EVO 2018 Day 1 Discussion

Hey all. It's EVO time once again and I would like to talk to about this year's tournament. I know this vid is kind of late for a day one discussion, but as long as I put it out is what matters. So to give you some context about me and my relationship with EVO it was back in 2009 when I first started getting into fighting games competitively and the first game I hopped on was Street Fighter IV. I actually think that IV brought a lot of new people into the fighting game community. III seemed to go under the radar for me and others I knew and the hype that IV created got people who didn't know about the FGC, like me, exposed to it.

I started off playing C. Viper and Chun-Li, but I realized I couldn't do charge characters so I ended up maining Viper, Sakura, and Dhalsim instead. I got introduced to the shoryuken forums at this time and learned how to improve my game. I even played with Wolfkrone online for a while and he taught me how to play Viper. I remember seeing that first EVO with Justin Wong against Daigo I think, I could be wrong about who he fought, but he had used Rufus up til this point and then switched to Balrog and I recall people chanting "USA, USA!" and that was the hypest shit I ever experienced and from that point on I decided I wanted to get into the competitive scene. My first tourney was a GameStop Tekken 6 tournament, but no one showed up so I won by default and after that went to some tournaments in my local city. At my first Tekken one, I was doing really well in my friendly matches until the tournament organizer saw I had mapped my double punches and kicks to L1 and R1. In Tekken, mapping two buttons to a shoulder button isn't allowed for some reason so once the tournament started I had to just use the face buttons and up until this point I had always used the triggers so it threw me off and I ended up losing early on.

After that I trained without the L1 and R1 buttons and was pretty beast after that. I made 3rd place at the state tournament and did decent in other games, but never as good as I did in Tekken. I played competitively from 09-2012 and stopped because I was going to school and  people stopped wanting to give me rides to tourneys and sessions. I didn't have a car and still don't and when you want to play competitively you have to do more than just play online. I hope one day I can get back into the scene, but I have to figure out how to get some money and a car first since I still can't find a ride all these years later.

But let's get to EVO. Yesterday i watched just a bit of the madness. Cuddle Core did her thing in two sets against Rhyan who i think was playing Feng and also against a Jack player. Rhyan wasn't all that good in my opinion, but the Jack player she fought later was better. I saw a little bit of Dragon ball FighterZ, not enough to remember anything specific, and I watched some Street Fighter as well. I saw how Punk got sent to losers against an Alex player. This is the man who made 2nd place last year. That goes to show how fierce the competition is this year. You can be the runner-up one year and then lose early on the next. Harada also showed up and is competing. I thought before that devs weren't allowed to play in their games as I recall this being a rule for Mike Z when Skullgirls dropped, but here was Harada who played against Scarlet's Jin. I thought Harada looked like a Feng player and he's damn good, but is he good enough to beat the fans and make it to Top 8? We shall see. That's about all I have to say about the first day. I'll be back tomorrow to talk about day 2. You can check out my video version below: