Category: News

Following in the footsteps of previous Super Smash Bros. Melee alumni like Johnny “S2J” Kim, Joseph “Mang0” Marquez and Zac “SFAT” Cordoni, premier Samus main James “Duck” Ma has joined Melee It On Me as their latest signing. Duck has gone from strength to strength as of late, achieving rank 22 on the latest MIOM World Rankings and picking up some impressive wins against fellow top 20 players like TSM|Leffen, G2 Westballz and CLG SFAT in the last year.

His placings have been equally as impressive, earning 5th at Dreamhack Winter 2015, 13th at Genesis 3 and 9th at The Big House 5, Smash Summit 2 and Evo 2o16. With the combined strength of Duck’s precise Samus play and MIOM’s connections across the world, here’s hoping that this duck will be taking flight with a top-level team very soon.

Source: Melee It On Me

The next stop on the North American Capcom Pro Tour will be New York’s Defend the North. Things will kick off on Friday, July 29 with team tournaments and special exhibitions including Battle of the Boroughs, a special 5-on-5 Street Fighter V team tournament. Now in its third year, Defend the North will host official tournaments for 10 different games over the course of the weekend.

Defend the North is the East Coast’s first CPT ranking event of the season and will feature much of New York’s top talent, such as Evo Finalist L.I. Joe, F3| Alucard, OG| Shine and PIE| Smug. They’ll do their best to protect their home turf against a list of confirmed attendees that includes Fox| Julio, EG| KBrad, EG| Ricki Ortiz, Liquid| KnuckleDu, RB| Snake Eyes, Ronin| Alex Myers and NYChrisG, who returns New York from Southern California.

As a North American Ranking Event, the winner of Street Fighter V at Defend the North will qualify for the 16-player Regional Finals and earn a free trip to the event later this year.

Exhibitions

Friday night will be an evening of exhibitions capped off by Battle of the Boroughs. Organized by Dwayne “D’Nyce” Buchanan and sponsored by Sennheiser, the exhibition will feature 8-teams led by area captains. The winning team in the single elimination bracket will take home $1,000 and the title of “Kings of the North.”

The full team lineups will be announced prior to the start of the event tonight. TeamSp00ky will be streaming the event and you can find the bracket here. Four teams have been announced so far via Youtube (captains in bold):

• Team Long Island: L.I. Joe, Marvisto, Moons, OG Shine and F3| Alucard
• Team Bronx: Coach Steve, Dieminion, Kreymore, Lionhart, Hiro
• Team Queens: TS| Sabin, PIE Smug, NL DaFeetLee, Jav1ts, BS Dang
• Team New Jersey: Shakugan, KDZ, NS Raoh, HD Cloud, CornFGC
• Team Manhattan: IFC Yipes
• Team Brooklyn: Henry Cen
• Team Connecticut: FreeJay
• Mystery Team (Replacing Upstate): ????

In other exhibitions, former New York resident ChrisG will face off against “new” New Yorker F3| Alucard in a first to seven Street Fighter V match on Friday night.

PAG| Pink Diamond will face off against PIE| Daffy in a first to seven Killer Instinct exhibition as well. Pink Diamond has built a reputation as one of the country’s strongest Killer Instinct players, earning Top 8 finishes at Winter Brawl, Combo Breaker and CEO this year. Defend the North will also serve as a qualifier for the Killer Instinct World Cup.

Johnathan “Bum” Farley will host a special “Underground Fight Club” on Friday Night as well, and will be organizing even more exhibitions and high stakes matches for Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Street Fighter V. Those matches will be streamed by the King of the House of Chaos himself.

Tournament Schedule/Brackets

Saturday will serve as the main event, with the player pools for each game working down to their finalists. Pokken Tournament will finish on Saturday, while Top 8 for the other titles, and Top 16 for Street Fighter V, will be held on Sunday. Be sure to check the full schedule for the weekend below, as some times may conflict:

Brackets are being handled through Smash.gg and will be updated as the tournament progresses. Check back for results as they happen!

Streams

The tournament will be spread across three streams, with the House of Chaos streaming the Underground Fight Club:

Team Sp00ky

Watch live video from TeamSp00ky on www.twitch.tv

Kick-Punch-Block

Watch live video from KPBLive on www.twitch.tv

House of 3,000

Watch live video from HouseOf3000 on www.twitch.tv

House of Chaos

Watch live video from Bum1six3 on www.twitch.tv

Source: Defend the North, Andy “CitiofBrass” Dumornay

For any players looking for some old school Guilty Gear action on PC, here’s some great news for you: both Guilty Gear X2 #Reload and Guilty Gear Isuka are currently on sale in The Humble Store.

The first update to the Guilty Gear X2 series, #Reload is the first time Robo-Ky had his own moveset. Interested players can purchase it for only $1.49 USD.

Guilty Gear Isuka, on the other hand, is more of an experiment at allowing 4-player battles in the series. While not as highly regarded as other entries, it’s still a worthy addition to any fan’s collection–especially since it’s also going for only $1.49 USD.

