Well that was a pretty crazy 12 months.

BREAKING! Thursday Night Pre-show!

At 8pm (CST), the fun begins as staff and special guests are invited to witness the UFGT9 Pre-Game Show. What mysterious type of show will this be? You’ll have to tune into the LevelUp live stream to find out, but I assure you its going to be totally boss. If you want to participate in the Pre-Game show, you can sign up at the Check In area.

Confirmed for the Thursday pre-show is:

• The unveiling of Divekick's Final Boss
• A Divekick money match including Dave Lang!

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Links

ufgt.us

http://www.twitch.tv/leveluplive

http://www.twitch.tv/vgbootcamp

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When I did my Ultimate Fighting Game Tournament 8 preview in May 2012, barely anyone had heard of Divekick, it was merely a prototype of a fun fighting game community parody that was a joke to most, fun to the few who had played it and undoubtedly crazy to all who had laid eyes on it.

Now it's an indie darling, the toast of PAX East, a very real upcoming PS3, Vita and PC release and the one fighting game most likely to break the wall down for gamers who have neither the time or interest to learn complex combos in current games.

This specific pre-release build of Divekick that will played in the UFGT9 tournament this weekend will feature 11 characters, one of which is Stream, who's existence was revealed Monday night (May 20th) on the http://www.twitch.tv/irongalaxy channel.

Stream will join Dive, Dr. Shoals, Jefailey, Kick, Kung Pao, MarkMan, Mr. N, Redacted, The Baz and Uncle Sensei.

Of course, this being UFGT, a Road to EVO season event (sponsored by Mad Catz and Atlus), that means that all your favourite games and players will be there too, all competing for 1st place, EVO seeding points and glass trophies (not to mention the return of the always fun to watch Mystery Game Touranment). This includes the latest and last addition to the EVO line-up this year, Injustice: Gods Among Us. Off the back of a strong start to its tournament scene life, Injustice has been added as the 9th game by the EVO organisers. This is great for the growing Injustice players, not so great for the 2nd place game from the EVO 8th game breast cancer donation drive, Skullgirls.

Skullgirls itself has been in the media recently for its indiegogo campaign to raise funds for DLC characters, making itself $828,000 with an initial $150,000 goal. Following criticism for its perceived steep goal, Skullgirls was covered by Giant Bomb's own @patrickklepek who interviewed Seth Killian and Dave Lang, asking just how much does DLC cost to make?

So it's clear that Skullgirls has an extremely supportive community unto itself, it's just that these people are apparently not tournaments goers. Skullgirls never really got going and has never had the support in tournaments like Injustice has (or the backing of Ed Boon's NetherRealm Studios and its parent company Warner Bros. either).

NOTE: The current plan regarding Grand Finals at EVO 2013 is to have 2 GFs on the Friday night, 2 on the Saturday night and 5 GFs running all day Sunday, any changes and indeed which games will be on which nights will be featured on future blogs when more information becomes available.

Check out these community panels that will be at UFGT9 (off-stream) and uploaded to YouTube in the coming weeks:

Other awesome links, videos and comments fun times

Why the fighting game community hates the word eSports - by Andrew Groen for Penny Arcade

In 2005 MLG and EVO put on a joint event in Las Vegas that could have been a great way to begin the merging process. Unfortunately, EVO was allocated only a small corner of the event space despite their attendees reportedly outnumbering MLG attendees 4:1. EVO's fans were so irate that they walked over to the Halo matches and booed the players.

Leagues like MLG and the World Cyber Games developed a bad reputation for never listening to the hardcore fans. When MLG finally decided to feature fighting games again after the 2005 debacle they chose Tekken 6, a game Cannon says was already on “its last legs competitively.” The WCG pulled something similar in 2005 when they chose Dead or Alive Ultimate as their only fighting game, a game with virtually zero community interest.

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“We evolved differently, and then we sort of clashed together with Street Fighter IV, and it was just culture shock on both sides.”

