If you have seen the following scene from Sanjuro (1962) in which Toshino Mifune bisects Tatsuya Nakadai, or any of the one hundred thousand shots it influenced across every sword fight in every movie or anime you have ever seen, you are the target audience for Samurai Shodown (2019), a reboot of the series you may remember from the arcade machines of your youth, which featured ubiquitously on SNK’s Neo-Geo hardware.
I love this game so much, I mean I’ve always loved Samurai Shodown but I’m so happy they made this one super colorful and kept it from getting too complex. Like there’s still a lot going on in it but it makes it way easier for someone new to pick it up and play it. SNK’s people really accomplished something special with those games on the Neo Geo.
I hope this does get some attention from EVO because SNK is pretty amazing. Though with Mr. Wizard happily letting Infiltration back in I can’t say I’m particularly excited about EVO itself, as usual the FGC can go fuck itself.
I feel like it really needs to be stated that Infiltration, one of the players likely to make it very far in Samurai Shodown at EVO, lost one of his sponsors (IIRC) and was removed from the Capcom Pro Tour late last year under credible accusations of domestic abuse. If it was me I’d definitely want the heads up, so I didn’t inadvertently end up rooting for an abuser only to find out after the fact.
Can we get a follow up story where Cuellar/Mr. Wizard is sought for comment about how he feels about enthusiastically inviting and promoting someone who beat and threatened to kill his wife?
Or a piece on the recurring situation of fighting game people who perform the actions of a piece of shit being used as ways to build hype and to build “redemption” stories for EVO? Triumphant returns and such. Fuck EVO.
Usually EVO leaves me with a ton of energy and motivation to both learn games and run more tournaments, but I don’t even know if I’m gonna watch Sunday, let alone continue with the FGC.
At least this article itself is about how good and unique the Samurai Shodown series is. Imagine being the Kotaku article from earlier yesterday about the Women in FGC panel at EVO.
yeah dude jokes on kotaku for reporting on uh checks notes the panel where a bunch of women told the fgc to take their complaints more seriously and recounted their experiences of being stalked and harrassed regularly
I’m not sure of your intention here, but obviously that panel and the players on it fuckin’ rule and it’s important that Kotaku reported in it. I would think that goes without saying?
I went to evo literally fifteen years ago and I have been torn about ever returning. Hanging out with a small group of people and getting real nerdy about low tier characters is an experience I’ll never forget, but everything else was bad. I mean, that’s and exaggeration.
Watching was fun. I dont think watching in person now would be as fun, too big. There are so many people there now. It’s so professional at times. Feels a lot less intimate unless you’re playing sailor moon or vampire savior or some other 2d fighter from 25+ years ago.
Anyway, the real point is that talking to a lot of people at evo really sucked. So many nerdy white guys saying the n word for shock value. So many awful comments about any woman that would show up anywhere. We left early because one of the girls we were with was just kind of fed up being there. And we were young and we weren’t part of the FGC. We were just kids who liked fighting games and heard about this tournament and pooled our resources to see it.
And I watch parts of evo every year. We all still watch small tournaments here and there. But there was never any desire after that to go all in on fighters and its real disappointing that in fifteen years nothing has really changed. Again that’s an exaggeration. The commentators and stuff have gotten a lot more diverse in appearance (though not in commentary style). But the player base and organizers are basically the same with just a bit more money behind it.
Anyway, samurai showdown looked cool. I learned that there was a kill la kill game that is so much more visually interesting than I would’ve ever imagined but it’s a kill la kill game so I’m over it.
Arslan Ash just won Tekken 7 at EVO this year, and it was super impressive. I wish the commentators were better. So this kid is from Pakistan and is really really good. He has been beating a lot of top players for the past year or so, but it was in smaller events. Then this past year he showed up at Evo Japan and crushed it. And this is extra impressive because he had over 24 hours of travel to get there (I’m pretty sure that’s it). But a lot of people thought. . not that it was a fluke, but that the top players would see what he was doing and be able to counter now that they had seen him. This was not the case. He still managed to win and to not drop a game to Knee, who was previously the best Tekken player in the world. I’m pretty sure Knee has never beaten Arslan. Anyway. sorry for making this the general evo thread. I’m very curious to see where Samurai Showdown s in the pecking order next year.
Evo staff showing at least some level of shame about Infiltration winning Samurai Shodown as they didn’t even include the game in the end of broadcast recap (something I’ve never seen before).
I’d like to think that the scene has gotten better than that, but honestly I think that’s more of a reflection that the world got a little bit better than that (despite being a depressing capitalist shithole) and not the FGC doing any of the work.
Also, just as an aside, I would never recommend people who want to watch actually go to EVO. The stream experience is just so much better. It’s comparable to sports: watching on TV, even with the constant advertisements, is just a better experience than a chilly rink, a humid field, or a sunny diamond.