Players considering grabbing either of these titles should head on over to the Humble Store, but take note that this is a limited-time sale that ends in a couple of days.

Source: The Humble Store; tip from John Polson

Gaming media outlet Dualshockers.com received a quote from Bandai Namco America Brand Manager Mark Religioso, revealing that the company is putting emphasis on Tekken 7: Fated Retribution’s single player experience:

What we’re kinda seeing now with the trends in fighting games, is that fans want more than the core fighting experience, they also want a full fleshed-out single player experience, which is why we’re pursuing story mode so hard in this game.

We’re really integrating it in a special way where it goes from in-game cinematics to actual gameplay with a lot of dialogue between characters, so you can really experience and feel that story.

Religioso also teased that even more characters would be joining the roster, presumably in addition to Master Raven and Bob, revealed at Evo 2016.

Though competitive players are usually focused on the quality of the multiplayer modes in fighting games, it is hard to argue that a thoroughly developed single player experience does not contribute to the overall success of a title. Furthermore, the social and political stances of the characters in the story of Tekken have been a focal point throughout the history of the franchise, so a more interactive story mode is good news for all Tekken fans.

Source: DualSHOCKERS

King of Fighters XIV has proven very willing to shake up the long running series, and among the other, more *ahem* obvious changes from prior installments in the series, those who have given the demo a go have discovered that there is a system wide change to the way jumps work. Although this doesn’t necessarily have an instantly noticeable effect, they do feel a little different to previous games.

With a bit more detailed inspection however, it was discovered by Youtube user G that one of Kyo’s staple abilities, being able to short hop and cross-up, has been removed. In the video below he breaks down just what this might mean for the series poster boy, and how those playing him might have to adjust. Of course, this may well change by the time the final product is released – this is just the demo after all – but it might be necessary to make peace with this rather awkward change. We’ll find out when KOFXIV releases on August 23.

Source: G

It’s been four years since Skullgirls initially came out, and the game is still getting patches and developer support at no extra cost. Though the game received it’s final balance change with the Robo-Fortune patch over a year ago, meaning the game fundamentally isn’t changing any more, these patches are nice to see. Similar to the patch Skullgirls received last month, this patch gives some quality of life changes. You can view the patch notes here, but the sum of it is a couple bug fixes and some Replay enhancements.

The bugs include something that would crash the game when two specific supers connected, as well as some Training Dummy bugs. The replay enhancements include the ability to enable attack data during replays, letting you view things like attack data for combo damage, as well as the ability to slow down replays for a better look at what’s occurring.

Prior to this, there was actually a patch we neglected to report on. A rather large and unfortunate discovery was made by the Lab Zero team. The bug was in regards to Quick Match on PC, where essentially if Player 1 won the game, both players would get a win, but if Player 2 got a win, neither player would get a win, leading to the Leader boards strictly reflecting how many times Player 1 has won a game. This bug was PC exclusive, meaning console players do not have to worry about their rankings, but it was stated that the PC leader boards would not be reset.

These and any future changes will be coming to consoles when the lobby patch drops, though that may be the last time the game is touched by Lab Zero Games.

Source: Skullgirls Steam

Before we had an official Team China in the King of Fighters XIV, the series had another team representing the peoples republic. The Psycho Soldier Team was the first King of Fighters team to raise the red banner and they are the focus of this weeks team trailer.

Joining Athena Asamiya and Chin Gentsai once again is the plucky Sie Kensou. Kensou has had some issue with his psychic powers throughout the series’ history so it’s nice to see that he seems to have them back in full force for this outing.

Source: PlayStation

Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR- is getting an interesting new mode later this Fall.  This new “Digital Figure Mode” revolves around allowing players to pick up a series of digital statues of the games characters.

Players will be able to collect digital statues and then customize their figures poses, colors, and even backgrounds and place multiple characters together to create unique dioramas in game.

This new mode should appeal to both creative types who can express themselves with the dioramas as well as players who enjoy in game collectibles. As for how these digital figures will be unlocked, nothing as of yet has been detailed. However they’ll most likely come from playing the games multiple modes.

In the meantime, here’s the modes announcement from an abridged version of the trailer shown at Evo 2016.

Source: Arc System Works

Famitsu posted an interview with top Japanese BlazBlue Central Fiction players, Fumi and Fenrich.

Fenrich, who plays Jin, is currently the number-one-ranked player in the arcades. The interview (translated by HiagoXYZ) talks about how Fenrich got started in BlazBlue and what his thoughts are on one of the new mechanics, Active Flow. Fenrich also talks about playing against his brother’s Ragna, the aspects of his gameplay that he’s working on, how to improve in BBCF, and his thoughts on which characters are strong.

The last section is a reference to this screencap of a BBCF tier list, which contains Fumi and Fenrich’s opinion on the cast.

The original interview also has a section with Fumi.

Source: Jourdal, HiagoXYZ