I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I am very excited and can't wait for EVO!

The Smash community is really showing up for this one, what an insane amount of competitors for this event! Friday is stack with Finals for some underrated games, but the real blockbuster day is of course Sunday. Hoping for some more Divekick and another KOF finals to rival last years finals, which was the catalyst that brought me into fighting games and caused me to preorder P4A.

GET HYPE

Also holy shit, SFIV seeds list is the most stacked list of players I've ever seen. Some really great players aren't going to make it to Ro32 because there's just not room for enough of them

That KoF XIII GF video reminded me why I should be excited for EVO.

It's gonna be great.

Excellent write up. Really summed up the large lineup in a concise way. I like it.T

he only thing you forgot to mention was that, despite still being a side tournament, Top 8 of Skullgirls will be streamed on one of the evo streams sometime Saturday, but when and on what stream, I can't say. All I know is that Top 32 will be starting on Saturday at 1:00pm local.

The hype has been boiling deep inside of me for the last week or so, ready to burst out. I've booked the whole weekend off and I'm ready to soak in as much of this tournament as I possibly can.

GET HYPE

If the purpose of this was to get me hyped for EVO, you have done well, especially with that clip of the KoF finals, which I remember watching live quite vividly.

To those who know about such things: What has changed about SFxT that has reversed some of the derision that game initially got? I remember it being boring as hell to watch last year, so I'm genuinely interested what the changes were in version 2013.

Its pretty cool to see like 500+ people for Injustice. Also interesting they haven't entirely forgotten about MK9. Good news for me is I apparently have Saturday off. Sadly, working Friday and Sunday though. So, I guess for the majority of all of this it might be archives for me.

Also that Street Fighter Tier list is pretty interesting considering a Gen player just swept CEO.

I hate having to work on a sunday next week, but just maybe, I'll get back from work just in time for the finals or something.

Can't wait for the UMvC3 tears.

Awesome blog as always FLStyle! I'm glad to see P4A get that many entrants for EVO, hopefully it'll have an exciting Top 8. I hope to catch the tail end of the Top 8 of P4A by the time I get home from work on that day. Definitely will catch most of the weekend action.

I'm going to be interstate for about two weeks during the time that EVO happens and I will miss all of it and I am so very sad. :(

Shit, do the twitch channels for evo (what was it, srkevo1, srkevo2 etc?) even do archives? :( :( :(

@arbitrarywater said:

Ahhh yes the archives. Last year, only after I paid the $12 to subscribe to the channel did I have access to the archive. I can't remember what it was that blocked it off but I recall that the EVO guys didn't do it intentionally, we'll see how it goes this year.

Get hype for KOF!

Also I feel P4A will be incredibly free to the japanese but I'll check out whatever matches I can.

Joey Cuellar‏@EvilMrWizard5m

Going to rebroadcast Evo Finals Day from 2012 starting at 10am PST! Tune in to relive the hype from last years finals! #Evo2013#hype

HYPE!!!

Watching that KOF GF gets me so amped.

So damn hype. Evo 2012 was jammed full of amazing moments. Next weekend can't come soon enough.

Can't believe its rolled around again already. I don't think my body is ready.

I've been watching last year's UMvC3 Top 8 and I forgot that Chris G came in third. Third. Last year, when he didn't lead with Morrigan and his Doom wasn't that sharp and ran Akuma as the anchor. Watching last year's EVO performance and comparing it to what I saw watching NorCal, UFGT, and CEO, he is so much sharper only a year later. It's his tournament to win or lose.

It's almost the opposite of SSF4AE where Infiltration was so dominant last year but the gap has closed considerably with Xian and others playing so well leading into next weekend.

I love how SSBM had the third highest number of entrants. Smash community showing up with both their money and their play. EVO weekend is always one of my most anticipated weekends.

Well shit... so we won't be able to freely access the EVO archives? Cause shit I'm gonna miss the Tekken Tag 2 stuff. Really wanted to see that since I can't see it live.

Can't wait to see Marvel, so many Japanese players attending. Unfortunately that game is getting quite stale now, need some wacky Japan teams to mix it up.

dude whats up with TTT2's entrants being so low? it came out last year!

I am so pumped! SO PUMPD!!

Okay, this is probably a noob question, but why is there a tournament for Super Smash Bros. Melee instead of one for Brawl?

Also, I thought that Injustice wasn't going to be at EVO this year. Was that ever true at one point but later changed? Or was I just misinformed?

@snail: as a disclaimer i havent played either of those games but i think the smash community has pretty much decided that melee is the more competitive game. also (and probably more importantly) it got in by winning the donation drive in which people donated to choose the final game included in the lineup.

as far as injustice you are right it wasn't in the original lineup but then through some EVO magic ( pretty sure NRS paid them a bunch of money and bypassing the donation drive...) they decided to include it. this is probably for the best because it seems like most of the MK community are focusing on that game now.

Ranmasama upset. I'm calling it.

SO MUCH HYPE.

@casper_: Oh okay. It would be cool if someone that was more familiar with the professional competitive Smash Bros. community could elaborate on why Melee was chosen over Brawl (namely what you said about being "more competitive"), but that aside that totally answered my questions. Thanks!

Nice to see Injustice and MK9 showing signs of having a healthy tournament life ahead of them.

Kappa

Really excited for this. I hope Sako can show the same skills at Evo as he does back home in Japan, because that Evil Ryu is sick.

I think it was only about a week or two ago when I found out that Melee was the Evo game and not Brawl, which makes me much more excited for it.

The main thing I took away from last year was that you shouldn't sleep on any of these games. A game that wasn't even close to my radar (KoFXIII) ended up being the best show out of all of them. Can't wait for this, thanks for the write-up.

As much as I dislike MK it's shown up at EVO for 3 years. It's done better than most were expecting it to.

@snail: I'm not into Smash, but I remember tripping being one of the things that really bugged that community. Your character has a completely random chance to fall over if you dash, change directions and sometimes even when using a smash attack.

Oh man, I remember being in the chat during the KoF Finals last year. I don't use the word "hype" as an adjective, but that one was as close as I ever got to uttering that fucking stupid word.

Dat hype

Dieminion has launched a last minute attempt to get to EVO https://www.wepay.com/donations/dieminion4evo_1

And just like that, Dieminion raises $1500, so we'll see him next weekend!

Not really into EVO, but hearing that SSBM made it in has got me thinking of this vid.

If this tourney can bring more of that then consider me hyped.

curleh mustache west #2 is on with none other than yipes on commentary so check out teamspookys twitch page if you wanna watch some marvel.

I'm not super involved in the scene, but I do dabble in a decent amount of Melee so I'll try to give as good of an explanation as I possibly can. Tripping is definitely one of the aspects of Brawl that made it less popular with players. It added a larger degree of randomness which competitive players absolutely hate. Brawl is a slower paced game than Melee and is viewed by the public to be less balanced.

From a spectator perspective, matches take longer and few of the characters that were popular in Melee are used in competitive Brawl. Melee is a vastly more popular game for the reasons stated above, and also because many spectators deem Brawl to be nothing but a game dominated by MetaKnight mirror matchups. While that's not entirely true, there are certainly a lot of benefits to playing as MK (he has really great recovery, easy and flexible combos, nice damage output while not being too light to go flying, few bad matchups, decent edgeguarding, etc) and MK is a very popular pick.

Coming from spectating Melee to spectating Brawl is a less extreme version of going from watching UMvC3 to waching SFxT. Brawl is slower, has less of an opening for "high-skill" characters such as Fox, and just isn't as enjoyable to watch for most spectators, especially those who became used to the fast paced, high damage, heavy edgeguarding style of competitive Melee.

Check out a Smash channel like ClashTournaments if you want to find some VODS to check out competitive Melee and Brawl. It's a pretty good chance to watch a few matches which will help you notice some of the differences from a spectator standpoint. Also, there is a Brawl mod called "Project M" which is an effort to make Brawl play more like Melee. Looking here will show some of the "features" that they added to change the way Brawl plays to make it more like Melee.

Overall Melee is just vastly more popular, both in terms of spectating and in the number of people who play it. Even though I'm certainly not an expert (since I watch very little Brawl) I hope tihs gave you at least a general idea :D

Also to raise some Melee hype, here's an example of how to play the Fox v. Marth matchup.

In the words of the caster (about 200x...)... Swag.

@davidwitten22: Good stuff, thanks for the write-up.

I will be there for KOF and Tekken as well as some important stuff for IPLAYWINNER. I will be wearing my Giant Bomb shirt on Sunday and I hope to get at the front once again for the obligatory SRK chant in honor of both fighting games and Ryan. Oh yeah I never finished my EVO Virgin blog from last year and I still remember much of it so I hope to write the rest tomorrow and Wednesday!

SEE YOU THERE!!!!!

Evo is one of the only game events that makes me go "Holy shit, Holy Shit, Holy Shit!" at most matches. I hope the Xbox Twitch app will show EVO so I can watch it.

Now I remember! The archive is 720p, and only paid subs can watch it at 720p.

That's a good point, it could prove vital in pushing EVO 2013 over 100k viewers on the Twitch stream (not including the unofficial French, Japanese etc. streams).

Seems kinda messed up to me to relegate KOF to 10AM when it had hypest finals last year. But I guess people want to watch Injustice :/ and there are a ton of entrants so that probably helps. Injustice is slowly growing on me, I just don't think its ready for prime time yet.

Anyways I've been playing more P4A online and I'm hoping Atlus will randomly decide to release a DLC with new characters or modes or something to bring some more people back to play ranked, I'm tired of fighting the same 2 Yu players all the time. I hate playing vs. Yu.

FGC| Dieminion

Wow, Nintendo isn't allowing permission to stream Melee so the schedule's being changed around, fucking bizarre.

http://shoryuken.com/2013/07/09/changes-to-evo-2013-smash-schedule/

Wow. Nintendon't I guess. I was kind of looking forward to watching it too.

@churrific:

Disgusting, do they not want their games to look awesome in front of 100k people?

Even with this Nintdeo BS, so hype for this weekend! Randomly watched my first Evo when G4 was hosting the stream (o good times...except for the chat F that). Now I've been watching FG streams constantly

I lost a ton of hype for evo and a ton of respect for nintendo today.

As a fighting game fan and a Nintendo fan, I'm fucking pissed at this.

#FreeMelee