VFDC

If yesterday (13 Nov) was Good Knee Day, then today (14 Nov) is Good Elbow Day! Confused? Join the club!

This past Wednesday, VFDC community member Blitzball Champ hosted his 83rd VF Arena, a weekly online gathering that has allowed fans of the game to find opponents more than five long years after Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown hit consoles. Blitzball has hosted VF Arenas on Xbox Live as well as on Playstation Network, VF5FS as well as VF5 vanilla, and even a Virtua Fighter 2 room, truly helping the community at large stay sharp while we all wait for SEGA’s next move. To commemorate these contributions to our community, we asked Blitzball Champ to answer some questions about his history with the game and his accomplishments.

Saturday 16th September 2017 saw the running of the 15th annual OzHadou Nationals (OHN) fighting game tournament in Sydney, Australia. Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown was featured as a "medal game" and drew an impressive turnout by comparative standards. With all of Australia's heavy hitters present and accounted for, a healthy contingent of new challengers, a returning vet and a surprise International guest, OHN15 had all the ingredients for one exciting event!

It's back, baby! The Official VFR twitter channel just announced the 16th Beat Tribe Cup to be held on 31 March 2018 at Toyosu PIT, Tokyo Japan!

This weekend will be a particularly busy one for VF fans! Not only do we have the best of the west facing off in the 2017 OzHadou Nationals in Australia, but we also have, not one, not two, but THREE major Virtua Fighter tournaments in Japan as well!

Fans of Virtua Fighter are encouraged to tune into twitch.tv/gamrah on Saturday 16th September at 3PM AEST (or 1AM EDT for those on the East Coast of America, and Fri 10PM PDT for those on West Coast America) to catch the Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown Tournament at Australia's longest running Fighting Game Major.

Recently streamed on the GODSGARDEN niconico channel, legendary VF players Ohsu Akira (now plays El Blaze) and Homestay Akira took part in some highly entertaining exhibition matches on console versions of VF5FS and VF2! Both players are mic'd up with the more vocal of the two being Ohsu Akira, and even if you can't understand Japanese you can certainly feel, and be entertained by, his struggle against the might of Homestay's Akira!

This year's New York Gathering, NYG 12, the longest-running western Virtua Fighter tournament, is back again this year at the world famous Next Level Arcade!

Today, Microsoft's Larry Hyrb aka Major Nelson announced on Twitter that Virtua Fighter 2 (and 3 other titles) are now backwards compatible on Xbox One. Like Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown before it, VF2 will use the same servers on Xbox One as it does on Xbox 360, so players on either system will be able to play against eachother. Additionally, DVR features such as screenshots, clip recording and streaming will be available when playing VF2 on Xbox One.

Every now and then the topic of the Low Punch makes the rounds, and when it does it seems to polarise the community. This debate recently surfaced again on the VFDC Shoutbox, where criticisms of the 2P varied from the functional (nerf 2P or should players just get better?) to the aesthetic (does punching someone in the shin look ridiculous?) From a simplistic RPS analogy, the Low Punch is the "paper" that beats the Standing Punch "rock" which makes it universally important to the core of Virtua Fighter and has been subject to a number of refinements over the entire series. Let's revisit this age-old philosophical debate and let us know where you stand -- or sit (hah!) -- on low punching!