EVO 2014 Preview, Streams & Schedule (July 11-13) Live from Las Vegas!

Welcome to the EVO 2014 preview! EVO comes to you live from Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino (formerly known as LVH).

What a turnaround for Nintendo, who last year tried to shut down the EVO 2013 Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament and now they're official EVO 2014 sponsors! No doubt the amazing Super Smash Bros. for Wii U invitational tournament at E3 2014 helped to bring them around.

Three games will be making their debut this year, Ultra Street Fighter IV, BlazBlue: Chronophantasma and Killer Instinct. If you haven't seen them played competitively before, you're in for a treat!

Expect to see Ed Boon take the stage once again, no doubt unveiling something new for Mortal Kombat X. Will Nintendo also take the opportunity to address the Smash community? We'll have to wait and see. Atlus will be there with playable Persona 4 Arena Ultimax too!

Check here to see which famed international players will make it to EVO 2014, including South Korea's strong Cafeid King of Fighters XIII players.

Click here to view a game by game overview by A.V. Club - http://www.avclub.com/article/viewers-guide-evo-years-biggest-fighting-game-tour-206670 (via @starvinggamer)

Official Tournament games, live streams and schedule

We say goodbye (in an official capacity) to Mortal Kombat (2011), Persona 4 Arena, Street Fighter X Tekken (Ver. 2013) and Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition (Ver. 2012).

Stream links and schedule

http://www.twitch.tv/srkevo1/

http://www.twitch.tv/srkevo2/

http://www.twitch.tv/capcomfighters

http://www.twitch.tv/Jyosua (Joshua Moore has been given permission by Tom Cannon to stream BlazBlue pools)

All times in PST. What time is that where you live? Click here

Unofficial streams

http://www.twitch.tv/madcatz

A bunch of streamers advertised themselves as doing unofficial streams last year, some of them did, some of them didn't. I'll list them just in case:

What do I need to know about EVO?

What is EVO?

Like many of the long running fighting game tournament events, EVO had humble beginnings in the time of arcades, Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat 2. It was 1st called Battle by the Bay, a 40-man Super Street Fighter II Turbo and Street Fighter Alpha 2 tournament in 1996 consisting of California locals and has since gone on to move to Las Vegas and become the biggest and most attended global event in fighting games.

EVO is ran part-time by 3 gents who all have full-time jobs. The Cannon brothers, Tony and Tom, and Joey Cuellar.

EVO 2014 continues to break records, with the top 10 most entered countries outside of the USA looking like this:

• Canada – 331
• Japan - 127
• Mexico - 114
• Australia - 28
• United Kingdom - 27
• France - 23
• Brazil - 21
• Chile - 19
• Germany - 15
• Colombia - 13

How do tournaments work?

Double-elimination brackets - Even if you lose, you're not out of the tournament, you simply move to a different bracket, known as the losers bracket. If you lose in the losers bracket, only then are you eliminated from the tournament. The longer you stay in the winners bracket, the less opponents you have to face.

EVO has so many entrants that tournaments are split into 32-man brackets (all double-elimination) and one from the winners bracket and one from the losers bracket will advance to the next round of brackets until we get to the top 8 finals on Sunday, 4 from the winners side, 4 from the losers side.

You can find all the 1st round brackets here, see if you can find your favourite fighters.

What should I look out for on-screen

At the end of the day, no matter how complex fighting games seem, it still boils to each player having a health bar at the top of the screen. Once that health bar is depleted, the round is over. But what you may not know is that the other bar, often found at the bottom is almost as important.

Meter bars allow you to do stronger attacks, break out of combos and more! Keep an eye out for how much meter is filled for each player.

I have another question!

Ask it in the comments and either myself or one of the several Giant Bomb fighting game tournament fans will answer for you.

Daigo and friends assess Ultra Street Fighter IV's tier list

If you saw my CEO 2014 blog last month you'll have seen a week 1 attempt at making a tier list by France's Alioune. Now with much more time under their belt, Daigo Umehara, Tokido, Momochi, Bonchan, Itabashi Zangief and Kazunoko have put together what is considered an accurate list according to these great Japanese players.