Love this article, neutral, well researched and features Tom Cannon, Mike Ross and Rod "Slasher" Breslau. The 1st of 2 quality articles by Andrew Groen.

Why gamers in Asia are the world's best eSport athletes - by Andrew Groen for PC World

"Ultimately, [Capcom’s USA branch] is subservient to Capcom Japan, and they don’t really understand,” said Gutierrez. “There’s a difference in culture. The major difference in the way that it’s evolved [in America as opposed to Japan] is that in Japan they can’t really play for money."

This one is a more general competitive gaming article, but still features a lot of fighting game tournament history and features Gootecks.

Chris G and the PS3

Thanks for reading, in June I'll have a blog for CEO 2013 and in July for EVO 2013. Make sure to check out the archives of this past weekend's East Coast Throwdown which had one of the best First to 15 matches I've seen between New York's TS Fooblat (Hulk, Haggar, Wesker) vs. Santiago, Chile's KaneBlueriver (Hulk, Haggar, Sentinel).

UFGT9 should be cool. I was at NCR and the PS3's were very laggy. My SFxT match had horrendous lag. Not defending Chris G or making excuses but laggy is laggy.

They should run more stuff on 360, other than money I don't see why they would run tournaments on hardware that gives a less than optimal experience.

@nefarious_al: Agreed, hope this doesn't pop up again when SF5 etc. release on PS4/Xbox.

Breaking News! The Team AGE panel has been cancelled by Team AGE.

Luckily a replacement has been quickly found:

testers among should be cool. too bad Arturo isn't on the panel though. thanks for posting all this @FLStyle !

Has anything been confirmed for the mystery event yet? I'm thinking it's probably some sort of regional/international team tournament for AE. I hope it's an alpha build of Skullgirls with a dlc character or two but that's rather far-fetched a dream for the moment.

edit: Great thread by the way.

@chrispti: Arturo may be going now, since he got that bonus pot money for winning SFxTK at ECT5. So who knows, he may appear in the panel as well.

@flstyle: Thank you for the Fooblat vs. KBR match. I can't believe you could cover a FT15 in 40 minutes, but those guys did it. I suppose you have to expect crazy things when Haggar and Hulk are the main characters on two UMVC3 teams.

I really enjoyed watching the East Coast Throwdown finals for Injustice. The matches were high level and very close. It was cool to see characters like Doomsday and Black Adam get some solid representation. The game is definitely worth showing off at EVO.

As for Skullgirls. I enjoyed it a lot when it was released. I even went to the weekly 8 on the Break tournament to play it. At some point though, the number of participants in the weekly tournament dwindled and fewer people showed up online. I sort of gave up on the game at that point. However, I did put money into the Indiegogo campaign and I am excited to see what happens to the game. That being said, the current form of the game is not nearly as exciting to play or watch as some of the other EVO games. I am completely fine with the Skullgirls at least getting the Grand Finals up on the big stage and, perhaps, showing off some of the future characters.

Wait, what's Barabariball? I went and checked it out so I guess I know the answer to the question now, but I wasn't expecting that at all. It'll be interesting to see it in action. In any case it's looking great, even the times are looking okay for me which seems rare for US streams. The auction thing sounds awesome as well (if this is what it is), is it just a UFGT thing?

Thanks for the other links too! Articles were a good read.

I'm actually going to this. It's my first tournament ever, too! Entering Skullgirls, Persona 4 Arena, Divekick, Mystery Game, BariBariBall, and the Mystery Game Tournament.

I don't expect to win anything, but it'll be fun to finally play these games LOCALLY once instead of online. Maybe I'll even find some people to play Virtua Fighter and Anarchy Reigns against offline. Should be really fun. And there's tons of non-fighting game events to spend time on if I don't get far in the tournaments. I'm a sucker for raffles.

