EVO 2014 Preview, Streams & Schedule (July 11-13) Live from Las Vegas!

Welcome to the EVO 2014 preview! EVO comes to you live from Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino (formerly known as LVH).

What a turnaround for Nintendo, who last year tried to shut down the EVO 2013 Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament and now they're official EVO 2014 sponsors! No doubt the amazing Super Smash Bros. for Wii U invitational tournament at E3 2014 helped to bring them around.

Three games will be making their debut this year, Ultra Street Fighter IV, BlazBlue: Chronophantasma and Killer Instinct. If you haven't seen them played competitively before, you're in for a treat!

Expect to see Ed Boon take the stage once again, no doubt unveiling something new for Mortal Kombat X. Will Nintendo also take the opportunity to address the Smash community? We'll have to wait and see. Atlus will be there with playable Persona 4 Arena Ultimax too!

Check here to see which famed international players will make it to EVO 2014, including South Korea's strong Cafeid King of Fighters XIII players.

Click here to view a game by game overview by A.V. Club - http://www.avclub.com/article/viewers-guide-evo-years-biggest-fighting-game-tour-206670 (via @starvinggamer)

Official Tournament games, live streams and schedule

We say goodbye (in an official capacity) to Mortal Kombat (2011), Persona 4 Arena, Street Fighter X Tekken (Ver. 2013) and Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition (Ver. 2012).

Stream links and schedule

http://www.twitch.tv/srkevo1/

http://www.twitch.tv/srkevo2/

http://www.twitch.tv/capcomfighters

http://www.twitch.tv/Jyosua (Joshua Moore has been given permission by Tom Cannon to stream BlazBlue pools)

All times in PST. What time is that where you live? Click here

Unofficial streams

http://www.twitch.tv/madcatz

A bunch of streamers advertised themselves as doing unofficial streams last year, some of them did, some of them didn't. I'll list them just in case:

What do I need to know about EVO?

What is EVO?

Like many of the long running fighting game tournament events, EVO had humble beginnings in the time of arcades, Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat 2. It was 1st called Battle by the Bay, a 40-man Super Street Fighter II Turbo and Street Fighter Alpha 2 tournament in 1996 consisting of California locals and has since gone on to move to Las Vegas and become the biggest and most attended global event in fighting games.

EVO is ran part-time by 3 gents who all have full-time jobs. The Cannon brothers, Tony and Tom, and Joey Cuellar.

EVO 2014 continues to break records, with the top 10 most entered countries outside of the USA looking like this:

• Canada – 331
• Japan - 127
• Mexico - 114
• Australia - 28
• United Kingdom - 27
• France - 23
• Brazil - 21
• Chile - 19
• Germany - 15
• Colombia - 13

How do tournaments work?

Double-elimination brackets - Even if you lose, you're not out of the tournament, you simply move to a different bracket, known as the losers bracket. If you lose in the losers bracket, only then are you eliminated from the tournament. The longer you stay in the winners bracket, the less opponents you have to face.

EVO has so many entrants that tournaments are split into 32-man brackets (all double-elimination) and one from the winners bracket and one from the losers bracket will advance to the next round of brackets until we get to the top 8 finals on Sunday, 4 from the winners side, 4 from the losers side.

You can find all the 1st round brackets here, see if you can find your favourite fighters.

What should I look out for on-screen

At the end of the day, no matter how complex fighting games seem, it still boils to each player having a health bar at the top of the screen. Once that health bar is depleted, the round is over. But what you may not know is that the other bar, often found at the bottom is almost as important.

Meter bars allow you to do stronger attacks, break out of combos and more! Keep an eye out for how much meter is filled for each player.

I have another question!

Ask it in the comments and either myself or one of the several Giant Bomb fighting game tournament fans will answer for you.

Daigo and friends assess Ultra Street Fighter IV's tier list

If you saw my CEO 2014 blog last month you'll have seen a week 1 attempt at making a tier list by France's Alioune. Now with much more time under their belt, Daigo Umehara, Tokido, Momochi, Bonchan, Itabashi Zangief and Kazunoko have put together what is considered an accurate list according to these great Japanese players.

Daigo: Yes. I began to look around for characters with high firepower and landed on Evil Ryu. At first, I didn't pay much attention to his strength and selected him. However, once I began to use Evil Ryu, I began to ask myself, "What have I been doing this entire time?"

4Gamer: I see. May we all assume that you will be using Evil Ryu for Evo 2014 and in the future?

Daigo: I suppose. At first I wanted to alternate between Evil Ryu and regular Ryu, but the more I played the more I realized that Evil Ryu is in all respects a superior version to Ryu. In the future, the only matchup where Ryu is more enjoyable to play is against Vega (Claw). From now on, I'll probably stick with Evil Ryu.

Check out the entire round table discussion over at 4gamer.

Tekken X Street Fighter still exists?

Apparently Tekken X Street Fighter is still in the works, despite hearing practically nothing about it outside of a few concepts shown years ago.

I think that about does it, this weekend should be a great watch! Thanks for reading, see you at the next fighting game blog, whenever that might be!