Daigo: Yes. I began to look around for characters with high firepower and landed on Evil Ryu. At first, I didn't pay much attention to his strength and selected him. However, once I began to use Evil Ryu, I began to ask myself, "What have I been doing this entire time?"

4Gamer: I see. May we all assume that you will be using Evil Ryu for Evo 2014 and in the future?

Daigo: I suppose. At first I wanted to alternate between Evil Ryu and regular Ryu, but the more I played the more I realized that Evil Ryu is in all respects a superior version to Ryu. In the future, the only matchup where Ryu is more enjoyable to play is against Vega (Claw). From now on, I'll probably stick with Evil Ryu.

Check out the entire round table discussion over at 4gamer.

Tekken X Street Fighter still exists?

Apparently Tekken X Street Fighter is still in the works, despite hearing practically nothing about it outside of a few concepts shown years ago.

I think that about does it, this weekend should be a great watch! Thanks for reading, see you at the next fighting game blog, whenever that might be!

It doesn't matter how long I've been out of the scene, EVO is FUCKING HYPE.

@rmanthorp said:

127 Japanese players at Evo! Too bad South Korea isn't anywhere near that.

Well, I'm gonna have to wheel in the PC to the living room this weekend.

Also, I'm hoping Salty Bet goes back to live stream betting for this.

Never watched any of this before, but will it be streamed through GB chat? If it is that's probably the sort of thing to get me to hang out and watch.

The time for hype is almost here.

ChrisG said he will be rocking Elena for most of EVO. I wonder if Justin will be doing the same. I hope her brokenness doesn't cost them the tournament at some point like at CEO.

What, no kof pools? Dangit.

Yes! Feel free to pop in the chat this weekend

Fly out to Vegas Thursday morning! People ain't ready for how lame my Bison is.

Thanks for posting this! Im going to try to catch as much of this as I can.

Surprisingly im most excited for the melee tourney. I need a smash bros tier list stat!

I'm kinda bummed that KOF has been relegated to Saturday tourney status now.

Good luck duder!

I am pretty excited for this after CEO, where I learned that KI is actually super fun to watch. Here's looking forward to another bizarre character pick taking Street Fighter this year.

Hella funtimes about to go down

OP Update:

Capcom Fighters has joined the party! Watch USF4 pools on Capcom Fighters.

The schedule image issue has now been fixed with one big image that includes Capcom Fighters' involvement.

@nefarious_al: Best of luck to ya man!

So... which part do I copy to paste in the chat this weekend? :P

Also, that preliminary tier list...

For any beginners who want to level-up their game, or even viewers that want to increase their knowledge, Patrick Miller (@pattheflip) just put out a free fighting game primer e-book on Shoryuken.com. You can find out more about it (and download it) here:

From Masher to Master: The Educated Video Game Enthusiast's Fighting Game Primer

Kind of depresses me that Injustice Finals are on Saturday. Did the game's popularity drop off THAT much?

oh god. too much hype. can't handle it. woah. :O

Also, am I the only one who thinks that Hugo should be higher up? Sure, he may be so unathletic that it's easy to whoop his ass 90% of the time, but let him get up close once and he's absolutely unstoppable, in my opinion

HYPE GET

Very excited to see how Ultra Top 8 will turn out.

SO HYPE!

Seeing BB get so much love has me excite for Guilty Gear when it drops stateside!

Also, that tier list. They need to just make a player tier list cause after watching the South East Asia tourney and seeing Momochi take it with Ken make me think that people need to chill out on those lists for awhile longer.

I want to see sako take it, by far my favorite player. But I hope Smug and Sabin do well too. I've been really impressed with Sabin's Dhalsim play lately, same with Momochi's Ken.

4th highest entrants and the highest prize pool but it somehow ends up at 9AM. Wondering what kind of "incentive" Microsoft provided to get KI a better slot.

