CEO 2014 Preview (June 27-29) + FighterMania & E3 fighting games round-up!

CEO 2014 (and FighterMania II) Preview!

http://www.ceogaming.org/

Streams and schedule

http://www.twitch.tv/capcomfighters

http://www.twitch.tv/ceogaming

http://www.twitch.tv/vgbootcamp

http://www.twitch.tv/funkyp

or

http://kbmod.com/multistream/view/?s0=capcomfighters&s1=ceogaming&s2=vgbootcamp&s3=funkyp&layout=9

Featured Games

Official EVO 2014 titles - Ultra Street Fighter IV, Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3, Super Smash Bros Melee, Killer Instinct Injustice Gods Among Us, Blazblue ChronoPhantasma, Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and King Of Fighters XIII

Plus Project M, Soul Calibur V, Capcom vs. SNK 2, DiveKick: Addition Edition, Persona 4 Arena

Schedule

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Welcome to the CEO 2014 Preview blog! If you're never seen CEO before, check out http://www.ceogaming.org/about

For the past few years, CEO has become so much more than the last stop before EVO, it's definitely as much of a show than it is a set of tournaments. Whether it's the boxing ring, the wrestling steel cage or the general crazy stuff that happens in and around it. In charge of CEO is Alex Jebailey, known in Divekick as Jefailey, who since the last CEO has gotten himself a job in the video game industry as the community manager of Dave Lang's own Iron Galaxy! Well done him!

For the 2nd CEO in a row FighterMania returns! This wrestling-style event takes place on Friday prior to the tournaments and has plenty of cool events going on.

UMVC3 6-Man Money-In-The-Bank Ladder Match

16-Man Project M Free For All Last Man Standing

Edition Select Mode Thirty Man USF4 Royal Rumble

Rules and reg for these sure to be nuts matches - http://ceogaming.org/blog/archive/211-ceofm2014

Any tournament that uses Edition Select is OK with me. That's the one I'm looking forward to, Vanilla Sagats, AE Yuns but the concept of the Royal Rumble is the bit that's the best. I'm looking forward to some big winning streaks before the end.

As for the tournaments themselves, I'm looking forward to the Tekken TAG 2 finals on Saturday and then the big finals day on Sunday, it's going to be action packed to say the least. I do hope the top 8 finals have entrance themes again.

News

E3! It was a thing!

Mortal Kombaaaaaaaat

Mortal Kombat X looks amazing! I've seen quite a few E3 interviews with Ed Boon, but Giant Bomb's was just as good as anyone else's, check it out.

I added the current roster's variation styles to the MKX GB wiki page for anyone curious. I'll have more opinions and info for MKX as it becomes available.

The following video from a tweet from who else but Alex Jebailey. It was from the Super Smash Bros. for Wii U invitational tournament, hosted by Nintendo, which was viewed by over 250,000 people and thousands of Nintendo fans in attendance. It had no right to be as fun as it was, only last year Nintendo attempted to block EVO for having its Melee tournament last year, then they announced Geoff Keighley as the host.

I assumed Geoff didn't have any competitive Smash Bros. knowledge but thankfully his host role didn't need any, he introed the players, worked the crowd and in general did a decent job while resident Smash Bros. community commentators Wynton 'Prog' Smith, D'Ron 'D1' Maingrette and Bobby 'Scar' Scarnewman provided a good insight into the crowd and the Twitch chat's excitement.

The entire show is here if you want to give it a watch. It was my favourite piece of content from the big 3 at E3.

What do you think of this early tier list for USF4 from France's own Alioune. I'm surprised to see Dhalsim bottom tier, hopefully he'll rise up a bit as players get more used to USF4. Yun being top tier again is pretty funny, though I doubt Ultra Yun is as strong as AE Yun, I really hope he isn't. We should find out in the coming month how accurate this chart is.

TJ Combo looks pretty cool and here's an interview by Max with Divekick creator and KI season 2 lead combat designer, Adam 'Keits' Heart.

