Capcom Cup 2014!

Hello and welcome to my final fighting game tournament event blog of 2014! We've enjoyed another year of quality fighting game tournament matches and now is the final big event, the Capcom Cup! Our own Jason Oestreicher will be at the event!

What is the Capcom Cup?

Capcom USA have teamed up with the biggest fighting game tournament events of the fighting game community to stream each Ultra Street Fighter IV tournament via their official channel and to hand out qualifying spots and seeding points (AKA The Capcom Pro Tour) to a 16-man tournament, ran by Capcom which will take place this Saturday. These events included but were not limited to:

• Final Round (Atlanta, GA, USA) – March 14~16
• Norcal Regionals (Sacramento, CA, USA) – April 18~20
• South East Asia Majors (Singapore) – June 20~22
• Community Effort Orlando (Orlando, FL, USA) – June 27~29
• Evolution Championship Series (Las Vegas, NV, USA) – July 11~13
• VSFighting 4 (Birmingham, UK) – August 23~24
• The Fall Classic (Raleigh, NC, USA) – October 10~12
• Taito Arcade Nationals (Singles) (Tokyo, Japan) – October 11
• Capcom Pro Tour Asia Series: Finals (Singapore) – October 25~26
• Dreamhack Winter (Jönköping, Sweden ) – November 27~30

As well as traditional video game events like E3 and PAX.

Who are the 16 competitors?

USA players -

• Eduardo Perez – EG|PR Balrog - Balrog (Boxer)
• Darryl Lewis – SnakeEyez - Zangief
• Justin Wong – EG|Justin Wong - Rufus
• Ricky Ortiz – EG|Ricky Ortiz - Rufus
• Du Dang – NuckleDu - Guile

Japan players -

• Daigo Umehara – MCZ|Daigo - Evil Ryu
• Masato Takahashi – Bonchan - Sagat
• Keita Ai – RZR|Fuudo - Fei Long
• Yusuke Momochi – EG|Momochi - Ken
• Hiroshi Nishikido – Nishikin - Blanka

Rest of the world -

• Ryan Hart – DIG|Prodigal Son (UK) - Sagat
• Seonwoo Lee – Infiltration (South Korea) - Akuma
• Olivier Hay – MD|Luffy (France) - Rose
• Valentin Petit – GL|Valmaster (France) - Chun-Li
• Kun Xian Ho – RZR|Xian (Singapore) - Gen
• Eric Moreira Silva – CNB|ChuChu (Brazil) - Sakura

Who is fighting who in the 1st round?

• MD|Luffy vs Nishikin
• EG|PR Balrog vs EG|Ricky Ortiz
• SnakeEyez vs EG|Momochi
• DIG|Prodigal Son vs CRS|NuckleDu
• Bonchan vs RZR|Fuudo
• Infiltration vs CNB|ChuChu
• RZR|Xian vs GL|Valmaster
• EG|Justin Wong vs MCZ|Daigo Umehara

That's right, Justin vs. Daigo in the 1st round, that's the level of competition we're talking about here folks!

Where and when can I watch this?

http://www.twitch.tv/capcomfighters - maybe even a certain video game website's chat?

This Saturday, December 13th. Live from The Warfield, San Francisco.

Schedule All times PST (What time is that for me?)

Capcom Cup has also been confirmed as the site of the first ever Street Fighter V match, viewable by people watching the event.

News

Street Fighter V analysis

So by now you know that Street Fighter V was leaked and then officially confirmed this weekend!

Maximilian provides the deepest analysis yet about the trailer we've seen:

• No OTGs (yet)? - You may have heard the term OTG (off the ground, seen commonly in UMvC3) on this week's bombcast, when Jason was talking about attacks by Chun-Li. But as explained by Max in his analysis, it looks less like an OTG attack, hitting an otherwise grounded opponent back in the air, and more like the original aerial attack by Chun-Li had Street Fighter X Tekken style ground bounce properties, allowing for an extra attack once Chun-Li landed.
• Elemental power-ups - I should've figured this one out myself! I was so fixated on the idea of Ryu using the Denjin Hadoken, not his regular Shinku Hadoken, as setting the time-line of Street Fighter V (after SFIV but before SFIII), I missed that it was part of an electrical power up. So had he not been powered up, he may still have done a Shinku Hadoken. Max's speculation regarding Chun-Li's water power up also seems like a good guess.

