Tonight  is a memorable night for me. With college taking priority of any free time I have, it's been a nightmare on the gaming side. If you've tracked me for a while, you might know that I've hosted a few tournaments in my time; one included AlexN. I even had a chance late last year to host/run/organize a tournament that had hundreds of spectators, and nearly a hundred competitors. For work tonight, we paired up with a local community, non-profit tournament host Last Action Gamer and threw together a Resident Evil 5 (thoughts on Sessler review) release party. It consisted of a well-sized Street Fighter IV tournament with a little bit of a Rock Band II follow-up. Man, it was fun -- probably one of the better competitions I've ran. Most of the players there knew exactly what they were getting themselves into, and nearly all of the matches were provided with many shock-in-awe screams due to the amount of close, exciting fights that occurred.

I could go into detail of how each match went down, but I'll sum it up by using one as an example: It was Guile vs. Sagat, and the rounds were extremely close each time. In the final of the match, both players were generally low on HP and the timer was hitting some low digits. Sagat moved in with a good tiger knee, knocking his opponent to a mere pixel of health. The crowd was on its toes, thinking it was over. Sagat was all over him, chipping away damage from Guile, who hasn't used his ultra the entire tournament thus far. Sagat pulled a swift tiger uppercut, but it was blocked -- and Guile unexpectedly busts into his ultra when Sagat was coming down. The audience was flipping out; I think everybody was on their feet. And still, Sagat had the smallest amount of HP left. It was epic. Unfortunately for Sagat, the Guile player chained a sonic boom right after his landing with perfect timing, and the player had no choice but to block. The chip damage killed him.

The night went on with many more matches just as amazing. It was sad there was only one person representing Zangief, though. Guess I'll have to as well next time. Also, a used copy of Madden 2001 was given away to what we considered to be the worst player at the tournament -- it was pretty funny.

So did anyone pick up Resident Evil 5? We didn't sell a single copy at our demo station during the tournament and it really didn't see much action throughout the night. It was eventually later replaced by someone who brought a Dreamcast and hooked up some Capcom vs. SNK 2. I got it myself, but will be holding off until I can play it with this goon when I'm visiting him in PA. Something interesting: During my vacation, I'll be running a D&D campaign (NERD!). Was particularly wondering if anyone was interested in listening to an (edited) recording of it if the effort proved worthy (funny, interesting, etc.). Dunno if I will follow through with it, but Penny Arcade has something similar and I've found it rather entertaining to listen to thus far.

Anyway, what an awesome night to be a gamer. Now, I just need to get to work on playing them and I'd be all set. Spring break surely couldn't come soon enough.