Arc System Works were also at E3, check out these trailers for Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- and Persona 4 Arena Ultimax -

That's it from me for a few week's, I'll be back for the EVO 2014 preview (July 11-13), see you then!

AWWW YEAH! Great job on the thread once again man.

SUPER FIGHTING ROBOT!

I'm excited for the final stop. I'm gonna see if we can get /chat up for this if the weekend is free - I'm glad they moved over to Ultra (last I heard it was 2012) but tbh I'm most excited to see KOF and Project M. Think we will see any MKX news?

I had a feeling that Juri was always good, just no one actually played her. Now with the buffs she got... I dunno man, it might be time for me to sink some time into her.

I'm excited about CEO, I'm always hyped to see KoF13 (Even if I'm awful at it).

Also worth noting the MLG Championships this weekend include Injustice and Killer Instinct.

I'm pretty hype for this. Jebailey always brings the fun. I want more Mike Ross tearing down the cage.

CEO is fine and all but the SEA major was kind of a much bigger deal as far as Street Fighter's concerned and is somehow absent from this thread, pretty sure it's going to replay on twitch today at some point, but a pretty good preview of EVO for Ultra; ~12 of the top 20 players in the world while CEO might have like 7-8 of the top 30 or so.

@fredchuckdave: The time that goes into these blogs vs. the amount of people that will read this blog and then watch the event it previews is my priority. The amount of Giant Bomb users who'll watch CEO will be more than the amount of GB users who stayed up until the early hours of the morning to watch SEA.

Good call, I just watched Justin Wong win KI, the MLG production and set-up was as meh as it usually is for fighting games but happy for Justin.

SEA Rebroadcast is up here. Tokido vs. Xian atm, not even one of the better matches.

Great work as usual, @flstyle. You're a hype man extraordinaire.

Giant Bomb is lucky to have you.

The MLG setup for Injustice was a complete farce.

One five-to-six minute match, cut to thirty-plus minutes of Pizza Hut advertisements, then one more match, then more advertisements.

Injustice had 73 entrants. On Saturday, over a six hour period, only ten matches were shown on-stream.

@historyinrust: It was decidedly meh sir, how dare you suggest it was anything worse than that. Floe will attest to the magnificence of MLG's production quality.

On a more serious note between Saturday and Sunday they seem to have acquired that annoying anti-adblock shit so I just stopped watching.

Hah. I'd read something amazing like security had been called on him by one of the more high-profile Injustice players.

The drama is so real it hurts.

I'll setup a chat, but may be in the midst of a world cup stupor thru the early morning :)

Man, has anyone looked at the way Cassie Cage animates? She moves like a fucking Robot Chicken character. Oh NRS when will you hire good animators?

As far as Alioune's tier list, lolol at Dan and Hakan being below Dee-Jay. At-a-glance Poison should be lower, Gief and Vega should be higher, Dan and Hakan should be much higher, Ken should be lower? I dunno, time will tell I guess.

Oh yeah, great writeup as per usual.

@starvinggamer: Poison seems like the best out of the new characters thus far, non Jwong region. Also a Ken player is like the 3rd or 4th favorite to win EVO at this point, doesn't mean Ken's good but maybe he's a little better than people think. Agreed on Zangief and Vega, no clue about Dan.

Good news everyone! Ryan Hart has picked up an as of yet unannounced sponsor and will be attending CEO and EVO, hurray! I predict high finishes in both for Hart's Sagat and Yun.

@fredchuckdave: Agreed on Poison and Ken, looking pretty strong.

Ta. I'm getting the impression that Dee jay was the secret worst in the game now that conversations about Hugo are not as strong.

As an Englishman I can only wish I was capable of such a mental state. At least I don't have to put up with them embarrassing themselves anymore this world cup.

@flstyle: Ryan Hart has been looking really strong, would not be surprised at a top 8 EVO finish. I'm assuming Infilitration will be at CEO so would be an interesting final, seems to be a different guy vs Infiltration every major tournament lately. I'd really like a dark horse such as Snakeeyez to do extremely well at EVO to make it more interesting, but kind of seems like we're primed for another heavily eastern players top 8.

@fredchuckdave: Yeah, but Momochi's strong showing at SEA Major had nothing to do with any buffs Ken got and everything to do with Momochi being a stone-cold killer.

I agree that Poison seems strongest overall out of the new characters, or at least the most well-rounded. Elena's footsies are bananas. I'm just not sure what Poison actually does. Her normals are ok but not as good as they look. Her damage output is above average if you can deal with the fact that everything is a 1-frame link. Her zoning is meh outside of meaty Fierce fireball on wakeup. Her DP is ass.

I want her to be good but I dunno. To me she feels like Rose with slightly better damage potential and slightly worse everything else.

@starvinggamer: Conceptually even though Ken's buffs haven't necessarily impacted his success (though they did have some amount of noticeable impact at SEA, obviously Momochi did most of the work but Ken appears to be perfectly viable) the playstyle of Ultra tends to favor more aggressive, high damage combo type of characters like Evil Ryu, Sakura, and Yun; and while Ken is not quite as good as they are at burst damage he's still pretty good at that aspect even if other parts of his game are weaker, thus Ken can and has benefitted from that shift. Additionally playing a perceived as below average character or playstyle in any game and performing extremely well with it can create a sort of aura of intimidation, just by demonstrating how viable that character can be. It definitely factored in Xian's success at EVO last year and even the subsequent nerfbat to Gen in Ultra.

Momochi went full murderface at SEA.

EVO is going to be so hype with a relatively new game like this. I hope all the killers get there. Sako, Kazunoko, Momochi, etc.

@fredchuckdave Ryan Hart's new sponsor is Team Dignitas.

Sanford Kelly showed off a pretty impressive Ken vs Smug (around 2:35:00 in the VOD) yesterday at NLBC, also some very strong Decapre play from some dude I've never seen before (Damdai).

Damdai is a Super Street Fighter II Turbo legend, isn't a big fan of the SF4 series.

Damdai is a top Super Turbo player. Won the 25th anniversary Capcom event and everything.

@jesna: @flstyle: Even more remarkable than that, he appears to be white! Granted maybe the mysterious demographic shift happened after the SF2 era.

A Twitter user spotted an error in that image which Jebailey has clarified. Ultra SF4 top 32 to 16 does not start at 12PM because the pools only finish at 5PM. 32-16 starts at 6:30PM.

Remember that -outside of a possible rebroadcast- Capcomfighters does not allow you to watch archived events without paying them for it. Better watch USFIV when you can.

@flstyle Thank you sir. Time for some KoF watching. Are the times in PST even though it's in Orlando?

I think it's EST, not sure, we'll have to play it by ear.

@flstyle: It is in EST just off schedule I guess.

CvS2 starting up at the CEOGaming channel!

I tuned in to the CvS2 stream and saw a literal "Draw Game" due to timeout. I didn't think such a thing was possible.

That was some good CVS2! Calling it a night, will catch up on the FighterMania tournaments tomorrow.

Just seen the archive from last night to see that the Ultra Royal Rumble didn't happen because of internet problems, sad times. Tune in 10PM (not AM as James Chen incorrectly stated on the stream) EST today to watch it then instead.

The official Cammy tournament? Aside from Kbrad rarely see Cammy in top 8's though.

I loved watching TampaBison, if only he'd have used some more of Bison's USF4 tech!

@flstyle: Yeah he almost beat Balrog who is probably favored to get at least top 3 or 4; though TampaBison was in the CEO top 8 last year as well.

Elena's Healing always seems so terrible, but maybe people just haven't figured out how to use it correctly yet.

Join us in the chat to watch CEO 2014 and SGDQ2014

Thanks for tuning in to CEO 2014, fun times were had!

Roll on EVO!

To my knowledge it never happened, Friday didn't run on time so it was moved to Saturday night and then Saturday didn't run on time so they cancelled it.

Here's the weirdest match from CEO if people missed it: