Category: News

With the intense competition of the past year coming to a close, one would expect competitors to kick up their feet and get some well-deserved rest as we head into 2016. But, as any fighting game player can attest, that’s not really our style. QANBA’s Dakou will be accommodating folks still grinding it out with the fifth installment of his annual tournament series at China’s Firefly ACG Festival this weekend.

Yangcheng Cup (also known as Guangzhou Cup or Canton Cup depending on translation) will feature action in both Ultra Street Fighter IV and King of Fighters XIII. Dakou’s teammate Xiao Hai is set to be in attendance, but he’ll be up against stiff competition from Razer’s Infiltration, r/Kappa’s Poongko, and MadKOF, who will be making the trip from South Korea to compete; Japanese visitors like Nemo and Kindevu; Hong Kong’s Humanbomb; and Saunic from France.

The tournament is scheduled to begin on New Year’s Day in China, meaning those of you tired of watching countdown specials on television will have something much more interesting to tune into. We’ve included a rough timeline of events, complete with timezone conversions, below.

Schedule

Yangcheng Cup will be broadcast live on Panda.tv, so bookmark that page and get ready for some great competition from China. We’ll be sure to bump this article up when things get started.

Sources: Firefly ACG Festival via Orochinagi, Alex Valle; r/Kappa via Jason; VGtime; special thanks to Shunao and SGFighter for their help in putting this article together.

While those of us in the fighting game community still look on the name SNK Playmore fondly thanks to their history of development in the genre, recent years have seen this venerable studio shift their focus to the manufacture of pachislot machines. Instead of bringing us legitimate Fatal Fury and Samurai Shodown installments, they instead decided to use those properties for other purposes, losing a bit of goodwill in the process.

Back in November, however, fans were given a glimmer of hope when SNK Playmore release an official statement describing their decision to move away from the pachislot business in favor of the traditional game development that put them on the map in the first place. The uncertainty of the market was cited as the main impetus, but a recent interview with the chief of their gaming division, Yutaka Noguchi, shines a light on some of the other factors behind the move.

Speaking with Famitsu (and subsequently translated by MMCafe’s Professor), Noguchi said the success of PC ports like King of Fighters XIII Steam Edition helped push them back towards game development, not to mention the international recognition their various brands enjoy to this day. “Even as of now, we’re better known as a game company than a pachislot company. People still talk about us (as a game company) when we say our name,” Noguchi explained.

While the old saying “vote with your wallet” doesn’t produce results as often as we’d like it to, those of you who supported SNK Playmore’s various Steam releases over the past few years can definitely put a feather in your cap for this one. For more on Noguchi’s conversation with Famitsu, be sure to visit MMCafe by following the link below.

Source: Famitsu via MMCafe, IPLAYWINNER

French Bread had a pretty busy 2015 thanks to their work on Under Night In-Birth and Dengeki Bunko FIGHTING CLIMAX, and they’re set to continue that trend heading into 2016. As part of their year-end retrospective, 4Gamer sent a brief questionnaire to producer Nobuya Narita to get a sense of the developer’s plans for next year.

“In 2016 we’re planning to release a proper console version of (that game you know about) and a new-ish arcade game,” Narita explained, “so please be excited for those.”

Without further details, it’s hard to accurately nail down what this console release may be. The likeliest scenario is a port of Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[st], but with Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code heading to Steam sometime next spring, it’s entirely possible that niche title could grace consoles as well.

And what of that “new-ish” arcade game? One would hope that doesn’t mean another update to Under Night In-Birth without a definite console launch for Exe:Late[st], but the terminology seems to point towards a possible re-release or remaster.

Only time will tell what this statement holds for fighting game fans, but one thing is certain: French Bread has quite a bit in store for us in 2016.

Source: 4Gamer via Gematsu

As part of its recent home console release, Dengeki Bunko FIGHTING CLIMAX IGNITION is receiving two downloadable characters from the Sword Art Online franchise.

Yuki from the ‘Alfheim Online’ arc and LLEN from the ‘Gun Gale Online’ storyline are currently available to download for free on the PlayStation Network. This special promotion will last only until January 31.

For those wondering how these characters play, Sega recently shared a trailer that shows them in action.

Dengeki Bunko FIGHTING CLIMAX IGNITION is currently available in Japan for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Vita.

Source: Sega via Gematsu

As the holidays begin to wind down, so too do the holiday sales. PlayStation Network is offering up one more round of discounts before we bring 2015 to a close, and that means a few more fighting games have been marked down if you need something new to lab.

This time around, BlazBlue: Chronophantasma, Dead or Alive 5 Last Round, and Nidhogg have been included across various systems. Please note that purchasing the latter on PlayStation 4 nets you a copy on PlayStation Vita and vice versa.

The table below includes all the pertinent details you’ll need to make your shopping decisions as well as links to each game’s respective store page.

Source: PlayStation Blog

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U patches, while addressing important issues with game balance, have been the cause of more than a couple of headaches within the Smash community thanks to the secrecy surrounding their contents. And while datamining has relieved a good deal of the stress involved in parsing out the changes that patches bring, there’s still plenty of work that goes into confirming everything, which the community over at Smash Boards has continued to do.

And even with all of that confirmed information, there’s still something to be said about seeing these tweaks in action. As they’ve done in the past, Vitamin ZK took on that burden and created a set of three videos, which you can find below, detailing everything the version 1.1.3 update brought to the game.

If you prefer your patch-related information in text form, you can still find the datamined notes on the Smash Boards forums.

Source: Vitamin ZK via Smash Boards