Last Saturday I went to the first round Gamestop Street Fighter IV tournaments for their national competition.¨Ü To sum it up, there was a first round tournament at every Gamestop last Saturday.¨Ü Two people from each of those tournaments go to the next round this Saturday.¨Ü Winners of the second round go to the third regional round, held at 10 locations.¨Ü Finally, 10 people go to national and they also get automatic entry to the Evo tournament (the biggest annual U.S. tournament).
All that doesn’t matter though, because I’m not going past the first round.¨Ü Lost in the semifinals.¨Ü I went with Junior, Jerry, and Chris and some of our other friends happened to be there also.¨Ü The store kiosk was moved outside so that forty nerds could stand out there and watch each other play SFIV.¨Ü It was a good time though, and it was only made better by a guy that played Sagat who looked like Sagat from behind (aka what we see when he’s playing), a guy wearing a leather jacket and a ten-gallon hat named Ken who (to our delight) played as Ken, and the double-mirror Guile (Floren Jr.) vs. Guile (Florian) match.
Me and Junior lost to the two guys that ended up in the championship, so I guess if you lose that’s who you want to lose to.¨Ü Junior lost to Florian.¨Ü I lost to a guy named Rico who could probably equip materia and I suspect was still jet lagged from his 12-hour flight from Japan.
I came home and hopped on the Shoryuken.com forums to see what other people thought of their local tournaments, and all I found was a whole lot of complaints.¨Ü I’ve pretty much lost faith in online comments anywhere, but these were really unreasonable so I thought I’d go ahead and defend the Gamestop tournaments (as much as I hate most Gamestop employees).
- Have to use Xbox 360 controllers.¨Ü Every store has these.¨Ü With the price of tournament sticks you can’t expect them to open up two at each Gamestop for a single tournament.¨Ü The tournament already ran three hours.¨Ü Ours had 32 people, but each store could have 64 max.¨Ü If people were switching controllers between every game it would take way too long.¨Ü Three hours already felt like plenty.¨Ü The comments that irked me the most said things like, “Man my thumbs hurt.¨Ü I would’ve won if I could use a stick.”¨Ü No, you wouldn’t.¨Ü Because the guy that beat you is probably also more comfortable using an arcade stick.
- Not allowed to change button configurations.¨Ü Similar to the controller thing.¨Ü If one person changes the buttons, the next person has to change it back.¨Ü And you’ll have the awkward “OK ready? I’m gonna unpause.¨Ü On three.”¨Ü The tournament rules were online.¨Ü Games these days use both analogs and seventeen buttons, how much trouble could you have with the triggers?
- No unlockable characters.¨Ü This would require store employees to play through the game and unlock all the characters before the tournament.¨Ü As much as I wouldn’t mind doing that, it still takes a few hours and I don’t think Gamestop feels like paying for that.
- Level of competition.¨Ü When I went to buy the game, they asked if I wanted to sign up.¨Ü I’m guessing they asked everyone who bought the game to sign up.¨Ü It was a free tournament so anyone somewhat competitive that thought they’d be free for an hour on Saturday probably signed up.¨Ü The competition improves in the next rounds.
- Prizes.¨Ü Awful.¨Ü But again: free tournament.
I got a little carried away and wrote a bit much.¨Ü Anyway, I’m going to see Norm MacDonald tomorrow night so I’m sort of amped.¨Ü I’ll let you know how that goes, but I imagine it’ll be pretty good.