Time for another FGC blog and another Road to EVO major, the 3rd of the 5, NorCal Regionals!

NorCal Regionals 2013 - April 26th-28th

Disclaimer: The official NorCal Regionals 2013 trailer, with all its Hotline Miami goodness, is brought to you by Giant Bomb's own @lordofultima.

All the main EVO games will be there and joined by Divekick, which will be using the Jefailey build (see more below). All the brackets are at http://ncr11.challonge.com/ so you can check to see which pool of which game your favourite players are in.

MadCatz have offers all weekend during the event: http://www.madcatz.com/ncr-2013-fierce-fights-dynamite-deals/

Stream Schedule**

Friday*

IPLAYWINNER

10 a.m.–2 p.m. Street Fighter x Tekken

2–4 p.m. Persona 4

4–7 p.m. King of Fighters

7–9 p.m. Tekken Tag

TeamSp00ky

10 a.m.–4 p.m. Street Fighter 4 Pools

4–10 p.m. Marvel 3 Pools

Saturday*

IPLAYWINNER

10 a.m.–2 p.m Street Fighter 4 Pools

2–5 p.m. Marvel 3 Pools

5–6 p.m. Mortal Kombat Finals

6–7 p.m. Persona 4 Finals

7–8 p.m. Dead or Alive Finals

8–10 p.m. Smash Bros. Finals

TeamSp00ky

10–11 a.m. Tekken Tag Finals

11 a.m.–2 p.m. King of Fighters Finals

2–3 p.m. Divekick Finals

3–5 p.m. Street Fighter x Tekken Semis

5–8 p.m. Street Fighter 4 Semis

8 p.m.–Close Marvel 3 Semis

Sunday*

TeamSp00ky

11 a.m.–1 p.m. Street Fighter 4 T16-T8

1–3 p.m. Marvel 3 T16-T8

3–5 p.m. Street Fighter x Tekken Finals

5–8 p.m. Street Fighter 4 Finals

8 p.m.–Close Marvel 3 Finals

*All times are subject to change without notice.

**Thanks to user @reddy1124 for pointing out the stream schedule at http://iplaywinner.com/news/2013/4/28/norcal-regionals-this-weekend-stream-schedule-now-online.html

Stream links

Team Spooky: http://www.twitch.tv/teamsp00ky/new

IPlayWinner: http://www.twitch.tv/iplaywinner/new

More to be added as they become available

Speaking of Divekick...

New Divekick characters

If you haven't seen them already, I present to you Uncle Sensei and Jefailey, the latest divekickers (or dropkicker, in Jefailey's case) to be added to the Divekick line-up, as unveiled on Iron Galaxy's Divekick #eSports Hour on their Twitch page.

The Divekick #eSports Hour airs every Monday Night at 7PM PST - 9PM CST - 10PM EST - 3AM GMT, the shows are even uploaded in 5 chunks to the Iron Galaxy Youtube channel. Enter the Lang Zone!

Injustice: Gods Among Us - Civil War V results

Last weekend was Civil War V, it may have not been a Road to EVO major and the hotel venue's internet may have been awful, but Spooky and Arturo still managed to squeeze two decent streams out of 4G.

MadCatz own MarkMan said that Super Street Fighter IV: AE Version 2012's Winner's Final, Loser's Final and Grand Final at Civil War V was the most refreshing he'd seen in a long time. In the top 3 AGE NYChrisG (who won UMvC3 later on)'s Sakura won the tournament in dramatic fashion over VxG EMP Dieminion's Guile and MadCatz Team Spooky's Arturo's Dhalsim (who won SFxT version 2013 earlier on).

Arturo and Skisonic provide commentary for the Injustice Top 3

Civil War V was also the debut of Injustice: Gods Among Us in tournament play and fortunately for the spectator (maybe not the players themselves in the short-term), the Injustice pre-release testers were allowed to compete, showing early examples of high-level play. While the interactables, notorious for being unblockable played a role in the matches, the typically high-level of EMP's REO and Tom Brady and again AGE NYChrisG proved that Injustice is off to a good start in tournaments.

Injustice is not officially at EVO 2013 while MK9 has its final official tournament this year, but if this first tournament is anything to go by, it should be an easy choice to swap NetherRealm game for NetherRealm game next year at EVO 2014.

I will tell you one thing though, it's a good job Arturo and Skisonic manage to do a good job commentating these matches, because the game's music and in-game announcer are almost non-existent. Other than that, good job NetherRealm Studios.

Thanks for reading, see you next time!

Videos of interest

Here's a tentative schedule for both streams as well http://iplaywinner.com/news/2013/4/28/norcal-regionals-this-weekend-stream-schedule-now-online.html. The times are in PST obviously and be warned that the times may and probably will not be accurate as the FGC goes by Tournament Standard Time.

@reddy1124: Many thanks sir, I added it to the OP.

#banthepig

Seriously. While it's hilarious to see that stage boil down to two guys throwing the pig at each other, it's also really broken. Only issue is that you're banning half a stage, and there's no way to stop players from doing the stage transition in the first half outside of banning the whole stage together. Which then removes a perfectly viable 1/2 a stage for no reason other than "the second half is broken."

Injustice needs collusion.

I'm actually co-organizing a local fightan game tournament this weekend in MD. Maybe I'll write a blog about it later if I have the energy to do so.

Nice post as usual FLStyle. I'm always up for more Rush Hour shenanigans.

@morbid_coffee: The comedy hype has gotten so intense that someone made an Injustice Pig twitter account, I thought parody accounts were reserved for raffles. People will get tired of it eventually I'm sure.

@dochaus: Good luck, looks hard to run.

@devoureroftime: Thanks! They don't get on the mics as much as they used to but it makes it even better when they do.

@flstyle: The harder part for me is spreading the word around when you haven't exactly "established" yourself in the almighty FGC, though dealing with used equipment on a budget and praying it doesn't break down during the tourney is a pretty big challenge in itself.

@dochaus: Gotta use the power of social media! But yeah I can see how getting the word out would be a problem. What are you using as your venue?

<p>Wont be able to watch a lot of it, but I'll watch what I can. Infiltration for SF4. You heard it here first,</p>

As much as I love me some divekick, I really think they are taking it a lot more seriously than I am at the very least. The entire concept of the game was a joke at a popular move.

btw, leave the pig in. I know that may not be the popular opinion right now, but as it stands the pig is pretty damn killer for both sides, so all it really does is increase both the risk and reward at the same time. Not something really "broken" since it could turn the battle around for both players with one fatal move.

Timezone differences mean that I'll probably go to sleep during the streams, but I can at least see the first half or something. Thanks for the post! Fighting game tournaments are always fun to watch

Wait which King of Fighters are we talking about here? Was there recently a gritty reboot just called The King of Fighters that I didn't hear about?

@mezmero: XIII is what gets played most

NCR is now live with SFIV pools.

HADOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKEEEEEEEEEEEEEN

most interested in persona 4, ive missed out on all high level matches of that game and would love to see the intricacies of it

I have arrived home, NCR time!

SFxT was hype. You walk away from a game for 8 months it's crazy the things that change.

Damn, missed it, ah well.

P4A is up next, should be good. cc.@optix12:

P4A, wtf is this game man Chie mirror, this match was made for GiantBomb

first 2 P4A games, i may be from europe and only seen quick look/ giantbomb stuff from this game but MAN is this game is CRAZY fast. Also im playing persona 3 atm and its great to see/understand the small influences from that game in here

Man, I kind of want SFxT now but I kind of don't want to pay twice the game's price to play Sakura (my SFIV main). This is also getting some of my P4A hype back for the upcoming European release.

I approve of the variety of characters being used in SF, I've seen Blankas, Makotos, Kens and Ibukis. Good stuff.

Getting late in UKLand, going to retire for the evening.

KOF is hype on stream 2, with none other than EVO 2012's KOF commentators.

See you tomorrow!

EDIT: Tekken Tag 2 is about to start on stream 2 and will go until the end of day 1, stream 1 will continue Marvel.

Do you know if there was any body streaming the DiveKick pools?

@d_w: It definitely wasn't on stream 1 or 2 and there hasn't been anything archived on the Iron Galaxy Twitch channel since the last Monday show. Looks like the plan was only to stream to top 8 today on Spooky's channel.

KOF top 8 is on stream 1, SF pools are on stream 2, NCR Day 2 let's go!

I've never played KOF, but it's still great to watch. Kind of happy to see that the super long combo videos I've seen don't really happen here, I guess if you need to max every meter for them they're not that practical edit: common. Saw some pretty long ones, but they were rare enough that I liked them

Also Divekick coming up on the TeamSp00ky stream.

Divekick Top 8 time! Let's get it on!

Chris G killed #esports

soo funny that the prize for divekick was 895

That was some good shit, looking forward to see some of the other characters learnt too.

What aggravated me was that every single Dive player forgot that he has a ground super, and it makes him jump forward.

So many time out losses that could have been won with a last minute ground super.

Divekick's way too fun to watch. Shame it was mostly just Dive (and Kick) but makes sense I guess. Btw, in SFxT tournaments do they just use gem presets?

KoF final round OCV WHAAAAAAT

DiveKick WHAAAAAAT

HYPE HYPE HYPE

Ver. 2013 update added in 5 (?) gem presets instead of the regular 3 from vanilla, and that became tournament standard instead of having players waste 10 minutes sorting through custom sets.

The forwards jump was just the right length to cancel ChrisG's close range strategy too, what a shame.

Correct, custom selection isn't allowed.

stream monsters bum me out sometimes dude...

A pandora kill in SFxT? Now I've seen everything.

Dat Aigis

After today, I want to know how much is divekick?

Watching the P4A finals kind of made me want to pick up P4A again before realizing that it's completely fucking dead in almost every place other than California. :(

@morbid_coffee said:

Move to Europe! We're still sort of excited. I mean, some of us are. And on second thought moving to California might be easier. Something to consider at any rate.

Does the TeamSp00ky stream look weird to anyone else? Like the contrast in-game is way high or something.

Not too into all of the top 4 in P4A being all top tier characters. No other fighting game is like that at top level play, especially going from these NorCal Regionals. It's a shame that there's a lack of variety in my favorite fighting game, especially given the fact that it's actually pretty balanced but with the top tier characters being just too good. I want a P4A2 to introduce more variety in play, among other reasons.

Also, top level competitive Melee is absolutely crazy. I have no idea why elitists try to claim it isn't a fighting game.

I love Smash Bros. Hopefully Nintendo won't be dumb with the next one, if they don't want to support a competitive scene that's fine, but to put in extra effort to discourage it is insane to me. Add in a good online mode and I'll need to get myself a Wii U. As for the stream: Jigglypuff's cool and the commentators are gasping a whole lot. edit: I think it's starting to be a bit excessive

senor taxi over chris g!!!

Senoir Taxi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That was pretty incredible. Did not expect Chris G to get sent to losers.