Evolution 2009 took place at the Rio this year. The hotel rooms were much nicer than the Tropicana, and I hope they plan to do the same (or better) next year. As for most of SoCal, Evo was never about the tournaments, it was always about the food, the drinks, and the hype. I had plenty of the former two, and an overload of the latter. I think my hands went numb from clapping too hard and my throat hoarse from yelling "RAZORCRANE" too often. As Midwest would say: good shit.
Bunch of us watching SF4 regional 5v5s.
Preamble
I had the brilliant idea of leaving at 3AM Friday morning. The logic? For Ken to make it on time for the Blazblue singles tournament. Because it's been ridiculously hot, I had about 30 minutes of naptime (after about 9 hours of class, mind you) before saying fuck it, I'm just gonna stay awake the whole time. Semi-bad idea. We arrived around 7:30 and walked up to the rooms where I had about an hour of sleep before deciding to venture into the main hall. You wouldn't believe the insanity that met my eyes. The two long walls of the conference hall were BOTH reserved for Street Fighter 4 pools. That's 24 pools son, and 5 times as large as the next fighting game turnout. The doujin fighting game community was snuggled against the back wall, headed by an Aksys Blazblue booth and littered with BYOC games such as KoF 11, HnK, GGXXAC, and Brawl. The center of the hall consisted of all the other Capcom games, such as TvC, MvC2, and a few setups for FUC. The amount of people there was quite overwhelming.
Guilty Gear/Blazblue
I sucked hard this year. Countless hours of practice have made me realize only this: I needed even more countless hours of practice. It didn't help that I was shoved into Latiff and ElvenShadow's pool lol. So after beating some random Johnny and then scrubbing out against Woki (an excellent Dizzy player who almost made it out of that pool), I went on to cheer for the rest of the SoCal crew. Hellmonkey had managed to defeat Marn (who he previously lost to at Devastation), while Jo beat the living daylights out of AKA, and ALMOST overcame Marn in the losers finals. As Koogy said, Jo is definitely West Coast's secret weapon. Blazblue had an amazing side tournament turnout of 187 (!) players. That's more people than Guilty Gear, Soul Calibur 4, and Smash Brothers Brawl! There were a few dark horses, namely Wooku, from Vet Coast. Excellent tournament, though HeartNana came out on top after a close finals against Goryus.
GG teams were pretty fail for me as well. I managed to team with TGS and Stormlocke to a dissappointing 0-2 finish. Our first team went against Moroha's, but little did we know that they had Steve Harrison (an SBO qualified Ky) as their anchor. So after two hype kills by Stormlocke, we were reverse OCV'd. Lame. Our second matchup was against 9TNine's team. Stormlocke took out 9TNine, but lost to Sparks, a fellow Robo Ky player. After playing Stormlocke a bunch, I had a decent grip on the Robo Ky matchup, so I took Sparks down without much stress. Next came their anchor, who was none other than fucking Veteru. Seriously, of all people we had to go up against. Veteru is no god at GG, but he definitely has much more experience and skill than I do. We go to three games, all of which were decently close. I simply choked, no excuses here. Having lost to him more times than I won during the Aksys event a few months prior, I was a bit mentally afraid of him. Unfortunately for TGS, Veteru plays against 9TNine's I-no all the time, so he was pretty handily destroyed. And yes, that was my epic Guilty Gear performance for Evo 2k9.
Getting Drunk and Stuff
Before I go ahead and talk about the finals, I must go over the most hype part of this year's Evo: getting_FUCKED_UP! It started with Bryan and David, who bought a bottle of Cap Morgans at 9AM and started drinking. Later on after the singles tournament, we went back up to the room and downed a few shots. While both Hellmonkey and I only had about 4-5 shots, Bryan and David had been drinking the whole god damned time while the rest of us were downstairs playing. Bryan drunk dialed Lily in front of everyone, and we then had the excellent idea of going back down to the hall. On the way there, I kept doing Aikido rolls on the floor and Hellmonkey kept plopping down indian style and holding his arms out to do Toki's Fatal K.O. pose from Fist of the North Star. As we got closer to the hall (where everyone could see us), I started rolling around again and did some stupid MGS stuff and boasting that Stormlocke would have been proud. When we actually arrived, Bryan introduced himself to everyone multiple times, David kept hugging me in a tender way, and Hellmonkey went around to everyone telling them how he air threw Marn like 30 times during winner's finals in his pool. After all these shenanigans, we lost Bryan and I decided to go up to sleep. Later I found out that David picked up Bryan from the public restroom where he had passed out.
