 is a treat for anyone craving some simple and solid footsies.
A Chinese language version of The King of Fighters XIV is coming out later this month. With the country being a major market for the series, as well as the home of SNK’s new owners, Ledo Millenium, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the country is getting a special premium edition. What’s interesting however is that this version may be getting something that other regions don’t have.
Based on an image supposedly released by the game’s Chinese distributor Gamepoch, The King of Fighters XIV’s Chinese Premium Edition will come with an exclusive classic costume for Iori Yagami. The image was spotted in a KoF chat group and was shared on the web by Twitter user Tox.
The other items included in the premium edition seem to be the same one in the Premium Editions for the rest of the world: a steel book, 3-disc soundtrack, and a premium art book.
Whether or not the Classic Iori skin will be made available for purchase in other regions is as of yet unknown. However, it is likely considering that the pre-order exclusive Classic Kyo and Nightmare Geese skins were later made available for purchase.
