Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Episode 6: A Certain Two and a Half Year Reboot

     Ok now I know what you're thinking. What made you decide to come back to your neglected blog? Well, to be honest I sort just remembered I had a blog. I'm still playing fighting games, but I've sort of picked up a new game in place of Melty Blood, which I'll go into greater detail later on this post. I will however give you a quick rundown of what's been going on with me and fighting games between EVO 2010 and now.


     Well EVO 2010 came and went. I ended up getting 5th place losing to Lord Knight and H-F Blade in the losers bracket. At the time I was sort of torn about my placement because in the back of my mind I sort of felt as if I didn't deserve it. Mainly because my bracket was considered the "kiddy pool" due to not having any strong MB players. Personally the only players I felt who had any chance of sending me to losers was Numakie with his abare / random style of play and Nas due to lack of match-up EXP against F-Ryougi. Even when I played those two I pretty much won my matches pretty convincingly. I felt that the "real EVO experience" was going to be the following day when I had to play Lord Knight on stage. Maybe it was because of my inexperience on a "big stage" but I felt really cold and nervous which is pretty out of character for me. I was told that I have strong tournament nerves and even I will say that I hardly ever get star struck or nervous when I'm actually playing someone in a set. When I played my final match of the tournament against H-F Blade I calmed down a bit, but was still playing scared and as such missed huge punishment opportunities which ultimately costed me the set. Overall however I felt as if I played really well against the people I played throughout the weekend. Fast Forward to December 2010 and NEC XI is on the horizon. Now at this point I was sort of slowing down on MB mainly due to major competition in North Carolina (where I was living at the time due to military) more or less collectively dropped the game so I had no real competition and as such I really sort of went into NEC with a "whatever" attitude. At this point my play style has changed a bit being more conservative on meter usage and used more of F-Ciel's frametraps over trying to break the opponents guard. At this tournament I ended up finishing 4th losing to Tonberry, who used C-Kohaku at the time and Lord Knight. This tournament was weird in the sense that I where I usually do really good the day before singles I possibly had the worst showing during the team tournament. I lost just about every game with Pfhor, who was my 2v2 partner, carrying me throughout the entire team tournament. I felt really off losing to people I know I could possibly beat on any given day, but in a FT1 just about anything can happen so I don't find it too odd now. Now I don't know what happen, but during singles however I just got into gear and played MUCH better. I felt that I was on point with most of my play minus a few setbacks during a couple of my matches. I more or less got lamed out by Tonberry in my winners match and Lord Knight (notice a trend? D:) just STEAM ROLLED me in losers. I remember one point in particular where I went to bait a DP and clearly I wasn't high enough because I ended getting pulled INTO the DP and got hit. It was at that point I just laughed and just not gave a fuck for the rest of the set. Anyways that's my wrap up for 2010 and I'll briefly go over my 2011 year as that year was probably my least eventful year as far as FGs goes.


     As I said earlier, 2011 was probably my least eventful year and here's why. For one reason or another I could not attend any of the majors I aimed to attend to: Final Round XIV, CEO 2011 and NEC XII all of which I had to miss due to circumstances outside of my control. Aside from that the only real eventful thing I did this year was pick up Arcana Heart 3 for the PS3 and that didn't last too long. The main problem with the game was that Microsoft didn't bother to put it on it's marketplace so no US360 players had no means of playing the game unless they decided to import the game AND system. Now let's be realistic...no one expects people to do that for a game only 3-4 people in their states will play. The game did have a good following at EVO that year, but aside from that the game wasn't really getting numbers to warrant making it a main game for me. I really didn't play much FGs competitively this year and just played MB "casually" until they announced Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code for the PC. At first everyone was pretty hype for not only for a new MB, but also on a platform that was accessible by most people complaining on the forums...a PC. Now this also posed another problem; the only you was able to obtain a legal copy of the game was buying a LE BRDVD copy of an anime called Carnival Phantasm. The 3rd season of the anime, which also had the copy of MBAACC wasn't available until New Years so this gave us, the MB community, a lot of time to figure out exactly what we was going to do to make out game hype again at majors so myself, Silent Shinobi, Komidol, Kamina, Zar and a few others decided to hype up the first big major where MBAACC was going to be an official game...Final Round XV. We pulled out all of the stops for this: hype promos, interviews with Shin Blanka (the main TO for Final Round), promoting our events to the JPMB community (even getting ECOLE to take notice!) and garnishing an international presence from players such as Canada, South America and Japan. Garu and Chelsea were the two JP players that was confirmed for the event. All this happened happened before the game even came out and a month before the event.