The next night, after watching SoCal's terrible performance in the 5v5 regional tournament, I downed about 5 shots of Cap Morgans and a shot of Grey Goose (all within like 15 minutes) and became hyper-buzzed. I played against Spirit Juice (got fucked up by), Blitz (broke even with), Digital Watches (did better than I expected, won more than lost), and Hintalove (same as Watches). I think my reactions are actually better when I'm drunk, cause I 1-frame jumped almost every exploding-chain-ball-thing that Digital Watches threw at me (except for the point blank ones). Some time later, after everyone was asleep already, Bryan and Ben were playing GG for shots and eventually moved on to SF4. Ben was sucking it up and finally told Bryan: "dude, if you throw me one more time, you're going to have to take a shot for it." Well, Bryan ended up throwing him three more times, and they both ended up finishing a bottle of Grey Goose. After they stopped for a while, I'm pretty sure I heard Bryan singing in the shower before I fell asleep at circa 7AM.
The Finals
I woke up at 9AM to the clanking of Hellmonkey's training mode practice. He was trying to master the timing of guard cancelling Faust's full-screen stab thing into a combo when I asked him if he wanted to grab something to eat before his on-stage performance. We ended up at some cafe eating some over-priced eggs and shit before heading to the hall for Third Strike. Guess who won that. I won't even have to say his name. Anyways, GG finals this year were pretty awesome. Latif sent Senkei to losers, Flash sent Hellmonkey to losers (close match, David even double-perfected Flash game 2), ElvenShadow kicked Joe Higashi out, Marn took Wuku out, and then Hellmonkey got paired against ElvenShadow. This was the matchup that I had been loathing, because we have no Fausts in SoCal, David's matchup knowledge was severely limited. While ElvenShadow plays every weekend in Japan against the world's top players, we have Hellmonkey here who plays GG maybe once a month. The matches came down to the wire, but David's ghetto corner lockdown with j.HS kept Mike from freely zoning. Mike is renowned for his use of j.D and double jump crossups, but David blocked the majority of them, so props to his defense. Some truly opportunistic playing followed by several errors on Mike's part led David to victory. Let me say, there might have been a few RAZORCRANES and AMERICAN DUSTS in there! The rest of finals were a bit depressing, as Marn defeated David again in a few close matches and Latif took Flash out. However, in the grand finals, Marn decided to butt heads in an Eddie mirror versus Latif. Talk about awesome. Latif's true powers were revealed, as he continually outplayed Marn on every level. As JP Ken said, Marn's Eddie is just a basic Eddie, while Latif is on a whole different level offensively. No one, not even the Japanese, can continually pull the Shadow Gallery loop as consistently as Latif can, and I am extremely proud of the fact that we're shipping him to Japan for a chance to compete against the best at SBO. I still don't think he's reached the level of godlike because his abuse of the greatest technicalities of the game (especially matchup and instant blocking related issues) aren't present, but his execution and offense are literally out of this world. I am extremely proud of both Hellmonkey and Latif and congratulate them on their finishes.
Latif vs Marn, Eddie vs Eddie in GGXXAC Grand Finals
We then stayed to watch Sanford beat J Wong in MvC2 and waited for the Blazblue 3v3 finals - HeartNana/Jan/Fubarduck vs Veteru/Pulsr/Wooku, but unfortunately that match was pushed back way too far and we had to leave. After dropping Ken off, we hit up BCD and called it a night. I also didn't go to class this morning cause my head felt as heavy as a boulder. GET HYPE.
Pictures in the next blog, I'm too lazy to upload them today. I had a lot of fun at Evo, but it's time to come back to reality (and school. fuck). Lots of stuff coming up. Anticipating the arrival of my Griffith GK soon, so get ready for that.
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