These power-ups giving characters access to multiple fireballs or extra properties like Ryu guard crushing Chun-Li seems like what the Street Fighter team may have been experimenting with in USFIV with the Omega Mode DLC. If I had to guess I'd also suggest that this is Street Fighter team's continuing efforts to create a system not unlike Street Fighter X Tekken's much debated Gems system. Hopefully this power-up system will be better received than the gems.

I look forward to getting more news as it arrives this weekend!

No platform-exclusive characters in MKX

In an interview with NetherRealm's Shaun Himmerick, he confirmed that there would be no platform-exclusives in MKX as Kratos was for the PS3 in the previous MK game. This may speak to NetherRealm's efforts to improve their standing in fighting game community tournaments, as Ed Boon himself learned on Twitter following MK 2011/9's release that Kratos was banned from tournaments. What it likely doesn't speak to is guest characters in general, as it's been known that out of the 4 DLC characters Kenshi, Rain, Skarlet and Freddy Krueger, Freddy was bought the most, so the Predator, an Alien or the Terminator as DLC shouldn't be ruled out just yet.

Tekken 7 looks awfully pretty, but people don't like the newly revealed character very much

Tekken 7 test events continue to happen in Japan, testing the new ultra combo-style system, changes to existing characters and getting to gripes with débutantes Claudio and Katarina but another recently unveiled character, Lucky Chloe, didn't go down that well with American Tekken fans.

The response to Chloe was so poor that Katsuhiro Harada addressed it on Twitter saying that he'll just hold her back from the American release and make her exclusive to the Asian and Europe releases of Tekken 7. From a series that has fighting robots, bears, pandas, kangaroos, dinosaurs, people with demonic powers and an old man who lacks the ability to stand up she doesn't bother me as much as she seems to bother so many others.

The Game Awards 2014 - Best Fighting Game

Always interesting to see is the mainstream perspective of fighting games. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U took the award for best fighting game in a category that didn't even include the all but announced Evo 2015 main stage tournament game, Guilty Gear Xrd.

Northeast Championship 15 results

This past weekend was the 15th annual NEC ran by Big E Gaming. Hit this Shoryuken link for a list of games and winners and be sure to check each respective Twitch channel's YouTube page for uploads of the best matches.

Thanks for reading!

That about does it from me, see you next year for Evo 2015 news and more tournaments! Follow me on the Twitter!

I get to actually watch Capcom Cup since it's on a Saturday. It's going to be fun!

James Chen and UltraDavid did a really in-depth analysis of the trailer starting at 13:50 where they slowed it down to like 1/4 speed and just crawled through the footage dissecting every tiny detail. I haven't watched Max's video but they mentioned he thought the 1P 2P icons might indicate a possible tag system. James thinks they're just a holdover from the linked arcade cabs for SFIV that would have the same on-screen indicator. Either way, it's super informative and at 1:47:25 they build a phantom bracket and go through Capcup, matchup by potential matchup, to predict a winner for the event.

I doubt the powerup system is going to be anything like gems if you're talking about swapping. Seems more like A Groove to me with a fixed element for each character. Ken will be fire.

EDIT: Also it might be worth directing people to the World Warriors of Capcom Cup videos Ultrachen has done on the Capcom Fighters channel. It will help people understand the storylines going in to the tournament as well as what they can expect to see and what might be a surprise.

@starvinggamer: By gems I meant the concept of them trying (and failing in the Gems case) to introduce personalised power ups like as you said, fire for Ken etc. I'll give that Ultrachen video a watch, thanks!

Why should they have included Xrd in the fighting category when it's not even out yet?

Ah yes, I neglected to mention that the jury of people who vote for the winners, including GB's Jeff, were given early access to unreleased games some months ago so that they could play and pass judgement on them.

