As a bit of a follow up, Aevee also made a medium post about how to watch fighting games and why watching them is fun https://medium.com/@MammonMachine/why-and-why-to-watch-a-fighting-game-698652e2735b
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The most important fighting game at evo is actually ultra fight da ! Kyanta 2 and i will not hear otherwise
Extremely excited to watch Puyo Champions and Puyo Puyo Tetris on the side event streams.
A couple events this past month were totally dominated by Haohmarus so who knows
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.
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is kicked off team and disqualified from Capcom Pro Tour for abusing his wife
Evo: CONGRATS INFILTRATION ON THE TRIUMPHANT RETURN
fucking sickening
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Yeah this uhhhhh
This article did not age well, huh?
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.
I’m just so fucking angry/disappointed/depressed.
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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.
The “core values” of 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
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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?
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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.
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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.
It was really disappointing after hearing the credible allegations against said fighting game player to see several company tweets congratulating the bastard.
Guess that’s the sorry state of it, letting an abuser into the public eye and celebrating a “triumphant return”.
On a brighter note DBFZ was a joy to watch and both SonicFox and Goichi clashing back and forth was hype.
Also these all sound like JoJo stands.
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I have a feeling it’s going to #EmbraceDeath and not be around again. Check out the EVO Japan announcement, even Street Fighter 5 has been reduced to “and many more!” instead of even being named in the announcement. 
They seem to be really pushing Soul Calibur 6 as IIRC besides the DLC characters it’s going to be getting some kind of substantial balance/update to its systems also. That surprised me though as I didn’t think it had a lot of momentum in general but hey.
Arslan Ash is amazing, you had top pro players talking about how 10AM is just too early to play fighting games at peak level and this kid basically just stepped off the plane and dominated Tekken. I’m actually not a big Tekken fan myself but those matches were great made me interested in finally getting Tekken 7 (besides that and it having Geese Howard i.e. One Weird Trick To Make Me Interested In Tekken).
Speaking of which, for PS4 players I notice Tekken 7 and Soul Calibur 6 are both on sale on the PSN.
The scene’s always been really bad yeah, I have to agree that everything around it has gotten slightly better with the FGC being slowly dragged along with it, though it’s always been insanely toxic and will continue to be for a long time, probably forever.
I fucking love fighting games. I first played Street Fighter II at one of the arcades on Coney Island when it first came out. And from that point on I loved fighting games more than like anything else on planet earth and I used to play in arcades whenever I got a chance and do whatever I could to get like every single one on consoles/that got ported/whatever ASAP throughout the 90s and would always try to get my friends to see how awesome they are. I got into importing games just for fighting games so I could get them earlier at home (or at all in the early 00s).
My wife and I first met over King of Fighters '99 in Chinatown Fair because she was super passionate about them too. At the same time in the late 90s and early 00s besides playing in arcades often we were both coincidentally on the SRK/Orochinagi/etc. forums pretty regularly, And like, seeing all of that toxicity of the “community” and some of the major players not only just as someone talking shit in the heat of the moment but at that level where someone typed it out, looked at it, and pressed post, was always a little off to me in ways I wasn’t really mature enough to understand why at the time.
And, all online spaces are and all communities are going to have some assholes but it really turned me off over the years and I basically don’t go to arcades anymore and I barely ever even play them online at all.
I still can’t resist getting any SNK game ASAP though, I have such a massive attachment to that company’s games, even before the Neo Geo was a thing.
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So, uh, remember when everyone thought they teased Snake for Tekken 7?
Not only was that not the case, but, uh, EVO forgot to contact Konami or David Hayter, who’s voice they used. And he’s understandably upset.
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The production was pretty bad in general (even just for the stream quality for the ads and stuff like they were running them off someone’s cell phone or something) so that doesn’t surprise me.
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So much of the FGC basically boils down to “does the people who are in charge of your local scene actually give a shit about the people in it, not just white cis men”. The whole FGC is just a sum of all those parts, so, yeah, the toxicity will continue as long as there is a rotten scene to spoil the bunch.
And there are a lot of rotten scenes.
I’m lucky to have a local scene that is pretty good, but that’s mostly because I spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears building it myself from nothing. I had a lot harsher rules for harassment than most places, actively banned some regulars, and I did my best to make it a LGBTQ+ positive space. I like to think I did a good job, with a few dozen people regularly attending tournaments, including people of all genders, races, and sexualities.
Cutting all ties with the local Smash community certainly helped a lot too.
Too bad the owner of the bar I was running it out of turned out to be a giant racist and chauvinist and was just good at hiding it while sober. I no longer had a place to run tournaments, never found another one, and the scene shifted to the local college that I’m not a student at, so I was no longer in charge.
Also SFV scene had dried up and I had no interest in any other of the games at the time so I kinda fell out of it.
It’s a pretty good scene today from what I hear (except for the fact that they’re starting to run events with the local Smash scene again which is… yikes), but even in that group, there was one guy who tried to defend Infiltration pretty hard in the discord so blegh (luckily the current head of the community jumped down his throat for it). Keeping your scene clean requires constant work…
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What I think is a bummer about a lot of fighting games is that, for me, I really need a buddy. And I’m not gonna be able to talk any of my friends who are nominally gamers into Samurai Showdown. Which is why it’s Smash til I die baby. Still really like watching other games though, and I found Tekken particularly riveting at this Evo.
Also the Snake “prank” is so dumb Evo, c’mon
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I’m really glad to hear you put so much effort into this. I was never able to find a group I could fit into myself but it’s cool to hear that folks were able to carve out a niche.
Might be worth a shot, slower pacing and the way like everything is unsafe and has a way longer recovery than other fighting games kind of makes it like an ideal “here are the fundamentals of how fighting games work” kind of game. Samurai Shodown V Special is a great game and is much cheaper and is on PS and PS4 if you play on one of those.
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