My Opinion on Norcal Regionals 2015

Norcal Regionals 2015 was a pretty disappointing tournament for me this year. There were tournaments that went a little bit too fast, grand finals that were anticlimactic, and then there was a mistake that caused a top 16 to be played all over again.

I watched the Ultra Street Fighter IV and Smash 4 tournaments this weekend.  Both tournaments provided some entertainment, but I ultimately came out underwhelmed. The Ultra Street Fighter IV tournament had a pretty diverse set of characters in it, but I felt a bit of fatigue with the game initially probably because I've been watching SFIV since 2009, but eventually I was starting to feel the excitement in some of the matches. The first one that pumped me was the Ibuki match vs Bison. There were some other matches that held my interest in a bit, but my interest completely dwindled when the dumbest thing to happen at a major in a while occurred. When Snake Eyez started his match against Ricky Ortiz the game had suddenly came to a halt. A couple of minutes later one of the commentators announced that the players have been playing on an older version of the game. The tournament organizer then made the decision to have the players replay the top sixteen matches.

I have to say that I could not see how this wasn't noticed initially. The tournament organizer is supposed to check if the game has had the latest patch and it seemed even more dumb to make that decision when the players didn't even notice it. I thought it would've been better to just let the players continue as normal and learn from that mistake as the tournament was running behind schedule anyhow, but the players agreed to it and the tournament continued. I watched the first replay and then decided to go to sleep. When I woke I caught the grand finals between Gamerbee and Daigo and I didn't miss much. The set was only best two out of three and Daigo took it pretty quickly with no comebacks from Gamerbee's Adon. It was not a satisfying end to the tournament.

The Smash Bros tournament was gracious enough to not be deterred by any technical issues.  Only the top eight was streamed on Sunday and the bracket was a bit disappointing. There was not much character variation, but it was really cool to see the two Diddy mains break out alternates in the grand finals; Meta Knight and Captain Falcon. I believe they did such because they knew spectators did not want to see Diddy mirrors. That was about as exciting as it got however. The match ended quickly with a three out of five outset without any climax. Norcal Regionals 2015 was disappointing for me.