@flstyle: Hm, I see. It's a bit suspect if the awards are based in part on unfinished versions of the games.

@flstyle: Ah, I'm thinking it will be a unified system with the only difference between characters being their graphical treatment. I hope they have some real details at Capcup.

@l1ghtn1n: Chuchu went up today and Valmaster is the only one they haven't done yet. You should also watch this week's Tuesday show, it was amazing.

I am so freaking hyped for Capcom Cup on Saturday. The fact 4 people have to go 0-2 is absurd. Only one I feel like I won't be surprised by going such is NuckleDu (not saying he's bad, if you are in this tournament you are good, just that compared to the rest of this group he feels like the weakest contender there other than people I don't know much about like ChuChu).

The lack of Pepeday and Smug at Capcom Cup is a bummer, but I'm sure it'll be a fun tournament.

Hopefully we get a chat on the site. It's less noisy and way more of a conversation on this site.

But when's Marvel?

Speaking of fighting games, BlazBlue Continuum Shift Extend just got released on Steam... Weird, why port that one and not the most recent game?

Really excited for Capcom Cup, only got into the FGC this year so this is like the perfect end to the year. Really interested to see how the competitors deal with SnakeEyez's Zangief. He plays such a confident game with him(I can't believe how often he just walks up SPD's people) that I can see less experienced players getting bowled over by him but most of these guys have tons of high stakes tournament experience.

It is gonna have to be pretty crazy to beat the Top 8 of NEC 15 though. Smug and Pepedey are not just incredible with their characters but just so entertaining to watch play.

Too many good players, I don't know who I want to win! I want to see SnakeEyez ripping it up and I'm hoping Valmaster does well. He's definitely gotta be one of the underdogs just because he's not as well known, but he's definitely got a really legit Chun. Bonchan confirmed for second place, right?

I imagine it's just a case of a publisher looking for whatever stuff they can get to put on steam and it was probably much cheaper to license that than Chrono Phantasma. I would suspect it's the same reason why Calamity Trigger showed up on steam earlier this year with all the GFWL features, including netplay, just stripped out.

It's kind of a shame, I don't think it reflects very well on Arc. It comes off as a bit of an apathetic attitude to have towards your own IP and feels dismissive of PC players anyway. Thanks for throwing us some scraps!

Ha! Speaking of great treatment of fighting games on Steam, I was looking at the DOA5 page and it says:

Online modes for Dead or Alive 5 Last Round will be added in a patch within 3 months of release.

@flstyle: That comment about having a geriatric scientist who can barely stand as a playable character was also the same comment I made when this was being discussed in the GB forums. Holy hell, people can be so fucking fickle when it comes to these things.

God damn it why do these event's have to happen in San Francisco? I'll be able to watch the opening rounds but by the time it gets to the finals it'll be 3am here.

No sako. :(

The least experienced player out of the lot is NuckleDu, and he got 17th place at the biggest stage in the world tying with Justin Wong and Xian, and finishing above Infiltration, Ryan Hart, Daigo, and PR Rog. SnakeEyez is amazing, but so is everyone else in this tournament. Anyone getting bowled over by anyone is going to be a huge shock.

@l1ghtn1n: I think I still like Daigo for that matchup. Even if he picks a different character, Daigo has played Justin so many times as so many different characters that I think he'll be able to figure it out quickly. Unless there are some crazy anti-E.Ryu counterpick shenanigans that I'm not aware of. Also Justin has seemed off his game in SF all year.

Still so sad that there will be no Sako at this tournament. He won it last time. I guess he just doesn't have the time/desire to give it a go. Capcom Fighters stream also probably means paid archives, bit of a bummer for people who can't see it live due to incompatible streaming hours.

Shame all matches aside from the grand finals are first to 2. I love the longer sets. Shorter sets also makes it better for some players (PR Balrog) and worse for others (Daigo).

Still looking forward to it though. Nishikin! Blanka!

P.S.

Fuudo's profile picture on the Capcom Cup website is downright glorious.