Hopefully at least one American makes it to top 8. They're giving the highest placing American citizen a spot in Arc Revo and like $5K, so it would be kind of funny if the winner of that wasn't even top 8.

Maybe reading this will be the thing that rekindles my desire to get good at fighting games again.

Maybe.

So pleased with how well the Melee scene is doing. Barely behind Marvel in entrants and with Nintendo sponsoring. Hype that BB gets on finals day, that game is fun to watch but I usually avoid it for games I am more into during tournaments. KI I watched for all of 3 minutes and don't understand that game one bit.

Safe to say that Smash is even going to surpass Marvel next year unless an update magically appears.

Street Fighter (new Ultra update), Smash (new release coming), and Anime (Guilty Gear coming) all had increased entrants this year. Marvel decreased by 25%.

@syz:

The anime fighters have always been at 9AM/early. It's not a slight against them. Also KI is on right after it. If Microsoft was gonna pull some incentives you'd think it would be to get them better standing than 11AM.

Outlook not so good

Mate Luke beat me to the UK schedule this year but here it is for all you GMT BST folk :D

Glad to see my favourite Prinny cosplayer at the top of the tier list again.

I love that Nintendo is now an official sponsor. We live in a wild time.

Only one thing could make this EVO perfect

Better - cleaner version of the UK times :)

@starvinggamer:

In order to alleviate any confusion surrounding Niitsuma’s tweet, Shoryuken contacted Capcom community manager Peter “Combofiend” Rosas to see if he could help shed some light on the situation. Rosas followed up by pointing out a recent Capcom-Unity article regarding the discontinued sale of the crossover fighter’s PlayStation Vita.

Since sales were slated to end on June 24, Niitsuma’s seemingly ominous message thanking the community was just that: a nod of gratitude to all the fans who have helped support the game along the way. Hopefully this alleviates worst case scenario fears that Marvel’s servers would be shutting down.

Credit: http://shoryuken.com/2014/07/02/peter-combofiend-rosas-clears-up-questions-surrounding-ryota-niitsumas-ultimate-marvel-vs-capcom-3-tweets/

Regardless of whether you agree with it at least the tier list is presented in an easy to read fashion. Buff Akuma.

Smash Bros Melee final only taking 2 hours? Yeah sure. BB also seems to take forever, and it's no KoF in terms of interest factor.

@jjor64: Winners: Smug, Infiltration, Momochi, Kazunoko, Losers: Daigo, Balrog, Bonchan, Sako. Daigo makes it to the finals only to be 3-0'd by Smug, who never loses a match the entire tournament.

Note: I'm too lazy to look at the brackets to make sure Bonchan is there.

@arbitrarywater:

Looks like a fun evo to me big hopes for next year for a lot of new games.

Not like they have a choice given how big a clusterfuck Marvel copyright has become since they released. Capcom doesn't really seem to be in a position to make games right now, either.

At the time of death it'll be hard to say whether they were bad at supporting their game or if they just weren't able to.

EvoDeKappa, I hope we get some more amazing hype videos out of Evo this year. The beginning of this one is still really good a year later.

If you aren't watching http://www.twitch.tv/ultrachentv right now what are you doing!?

@flstyle: Great write up as always!

Whos everyones pick for Ultra?

Great write up, love these threads. Really looking forward to EVO, even if I have no interest in playing fighting games myself. Hope we get a chat for it here on GB so I don't have to interact with the Twitch chat!

Tough to say because I don't think there's a handle on Ultra yet at all, but I'd go... Kazunoko? Aren't all 5 Gods coming this year? Champ, Chris, or Apologyman for Marvel. N-O for BBCP.

I will also win Saltybet. Except probably not.

Cant wait, will be in vegas this weekend

Would be funny to see Apologyman win as the salt would be ridiculous.

I have to wake up at six in the morning on a Sunday to watch the KOF finals? Man, fuck time zones.

At least we'll only have to see NY Chris G attempt to master 28392103 fighting games instead of 28392104 of them

Nearly 2000 people vying for the SFIV crown. It's a damn shame Jeff won't be able to make it.