Started a local Windjammers league and ran two tournaments

I've been playing Windjammers with my friends for a couple years, pretty much since Giant Bomb started talking about it. It is one of our favorite pick-up-and-play two-player competitive games, and it's great to get a group of friends together and rotate out and stuff.

Last week, we got together on the weekend and started an impromptu tournament. You can watch the whole thing here, including a bonus hour or so of Money Idol Exchanger. However, that's probably pretty boring to watch, so let's just skip to the extra-hype final game:

So yeah, we play a lot of Windjammers, and are constantly analyzing the game to learn its hidden depths and perfect our technique. I'm spearheading putting together a strategy guide for the game that contains detailed explanations about how to pull off all of the various moves, analysis of strategy for each character, descriptions of each court, and more. Needless to say, I'm way into Windjammers.

However, recently, we've been playing at school to relieve stress as the pressure before finals builds. Since my school is a nerd school for nerds, we have a big "LAN Party" event each semester near the end where people play a lot of local games, ranging from Smash to Dota 2 to Hearthstone to Artemis. We didn't think to book a room in time for the party, so we just started a tournament up in the middle of the open lab area, near my team's work space. This is the crowd that drew around the final game:

The players in the tournament consisted of both seasoned veterans as well as new blood. Off-camera, people were walking up and learning the basics of windjamming. Behind us, as you can see in the webcam feed on the stream, was a group of people playing the new Smash Bros. game. That crowd thinned out as more and more people came over to see what all this fuss about this old-looking video game was. It was amazing.

The entire tournament can be viewed here, but really, it's all about the final match, where the silver medalist from the previous tournament (Der Hui) went up against someone who was completely new to the game and only played as the previously thought-to-be-worthless-in-the-current-meta G.SCOTT (Dan) and, well... you'll have to see for yourself:

(We'll definitely get a better audio setup next time we do one of these, I know the audio is screeching and horrible. We have plural audio engineers in the League now.)

But yeah, I just thought that out of all of the Internet, the Giant Bomb community would most appreciate several videos of dudes playing highly-competitive Windjammers. If you want to see more windjamming in the future, hit up the Twitch account I made specifically for the Northwest Windjamming League. Also, if you're in the greater Seattle area (specifically Redmond) and are down to jam, we can probably work something out, too. If you attend the Redmond campus of DigiPen Institute of Technology, look forward to a Windjammers Club next semester.

I support this endeavour.

YES!

I've got the perfect place to lodge competitors if you ever come to Nova Scotia.

http://www.windjammermotel.ca/

I love the Windjammers renaissance. I remember when I played it in arcades it never seemed super popular. I mean it did alright, but people didn't line up to play it or whatever.

I always liked it, though, so it's cool to see people getting something out of the attention Giant Bomb gives it. Although, they are way better at it than I ever was.

There was a game (that I still own) on GBA called super dodgeball advance that is similar(not really shockingly it's not in the Giant Bomb wiki- it seems like all my favorite games are super obscure). It's not as good probably because it's on GBA and it's not a full console release so it never seemed to have as much depth, but it was still pretty cool when I got it (whenever GBA came out- I forget).

That's really cool. Wish I lived near you in order to attend this event! Alas, I'm too shy/don't have enough connections to make this happen near me :(.

This is great, important work.

@kindisaurus_rex: Don't be shy about anything, brother! The worst thing that could happen is someone disagrees with you on whatever. Who cares?! Life's too short!

As for this Windjammer League, I live in downtown Seattle and would love to attend a future event!

Fine work, my friend.

Super Dodgeball was a staple of my childhood, everyone knew what it was and generally liked it. I wouldn't say it was obscure at all, in my circles, but neither was it some break out explosive volley-ball-shaped-like-a-spear hit. =)

Link to the Giant Bomb entry since you're having trouble finding it.

@griffinmills: oh. weird, it didn't come up for me.

Well, there it is ha.

This is awesome. I might have to make it out to one of the tourney's in the future, although 6 hours driving (there and back) is a bit of an undertaking.

Looks like Windjammers is a cool highlight of your rose coloured campus life.

Seal of approval.

this is a wonderful endeavor... I salute you

Hmm...those don't look like Neo Geo/Wii Remote/Wii Classic Controller/GameCube/WaveBird controllers...

As a bunch of poor college students, our goal is to, as soon as possible, either acquire an AES and copy of Windjammers, or perhaps just the latter, to dump the ROM for reals and then frame on our wall. I recently purchased a Windjammers arcade flier, pictured below, and will soon frame it, too :D (Assuming the image upload works, it seems to be kind of broken.)

Hi guys, i'm from the French community (http://windjammers.forumactif.org ) & we're pleased to see a local scene on this game in the US. As we know the game & its real depth very well, we would enjoy to share technical stuff with you.

Very nice to see international communities for this game come together.

Some French (top) players playing on Fightcade, enjoy !

You can find other recorded fightcade replays on this Playlist