First to 2 makes this a real crapshoot. If you've got 16 relatively close in skill players it's already going to be fairly random who wins (i.e. who had the best day), this isn't like Tennis where there's 3-4 dominant players and no one else even comes close (though it might be if every match was first to 5 or something) and we didn't really have a dominant player this year. Balrog has sucked since Ultra came out so will be interesting to see how he does/what characters he plays, Nuckledu is most likely screwed but who knows. Snake Eyez will probably do well but not win it if I had to guess. Luffy has the best shot out of the non Korean/Singaporean (?)/Japanese players.

Jwong is just not ultimately that amazing at SFIV compared to other games that he's ridiculously good at, but again it's first to 2 so he has a shot same as anyone else.

Obviously the final results will be 1. Luffy 2. Bonchan 3. Fuudo 4. Snake Eyez.

@hassun: Harry Potter's on a mean streak.

@hassun: Yup, players like Eduardo, Justin, and FChamp benefit a lot from longer set matches.

@bane122: To be fair, the game was originally released in arcades in February of this year, only the console version has yet to be released so for all intents and purposes it was pretty much a finished product at that point.

This is incredible. I'm happy to see it's being featured on the front page because it certainly deserves it!

@gaspower: The way he phrased it was ambiguous (couldn't tell what side he was going to land on!) so he could have meant Balrog does better in longer sets or Daigo does better in longer sets. Commonly accepted reasoning is that the best player does better in longer sets; which is why no one can beat Chris G in an FT10 in Marvel.

How many EG team kills will there be?

Should I go or stay home and stream monster it up while I play Xrd? That's the question I'll be asking myself up until Saturday morning.

@gaspower: I meant the opposite actually. Daigo probably benefits more from longer sets than anyone else. Eduardo benefits from shorter ones, mostly because of his character. Boxer doesn't do too well in longer sets.

@fredchuckdave: Has Fuudo ever been put on tilt? Afaik he never gets rattled, ever. And his character is perfect for that as well. Snake Eyez vs Fuudo at Evo this year was one of the most amazing matches I've seen in a very long tine.

@hassun: Fuudo is like a steel wall essentially; pretty interesting to watch. There was definitely some weirdness in the EVO top 8 featuring Fei Longs but can't remember if it was Gackt or Fuudo who did it.

Didn't Balrog do pretty well at Topanga? Also he could play E Roo or Yun for all we know.

SEA Majors were the best tourney I watched this year, where Momochi managed to out-Yolo Kazunoko and proudly earn his title "Yolochi;" hopefully we see some more of that type of craziness. Though there's a lot of disciplined players in the tourney so maybe not the most likely occurrence.

@hassun: Oh yeah that's true, Boxers options are limited and has to take gambles in certain matchups and why he dabbled with Fei for awhile.

As someone who wants to go but cannot go because it is very very very far, I will hate you forever if you do not go.

You have to drink in all of that HYPE!

@fredchuckdave: PR Rog was 7th out of 8 when he was invited to the Topanga World League. And yeah, any Fei weirdness was definitely Gackt. Fuudo is a fucking monster of precision. I think he's the most precise player out of anyone in Capcup.

@gaspower: Yeah, in Japan, same as the console version over there being out earlier. But I doubt they use foreign releases for consideration.

I don't doubt games like GG have a bigger uphill battle to be recognized by something like this over SF or MK, I just don't really see how it's a knock that it wasn't considered in this case when the game wasn't released widespread yet.

Regardless, I'm excited for the stream this weekend. Omega mode should be fun to watch and I really want to see more of SF5.

@fredchuckdave: Momochi was the only player to give Daigo any real trouble at Topanga A league recently. He's definitely reaching new levels with his Ken. Daigo in long sets is monstrous though, Jesus. 10/1 in the round robin and 5/0 in the upper finals. His only loss was to Momochi.

@hassun: Also obliterated everyone to qualify for Capcom Cup at CPT Asia. I mean I'm sure Daigo is the best player, but he still only has like a 45% chance to win this or something; and of course whether or not he wins will not impact his reputation in the slightest; but if Snake Eyez or Balrog won everyone would go nuts.

@fredchuckdave: Nishikin though... Blanka in there! Happy to see Chun-Li as well, and not just as an Infiltration side character.

@hassun: It's cool that Nishikin is in but I think in Japan he's pretty well regarded. In the US we just don't know a ton about him to begin with; I guess he's the wild card in the absence of Momochi's Ken. At one of the Topanga charity events there was a godlike Poison that I would have liked to see as well as Nemo's Rolento. In general this tournament could be well served to have 32 seats instead of 16, at least at some point in the future, same could be said for Starcraft 2's Blizzcon finals.

Ryan Hart was so dominant early in the year and then just went immediately downhill after Ultra came out, hopefully he can put up a good showing at the cup (Bonchan obviously still doing great with the same character).

Capcom Cup is going to be crazy, first round alone looks like a bunch of grandfinal matches. The character spread is really interesting too, as far as I can tell the only potential repeats are:

• Chun-Li (Valmaster, Infiltration, Chuchu)
• Sagat (Bonchan, Ryan Hart)
• Evil Ryu (Daigo, PR Balrog)
• Rufus (Justin Wong, Ricky Ortiz)
• Decapre (KnuckleDu, Momochi)

I haven't seen Momochi pull out Decapre for a while, and Chun-Li is not ChuChu or Infiltration's go to characters, but they have all used them in tournament before. Ultradavid and James Chen were also speculating that Ricky and Justin have other characters they have been prepping (I'm guessing Poison and Elena), and Ryan Hart and PR Balrog may end up using Yun and Balrog respectively. So every repeat character has at least one other potential replacement.

If you include other potential alternates that the players have used in tournament before (Ryu and Hakan for Infil, Juri for Momochi, C. Viper for either Chuchu or Valmaster, etc) that puts us at 22 potential characters 16 players. That is a lot of matchups for a one day invitational tournament!

@jesna: The YouTube series David and James made on the competitors is very good. I'd like to take this opportunity to pimp it a bit.

World Warriors of Capcom Cup

Pimp away, between those videos and the most recent Tuesday Show those guys have been knocking out of the park with Capcom Cup content.

Justin's secret character is probably going to be Rose. I only say this because he was playing a lot of her on his stream a while back and mentioned not wanting to pull her out back at 37 Reloaded. Whether he's confident enough in his Rose game to actually use her is going to be a different story though; most of these people have been playing their characters for a long time, so it would be tough to pull out some secret never-used-in-a-tournament character. I know that Ricky has been wanting to main Poison for such a long time, so it's possible that this tournament won't even feature a Rufus (although I really doubt it since both she and Justin are just too good with their old characters).

Daigo is the biggest threat in the tournament since he blew up Japan's greatest players back in Topanga and if he makes it to finals, he'll almost certainly be able to adapt to whatever the other player does because of how well he does in long sets. He had a rough start in Ultra after switching mains, but after realizing that he could just play Evil Ryu as a souped up version of Ryu, he's been excelling.

This will be fun tournament, wish I had the dosh to make it out to the west coast. On another note, why remove a character from the american release just because of a negative response? It's not like people have to play her, unless she's fantastically high tier or something silly. The more characters the better I say, balance be damned!

@smokeyd123: It was just Harada trolling fools like usual. No idea why everyone freaked out. No, I do know why. Because the clicks!

Surprised so many news sites ran with the "Lucky Chloe removed from the US" thing.

Does Capcom's site let you watch archives for free? I'm working that night so I'm going to miss most of it.

Pulling for Xian and Prodigal Son to do well.

I'm rooting for Ryan and SnakeEyez!

@starvinggamer: I meant how at other tournaments when in Pools or when lesser known players go against Snake Eyez he tends to dominate them mentally. One of the reason I am excited for Capcom Cup is to see how he does against these titans of the game.

Is there word on who is commentating?

@zella: Ultrachen

EDIT: Ok, now that I think about it, I don't think I've seen that officially stated anywhere, but I'm like 99.999999999% sure it's Ultrachen. They did the WW of CC videos after all.