Gill Hustle
Well-Known Member
So last time I did a post like this, it was back when DOA5 was in a pre release fashion at Summer Jam.
That tourney judging from the amount of participants at the time, looked very promising for the upcoming release of the full game in September.
Well truth be told even though the game had sold well, DOA5 had a bit of a rocky start .
The game was released in the shadow of TTT2, online connectivity was iffy not to mention various bugs, and worst of all DOA5 seemed like its fate in the offline community was going to have the fate as it's predecessors . . . but worse.
Yes even with all the hype built up since announcement, DOA5 was being ignored. But not by those in the fighting game community that already had preconceived notions about the series, but the actual fans themselves.
Of course those in the " old guard " did what they could to keep the game afloat with help from alliances made during the the titles long absence from the fighting game world. Wether through facebook groups, youtube videos, online streams, and just plain showing up to offline gatherings the OG's were not ready to call it quits yet. RESPECT. I for one did what I could participating in ALL OF THE ABOVE and recruiting NEW players into the fold.
The week of DOA5's release there were two major tournaments scheduled for the SAME weekend. One being Seasons Beatings and the other being in my neck of the woods up in Massachusetts called GUTS. It's hard to say if this was a contributing factor to the decline of OFFLINE presence or if the fact that the game was released only 3 days prior but we may never know.
In any case I of course went to GUTS. It was there that I met a few new faces in the New England DOA chapter, Most notably Miss Maia and BBoy Dragon.
BBoy Dragon going by his moniker as you guessed it, was an actual BBoy that considers himself one of Kasumi's number one fans. Miss Maia of course was a competitive Soul Calibur 5 player and Leifang was her character of choice. Other MA natives on hand were Dr. Teeth, Most Infamous, Final Fever, and FDynasty. All players that have taken part in my Ultimate Gaming Spot streams that featured DOA 3.1.
From CT was my buddy H20 Evil, Mr Wah and Nordic Ninja made the way up to the event as well. This was my 3rd run in with Mr. Wah and the first time meeting Nordic so I was glad they could make it out.
Well truth be told the numbers weren't there but we all still used our time together to the fullest getting to know one another during and after the tournament. And speaking of the tournament, I had my ideas on who the favorite was going to be to place first, but Miss Maia surprised me with her level of play by taking 2nd in the tournament to Mr Wah in a grand finals set that we managed to get on stream to a huge crowd of onlookers. I took special note of that
.
After the tourney, I took time to introduce many members of the MA FGC who looked interested in DOA5 to Mr Wah, who in turn took them under his tutelage in the art of Dead Or Alive. Also we did the first "pair play" tag tournament of DOA5 on stream. My partner BBoy and I took second, but we did get a cool Tag Power Blow finish thats archived somewhere in the FSD media section
Moving forward after GUTS, both Bboy Dragon and Miss Maia have been regular visitors UGS honing their DOA skills in offline sessions with other newcomers to DOA Riceman and Mcpeanuts.
Riceman a former Melty Blood/UMVC3 player and Mcpeanuts a talented Mortal Kombat, Skullgirls, and Persona player.
All have been training with each other and continuing to enter all the the DOA5 tournaments in MA and a few have made it as far as CT and NY to play. Between that time I decided to recruit UGS Miss Maia (yep) as the first lady of Team UGS. And little ways down the timeline Takeda, a member of FSD, made his way into my gaming lounge.
. . .
Oh yeah this is supposed to be about NEC right? Let's talk about that.
So this was going to be my second trip out to Big E and Hubbs little party, but this time I had several other DOA players coming with us.
UGS Miss Maia, Takeda, Riceman, Mcpeanuts, Dr. Teeth and myself were on our way from MA. Dr. Teeth took the role of taxi driver again for me and Allan Paris who flew into Boston to meet us. We drove down with my Tekken Squad (UGS members Kid Lucid, Offinbed, and Stillelectric) following in another car. But seeing how this is about DOA I won't get sidetracked about Tekken so lets stay on topic.
Anyhoo, we made it Philly without incident and met a bunch of old friends namely:
Mr. Wah, Rikuto, Crack Mamba, H20 Evil, CyberEvil, Vanity Assasin, Low Sweep, Winback, Shade Swifteye, Mr. Kwiggle, Sonic Fox, Nordic Ninja, Hubbs, and Blackburry. I finally also got to meet online friends Blackula and MMA Boss.
So I had expectations that NEC would have a much better turnout then a lot of the local tournies I participated in. Honestly I thought we'd top out at 30 entrants but we did better with 58 total participants. Although it would have been nice to have more, I'm sure no one was expecting that. With that said lets move on to the actual tourney and reception.
Now that the game had been out for a couple of months, most have had adequate time with the game so now it was time to see who would come on top this tourney.
Even though a few of the MA DOA chapter didn't do as well as they would have hoped know this my brothers and sister " Uncle Gill is proud of you all."
While the various pool winners were getting seeded into top eight, everyone of them took time to reflect on their progress and use their time wisely by getting in a LOT of casuals with other players of varying skill levels and I was no exception.
First up was my online nemesis Rikuto. First Bayman now Jann Lee?! Shakes fist!
Second, an unknown player to me by the name of . . . X-Caliber Blades.
I found out that he was already in Winners Finals and was told to stand by close so he could be found when needed. We played MANY SETS and I could barely touch the kid as I went through every character I had used in tournament previously, I only made a dent with wins by using Mila, Sarah, and Hitomi. Ayane just couldn't get it done.
After that I had sets with a player by the name Sean Y.
Now interesting enough, I had seen Sean on stream at the Empire Arcadia events in New York, so I knew Ayane was his main character. Now in most cases I HATE MIRROR MATCHES, but instead of going for of my alternates Kasumi or Hitomi, I decided what hell LET's DO THIS!
What I realized during our play time was this was my first time in all my days playing DOA that I actually played another OFFLINE Ayane player for various sets. Granted this may not seem like much to some, but this was very educational for me. Due to nature of how DOA must be played competitively I could now learn "how" to play my character better. I could disregard what was considered safe/unsafe and freely explore meta game due to fact my opponent would think he'd have an opening at different points during our matches. I was finally learning how to play this new DOA better instead of relying on my DOA2/3 knowledge to get me by and I was having fun.
You see as far DOA5 goes, I still find the online play a tad frustrating and limit my play to casuals with friends that have strong connections and the CPU in other game modes so that time was very rewarding.
I won't go into the finals too much, as you should be able to watch them soon in the video archives. I will say though that seeing OUR GAME on a BIG SCREEN in a PACKED room of viewers is still something one has to experience firsthand. But I will at least leave you with some nice pics from the event:
That tourney judging from the amount of participants at the time, looked very promising for the upcoming release of the full game in September.
Well truth be told even though the game had sold well, DOA5 had a bit of a rocky start .
The game was released in the shadow of TTT2, online connectivity was iffy not to mention various bugs, and worst of all DOA5 seemed like its fate in the offline community was going to have the fate as it's predecessors . . . but worse.
Yes even with all the hype built up since announcement, DOA5 was being ignored. But not by those in the fighting game community that already had preconceived notions about the series, but the actual fans themselves.
Of course those in the " old guard " did what they could to keep the game afloat with help from alliances made during the the titles long absence from the fighting game world. Wether through facebook groups, youtube videos, online streams, and just plain showing up to offline gatherings the OG's were not ready to call it quits yet. RESPECT. I for one did what I could participating in ALL OF THE ABOVE and recruiting NEW players into the fold.
The week of DOA5's release there were two major tournaments scheduled for the SAME weekend. One being Seasons Beatings and the other being in my neck of the woods up in Massachusetts called GUTS. It's hard to say if this was a contributing factor to the decline of OFFLINE presence or if the fact that the game was released only 3 days prior but we may never know.
In any case I of course went to GUTS. It was there that I met a few new faces in the New England DOA chapter, Most notably Miss Maia and BBoy Dragon.
BBoy Dragon going by his moniker as you guessed it, was an actual BBoy that considers himself one of Kasumi's number one fans. Miss Maia of course was a competitive Soul Calibur 5 player and Leifang was her character of choice. Other MA natives on hand were Dr. Teeth, Most Infamous, Final Fever, and FDynasty. All players that have taken part in my Ultimate Gaming Spot streams that featured DOA 3.1.
From CT was my buddy H20 Evil, Mr Wah and Nordic Ninja made the way up to the event as well. This was my 3rd run in with Mr. Wah and the first time meeting Nordic so I was glad they could make it out.