 
     2012 is here and I'm already starting off in a much better situation than 2011. I was able to make it to Frosty Faustings this past January to run the MBAACC side tournament alongside play an early build of Skullgirls. Now I will say that at this time I had no motivation to play Skullgirls seriously. I really was never too keen on the VS games and it didn't help that I didn't like much of the characters designs so I played the game without any thought put into what I was doing. Melty Blood ended up being pretty small with only 12 players from Chicago and Wisconsin. I ended up taking 1st place. It wasn't until a couple of weeks before Winter Brawl that I decided to drive out to Philly with DaFunkDoc. This event ended up pretty fun despite not having a hotel room to crash in for the weekend....we ended up staying in some random MK players room on Friday and I ended staying at one of the locals place for Saturday. Now at this point my playstyle has completely changed and most people was able to notice and I was able to notice that everyone was leveled up exponentially since I last played them back in the MBAA PS2 days. I ended up placing 5th losing to Tonberry, who's playing C-Maids, and Lord Knight in losers. I felt a bit contempt that I was able to still hang with the majority of the competition, but I still wasn't too happy of still losing to Kohaku...but then again who is at this point!?


     Now we're here at what's the 2nd biggest MB event since EVO 2010, Final Round XV. We ended up pulling a total of 73 players which was more than what I was expecting considering people was talking about not showing up and such. I was really happy to see people I haven't seen in almost two years such as Silent Shinobi, Bellreisa, H-F Blade,  Pfhor, Jaxx, Kid Viper, Kensou, Divine Arc and Voomer who I haven't seen since NEC IX. It was also a blast meeting up with Garu and Chelsea again which I will admit was awesome despite being a scrub in the JP language. Overall the event was pretty awesome with me playing the "Game of Death", watching Kusoru body America in UMVC3 and "Kusoru Gear" as Chelsea puts it :D . I didn't end up making top 8 this major, which is the first time I've never done so since playing MB on a competitive level. I wasn't too upset about it because the level of competition was really stacked this year and it was really cool to hear people tell me how much I've improved despite not feeling so myself. This major was more godlike just hanging out with the community watching random YT videos, getting drunk and playing Melty Blood...which is what the MB community is all about at the end of the day.

     Now throughout this blog you're probably wondering what's up with this Skullgirls picture, I thought Brandino had no intentions on playing this game!? Well that was true until the day before the game came out and I decided to do my research on it. I found the game to be a bit interesting at that point and figured I had the funds on my PS3 already I thought "what the hell. why not give it a shot?" Well I didn't expect to like it as much as I did and it also helped that I found a character I REALLY liked and her name is Filia. She's a pure rushdown character with amazing mixup opportunity and DEADLY mixups in the corner. Her major problem however is that she's also very unsafe without an assist backing her up. She can't safely chain her normals or cancel her normals into specials without getting punished and her air to air game is very weak unless you push J.HP which is undeniably her best air normal for her air approach. I liked the game so much I decided to go to Power Up 2012 in Cincinnati, Ohio solely for the game. I ended up solo Filia since I didn't really have enough time to learn another character and I didn't know what I know about Filia at the time. Well, needless to say I ended up making top 8 losing to OMGItzAndre and JetM who ended up taking the tournament. Needless to say I didn't play in the MB side tournament due to wanting to focus on Skullgirls, but I did play casuals with the players after the event was over. Overall, Power Up was a great event with lots a space and the tournament was ran great in my experience so I'll gladly go back next year


     Well that's a quick rundown of the past 2 1/2 years for me. Right now I'm not really playing MB as much anymore and I'm currently on that skullgirls crack with an Filia / Parasoul team. I'll go over in greater detail as to why I'm not really focusing on MB in my next post. I just wanted to give people a rundown on what's been going with me in the past 2 1/2 years. I've also left the military and I'm a full-time college student now living my hometown of Toledo, Ohio. Till next time!

2 comments:

  1. Good stuff Brandino. It's interesting to read about where you have come as a player and how you've adjusted as grown.

    Keep fighting on and take them tournaments yo!

    ReplyDelete