@flstyle: Awesome work duder! I'm happy to see someone put so much effort into shedding some light on the FGC on GB. I know this is not your first post about this, so keep it up! This is the first season I got into watching most of the Major Tournaments leading up to EVO and weeklys. ECT was hype this past weekend, i'm stoked Art took SF x Tekken. It's crazy though, seems like a major every other weekend, I hope I have time to catch some of UFGT9. Also, I recommend checking out saltybet.com .Brings a whole new fun side to watching!

@perfidioussinn: You play Skullgirls? If you're on PS3 hit me up, MikeFightNight. I got back into it recently and have been looking for people to play on GB. Made a forum over here.

@chrispti: @jaycee13: @jewunit: @chibithor: Thanks!

@mikefightnight: Many thanks, it was actually djWHEAT who indirectly got me doing these with his "USE IT! USE IT!" rant last year.

Unfortunately I play it on 360. And I do mean "unfortunately" due to the whole patch situation...I'm so rusty because I haven't played regularly since the PS3 patch came out in November.

@perfidioussinn: Keits loves putting together these tournaments. They are all about making sure people have fun. Good luck and let us (or at least me) know how BaribariBall is.

Fucking amazing job with the thread. You made me go from Hype to Hyper.

@starvinggamer: It's going to be the best yet, can't wait!

@perfidioussinn: Good luck!

Just to recap last night's Divekick stream, the new character is Stream, the new stage is Kung Pao's dimension of Downworld and on Thursday's UFGT9 pre-show Divekick's final boss will be unveiled.

A small update on the main Injustice tournament rules for UFGT9, Lobo is in, Batgirl is not.

http://ufgtus.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/injustice-rule-updates/

No Virtua Fighter. The fuck.

This thread is great! Keep up the good work FL.

@rmanthorp: Will do, thanks for checking it out.

@trancequina: VF gets very little support, unfortunately. For some VF action I suggest looking up the archive of the Sega Cup that happened last month if you haven't already.

Updated the OP with the new Divekick character, the news of the Final Boss of Divekick who'll be unveiled on Thursday night and the change of one of the panels.

@flstyle: For everyone curious as to why the AGE panel got cancelled here's the GAF post made by Keits explaining the situation. Here's the excerpt from the first paragraph:

"I'll type the whole story here. I need to get it out. If needed I can and will supply photos of the text messages he sent, but I will be quoting them directly. Keep in mind this whole time that not two months ago I would have called Fanatiq a friend. We'd had many conversations outside the FGC and got along amazingly well. I've defending him when people were calling him a scumbag behind his back, and I now regret doing so, as I was wrong."

Also I'll be spectating on Friday! Hope to see some DUDERS over there as well!

Sooner or later AGE will have had enough with Fanatiq and just get rid of him. It's just one controversy after another and considering that they've already got Chris G, they don't need Fanatiq. I'm getting tired of seeing what shit he's pulled week after week.

And the worst part is that he consistently plays the victim despite all his lies and insults, the man is delusional.

is smash still gonna be in EVO? pretty much the only fighting game i got good at/enjoy watching/understand

Just another day in the life of fanatiq

@posh: Yeah it'll be there, I'll be putting the EVO schedule into the EVO Preview in early July so you'll have some idea of when to check the live-stream out.

@flstyle: @posh: Didn't Smash win the Donation Drive for the 8th spot?

@casper_: YEEEEEEP...

Fanatiq kinda does have some pull though considering that despite being "infamous" most of the time, he did advertise their brand A LOT so I really hate to be in AGE/PDP's shoes since they really can't just cut him out because in a way Fanatiq is a big reason why they're presence is known in the FGC. Bad publicity is still publicity and while AGE isn't encouraging that kind of behavior out of their players, there should be some reprimands in place. I think Fanatiq will try to pull some shit out from his side of the story by painting himself to be the guy who was asking for a "rational" request and then would continue to "rationalize" his and possibly Knives' situation by saying stuff like "Oh but they let us do this in other tournaments" or "Keits has always known to be very draconian and inflexible", or "he doesn't care if people have jobs", etc.

Yeah, Smash 1st, Skullgirls 2nd, SSFIITurbo 3rd

He has zero pull as far as I'm concerned, the only instance of advertising AGE I've seen got AGE branding banned by Spooky for the entire weekend of Final Round 16 and Chris G's victories will have gotten AGE/PDP more exposure than Fanatiq ever has. I'm willing to bet that it'll only take one instance of him taking one of these controversies too far where it would hurt AGE to be associated with him to the point that they'd have to end the sponsorship.

I donno, the more i see this, the more I personally worry that Onehandedterror is letting Fanatiq run the show. It always seems like this:

1) Fanatiq acts out of turn

2) Word gets to Sebastian

3) Sebastian(supposedly) reprimands Fanatiq for his behavior

4) Fanatiq half-heartedly apologizes

ad infinitum

Now either Seb doesn't care because Fanatiq is getting him publicity, regardless of if its bad press or not(after all Promo Code: AGEFANATIQ is probably one of the most prominent fgc memes right now). So Seb is just letting Loren run roughshod all over his business and do whatever he wants. OR Seb is a terrible team manager, doesn't want to 'hurt fanatiq's feelings' and isnt reprimanding him hard enough. If i was Seb i would bench his ass, not let him attend events under the team name. Make him pay his own way if he wants to go places. But like i said, who knows if seb is even serious about punishing Fanatiq, sounds like he's just letting him slide every time.

Forget all this Fanatiq bullshit, Divekick Final Boss reveal tonight! I'm hoping it's Uncle Sensei's evil brother, but would also accept a Master Foot as well.

Oh shit! EVO is tomorrow!? Well looks like my entire weekend is planned. Fuck yea!

Well said! Let's get it started!

Negative sir, UFGT is this weekend, it's an official Road to EVO season event, EVO itself is mid July.

@flstyle: Damn, but it is still streamed right?

@tycobb:

http://www.twitch.tv/leveluplive

http://www.twitch.tv/vgbootcamp

UFGT Pre-Show going on right now.

Seth "S-KILL" Killian is the final boss!

http://www.twitch.tv/leveluplive

New Divekick character! I love it.

Hmmm, the intro quotes of S-Kill sound an awful lot like Jeff.

I think Dave Lang is about to lose $100 in the current money match.

Just tuned in for some Divekick! I had faith in Dave Lang but it seems like it was misplaced.

Dave Lang just got fucking ROCKED. Also, S-Kill is fucking hilarious.

I love UFGT9 already! Dave got bodied hard.

god damn that divekick stream was hilarious. gonna have a tough time explaining all the marvel jokes to friends but the jokes in there are really funny

If the spam-trolls are that bad on Day 0 then the mods have got their work cut out for them over the weekend. Subscriber-only chats is the way to go!

Looking forward to some good matches over the next 3 days!

Bahahahaha too amazing beyond my wildest dreams.

"What an answer!"

Bahahahahahahahahahaha

I love the fact that they got Yipes' "WHAT AN ANSWER" in the game everytime he pulls off a parry to teleport. Hahahaha!

UFGT9: Day 1 - 16-man MVC2 tournament up first

Live!

@gaspower: Actually Seth says "What an answer!" ~20x per match when he commentates. I lost it when he said it in-game during the stream. So on the nose.

OH YEAH! Hahaha! I keep forgetting that he does say that a lot when he commentates. Yipes has just been saying that a lot lately so the association I have retained in my mind just goes to him

EDIT: I'll be at the venue in 15 minutes! Dunno who else is going though but if any other duders are going to be there I'll be in a Lincoln FORCE shirt. :D

Aww I missed the Divekick final boss reveal. Kinda getting burned out on watching tournaments as it feels like there's another one every other week of late, but UFGT is definitely a cut above most majors. Keits knows how to organise a fun tournament. So I'm in there to enjoy some s-tier Seth Killian commentary, bet some Bipson bucks and cheer on Mike Ross to fourth place.