Category: Videos

If you missed it live, make sure to check out these spectacular fights now!

Many fans in North America stayed up late on Friday night to watch Daigo Umehara’s second set of exhibition matches, Kemonomichi 2, unfold live — and it did not disappoint. Three first-to-ten sets between the best of the best took place in three different titles: Kotaka Shoten took on Ito in Super Street Fighter II Turbo; Tanukana tested herself against Yuyo in a Tekken 7: Fated Retribution Ling Xiaoyu mirror match; and — in the set that unsurprisingly got the most publicity throughout the FGC — Tokido challenged Daigo Umehara himself to a match in Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition.

The event is now available to watch on Daigo the BeasTV! Check out the videos below, or head over to BeasTV on YouTube and have a look at this playlist. The first two videos are pre-show commentary (including thoughts from Fuudo); the second video covers the tough Super Turbo match between Ito’s Dee Jay and Kotaka Shoten’s Guile, and the intense down-to-the-wire Tekken battle between Tanukana and Yuyu; the last video is solely devoted to the Street Fighter V struggle between Umehara’s Guile and Tokido’s Akuma. Results are posted after the videos.

Kemonomichi 2 ~ Results

Super Street Fighter II Turbo

First-to-ten set:
Kotaka Shoten – 10
Ito – 6

 

Tekken 7: Fated Retribution

First-to-ten set:
Yuyu – 10
Tanukana – 9

 

Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition

First-to-ten set:
Daigo Umehara – 10
Tokido – 5

Source: Daigo the BeasTV

Crouching states work differently in the 3D genre than what 2D players are likely used to. When crouching, you not only get access to new moves, but you also get a completely different set of moves while you’re rising from the crouching to standing state. On top of that, there’s various ways to cancel the crouching state, and those methods tend to differ a little bit between different 3D fighters.

Because of this, there are lots of punishment opportunities that slip right by new 3D players. There are many different types of moves that force you into a crouching state on block or hit, which limits what you can do afterwards. That does not mean these moves are safe, though — and if you know your character’s options from crouch, you can make better decisions as you encounter new forced crouch situations.

Source: Scallywag 93

exceL Esports’s Brian “xLBrian” Thomson is on the shortlist of sponsored Menat pros for Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition. The resource-reliant, highly polarized offensive move-set of Menat might makes her too much of a difficult and risky choice for most tournament players.

But if you stick with her, the high damage rewards of her combos speak for themselves. If you found xLBrian’s combo tutorial useful, you might also be interested exceL’s larger guide to controlling and winning with Menat.

Source: exceL Esports

Street Fighter Carnival X is Mikado Arcade’s currently-ongoing multi-game tournament series for a wide variety of classic (and sometimes, obscure) arcade titles. To see the beginning of these high-level Japanese tournaments, go here!

Today’s tournament is 1993’s Fatal Fury Special. This SNK classic combines old-school footsies with its innovative 2-lane movement system, years before Virtua Fighter found its own 3D plane.

You can follow the action of SFCX by subscribing to Mikado’s official YouTube channel. For the night owls in the US, you can even try to catch them when they livestream.

Source: Mikado Arcade

With any character in Tekken 7, it can be difficult to maximize combo damage off of a balcony break. There’s a lot of factors to take in: whether you’ve used your screw attack already, how far away from the wall you were when you hit, etc.

And if you choose to play as Tekken’s flashy Lee Chaolan, all of this is compounded by the difficult execution the character naturally possess. Lee specialist TZMurakumo‘s latest guide tries to simplify the decision-making process — so that regardless of where you are in the combo, your damage will always be excellent.

Source: TZMurakumo

Recently, WWE’s Austin Creed was at the Body Count Fighting studios to play Dragon Ball FighterZ. Though there for purely entertainment purposes (which is something he’s very, very good at), he likely also wanted to win. Sadly, the heroic Austin Creed jobbed to BCF’s Shayan during virtually the entire episode.

In true FGC fashion, if you get bopped in one game (and no amount of rematches will save your losing streak), then just challenge them in another! It’s a new day for Austin Creed — see if he’s able to get revenge for his losses in the 2D genre in BCF’s latest episode above.

Source: Body Count Fighting

In the long absence of a follow-up from Nintendo, what’s a platform-fighting fan to do?

The Nintendo Switch console has recently hit its first anniversary, and it completed a year on the market without any confirmation that we’d be seeing either a port of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, or an all-new entry in the Smash series on Nintendo’s current platform. By all appearances, Smash 4 looked to be following in the footsteps of its Melee predecessor: locked onto an outdated piece of hardware… until March 8th’s Nintendo Direct teased that there will indeed be some version of Smash heading to the Switch this year.

Of course, being stuck on the old GameCube (or original Wii console, as an alternative) has done little to deter the Super Smash Bros. Melee community — if not the opposite, as loyalty to their title is still strong enough to warrant a place on the Evo main stage alongside its sequel. And it’s unlikely it will have any real impact on Smash 4, either — except that Smash players have been stuck in a limbo of waiting to see when (or even if) Nintendo would offer an updated alternative. The new announcement of a move to the Switch platform will now shake things up a great deal — but until we know for sure exactly what Smash on Switch will look like, Smash 4 still ensures that Wii U consoles stay in the living room — and at tournament stations.

Meanwhile, just as imitation of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior spawned a myriad of games in the ’90s — kicking off the fighting game genre and giving us many classic games and new franchises that still stand today — platform fighters have risen to offer alternatives to Smash. While Rivals of Aether was first out of the gate to make a significant impression, and has started to earn a regular side spot at Smash-related events, others have not grabbed quite as much interest yet; among these, Brawlout is the first to land on a Nintendo system.

Brawlout, as a follow-up to the Super Smash Bros. platform fighter style, is a promising title; we were provided a test copy of the Switch version to try out, and you can immediately see a lot of care and creativity went into this game. It’s got a vibrant visual style that immediately grabs you, and its overall design and menu layout looks fresh and inviting. The overall sound design is also great (but there is an issue there, more on that later).

Once you get into the gameplay, the game will immediately feel completely familiar to anyone that’s picked up a Smash title before: the basic controls and game mechanics are lifted almost verbatim from Nintendo’s template, with a notable exception in the removal of shielding, replaced instead by a dodge. There’s no guarding in Brawlout, which definitely gives the gameplay an ever-so-slightly more frenetic edge. Like its spiritual predecessors, you can play with up to four fighters on screen at once — it seems like the character models are zoomed-out more than necessary, though. They perpetually seem rather small.

There is a fairly robust selection of gameplay modes — basically your usual variation of the online/offline options we’ve seen before. The game uses a quasi-lootbox system in which gameplay earns you in-game currency to unlock new characters, stages, etc. In these areas, Brawlout does just fine — it also has a good tutorial mode for beginners, and gets some extra points from me for even including a hitbox viewer in its training mode. (We did have a recurring problem with the software crashing, however — enough that it warrants mention as something that needs to be addressed.) It plays well on-the-go as well, with a variety of potential control configurations available, whether you’re playing on the Switch itself, or docked.

The character selection gets a little more interesting — the cartoony style is unsurprising for this type of game, it seems to suit the genre. And the visual character design is excellent — providing a variety of animal-themed fighters to choose from, all with very distinct looks, with lots of style and attention to detail put into their models. In terms of gameplay, they each have some variation to their attacks, adding some flavor to this brawl. While the game plays well, and is certainly oozing with visual personality, the characters fall extremely flat in the audio department — you don’t realize how much the voice acting adds to a fighter until it’s gone, and there is no voicework for the Brawlout characters mid-fight. With the only audio reduced to the generic sounds of pummeling and punching, without any vocal output from the characters themselves, it feels very empty. It seems like these character designs are being sabotaged by the absence of this crucial component.

And that’s a big deal, because when you’re competing for attention against Smash, personality goes a long way. Smash is a franchise that stands on the pillars of Nintendo’s own long-beloved characters (and many loved/hated guests from other publishers, of course). The draw of those characters will be the sole attraction for many casual players, before the gameplay is even a consideration. Brawlout‘s strangely silent warriors, despite a lot of great design and a solid gameplay base, can’t compete with Mario or Pikachu, or Sonic or Cloud.

This is really too bad, because there’s a fun game to be had here, maybe even a competitive future. But Angry Mob Games has their work cut out to drag consistent attention and dedication away from its target market… and now that Nintendo has revealed its own official return to the ring, Brawlout‘s time in the Switch limelight is drawing shorter. I still recommend any fans of the burgeoning platform fighter genre give this game a look. A lot of love has clearly gone into it, and it still is receiving support in the form of bug fixes and new modes. We’ll have to see if the audience that it’s accumulated during its run on Switch so far will stick with it in the long run.

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Additional source: Angry Mob Games (YouTube)

Street Fighter Carnival X is Mikado Arcade’s currently-ongoing multi-game tournament series for a wide variety of classic (and sometimes, obscure) arcade titles. To see the beginning of these high level Japanese tournaments, go here!

We’ve got two tournaments from Mikado’s feed today: there’s the old school, footsie-heavy Data East fighter Fighter’s History Dynamite (which is known as Karnov’s Revenge in some markets)…

And then there’s The King of Fighters ’97, which introduced the “Advanced Mode” meter mechanic to the series.

You can follow the action of SFCX by subscribing to Mikado’s official YouTube channel. For the night owls in the US, you can even try to catch them when they livestream.

Source: Mikado Arcade