Well truth be told the numbers weren't there but we all still used our time together to the fullest getting to know one another during and after the tournament. And speaking of the tournament, I had my ideas on who the favorite was going to be to place first, but Miss Maia surprised me with her level of play by taking 2nd in the tournament to Mr Wah in a grand finals set that we managed to get on stream to a huge crowd of onlookers. I took special note of that
. After the tourney, I took time to introduce many members of the MA FGC who looked interested in DOA5 to Mr Wah, who in turn took them under his tutelage in the art of Dead Or Alive. Also we did the first "pair play" tag tournament of DOA5 on stream. My partner BBoy and I took second, but we did get a cool Tag Power Blow finish thats archived somewhere in the FSD media section
Moving forward after GUTS, both Bboy Dragon and Miss Maia have been regular visitors UGS honing their DOA skills in offline sessions with other newcomers to DOA Riceman and Mcpeanuts.
Riceman a former Melty Blood/UMVC3 player and Mcpeanuts a talented Mortal Kombat, Skullgirls, and Persona player.
All have been training with each other and continuing to enter all the the DOA5 tournaments in MA and a few have made it as far as CT and NY to play. Between that time I decided to recruit UGS Miss Maia (yep) as the first lady of Team UGS. And little ways down the timeline Takeda, a member of FSD, made his way into my gaming lounge.
. . .
Oh yeah this is supposed to be about NEC right? Let's talk about that.
So this was going to be my second trip out to Big E and Hubbs little party, but this time I had several other DOA players coming with us.
UGS Miss Maia, Takeda, Riceman, Mcpeanuts, Dr. Teeth and myself were on our way from MA. Dr. Teeth took the role of taxi driver again for me and Allan Paris who flew into Boston to meet us. We drove down with my Tekken Squad (UGS members Kid Lucid, Offinbed, and Stillelectric) following in another car. But seeing how this is about DOA I won't get sidetracked about Tekken so lets stay on topic.
Anyhoo, we made it Philly without incident and met a bunch of old friends namely:
Mr. Wah, Rikuto, Crack Mamba, H20 Evil, CyberEvil, Vanity Assasin, Low Sweep, Winback, Shade Swifteye, Mr. Kwiggle, Sonic Fox, Nordic Ninja, Hubbs, and Blackburry. I finally also got to meet online friends Blackula and MMA Boss.
So I had expectations that NEC would have a much better turnout then a lot of the local tournies I participated in. Honestly I thought we'd top out at 30 entrants but we did better with 58 total participants. Although it would have been nice to have more, I'm sure no one was expecting that. With that said lets move on to the actual tourney and reception.
Now that the game had been out for a couple of months, most have had adequate time with the game so now it was time to see who would come on top this tourney.
Even though a few of the MA DOA chapter didn't do as well as they would have hoped know this my brothers and sister " Uncle Gill is proud of you all."
While the various pool winners were getting seeded into top eight, everyone of them took time to reflect on their progress and use their time wisely by getting in a LOT of casuals with other players of varying skill levels and I was no exception.
First up was my online nemesis Rikuto. First Bayman now Jann Lee?! Shakes fist!
Second, an unknown player to me by the name of . . . X-Caliber Blades.
I found out that he was already in Winners Finals and was told to stand by close so he could be found when needed. We played MANY SETS and I could barely touch the kid as I went through every character I had used in tournament previously, I only made a dent with wins by using Mila, Sarah, and Hitomi. Ayane just couldn't get it done
.After that I had sets with a player by the name Sean Y.
Now interesting enough, I had seen Sean on stream at the Empire Arcadia events in New York, so I knew Ayane was his main character. Now in most cases I HATE MIRROR MATCHES, but instead of going for of my alternates Kasumi or Hitomi, I decided what hell LET's DO THIS!
What I realized during our play time was this was my first time in all my days playing DOA that I actually played another OFFLINE Ayane player for various sets. Granted this may not seem like much to some, but this was very educational for me. Due to nature of how DOA must be played competitively I could now learn "how" to play my character better. I could disregard what was considered safe/unsafe and freely explore meta game due to fact my opponent would think he'd have an opening at different points during our matches. I was finally learning how to play this new DOA better instead of relying on my DOA2/3 knowledge to get me by and I was having fun.
You see as far DOA5 goes, I still find the online play a tad frustrating and limit my play to casuals with friends that have strong connections and the CPU in other game modes so that time was very rewarding.
I won't go into the finals too much, as you should be able to watch them soon in the video archives. I will say though that seeing OUR GAME on a BIG SCREEN in a PACKED room of viewers is still something one has to experience firsthand. But I will at least leave you with some nice pics from the event:
