Dutch WCG report

The Dutch preliminaries to determine the two finalists for the WCG ticket were fought on June 21st at the Free Gaming Festival in Rotterdam. The day would end after the semis, the finals themselves would be played at a later date. Among the contenders were six members from VFDC. They are, in no particular order: Vortigar, NGKrush, Spoon, Fulan, MasterPasje and Krye.

The day itself was accentuated by stifling hot weather and the Dutch detachment of the 501st patrolling the grounds to promote the Force Unleashed game. It made me feel genuine pity for the guy in the Vader costume, but not quite as much as for the guy in the Sonic outfit (who was there for Sonic Unleashed, ironically enough), as he probably left the grounds in a couple of buckets.

The start

Upon our arrival we noticed we would be competing for the finalist spots inside a not all too large tent. As we knew the maximum of thirty-two registrants was reached this caused quite a bit of worry. In the end only sixteen people showed up relieving our worries somewhat. Until we found out half of the tent was dedicated to PGR and they had sixteen people as well. Unsurprisingly, the tournament was run with lots of shouting around that people who weren’t competing were to get out of the tent.

The tournament would be fought in a four pools structure with the final four competing in the semi-finals to see who would pass on to the ultimate final (or final final if you will). Matches were decided in best of three games and games would be fought as a best of five rounds. At this point I would like to thank Spoon for mailing the WCG organisers that their original plan of having single game matches would leave too much room for lucky wins by lesser players over better ones who wouldn’t have time to adapt. This was obviously taken into consideration then.

As the pools were drawn up I quickly noticed I was in the same pool as Fulan and despaired. I had visited his place a week earlier and was summarily trounced by his Eileen. To my utter surprise he told me he would be competing with his Goh, leaving me with a sliver of hope of squeezing past as long as I didn’t make any truly horrible mistakes. The only other VFDC members drafted into the same pool were Spoon and MasterPasje. This left Krye and NGKrush to compete solely against unknown (to us) players.

The Pool Phase

During the warm-up games it became apparent that the skill level of the unknown players wasn’t all that high. As long as I kept my game simple and tight I would be able to take care of them without much difficulty. My first two games (against unknowns) came around and I was proven right. To their credit, none of the ones I faced were actual button-mashers and knew to block or dodge every once in a while, so I couldn’t charge in with reckless abandon. They were however far from ready to face someone who’d spent a couple hundred hours specializing in a single character.

My match against Fulan was a crazy thing to watch probably. Both of us were missing opportunities left and right. The main flow of the game was at a very brisk pace though so this might be understandable as this match also decided who of us two would go on. We kept each other on our toes, landing a couple of nice combo’s. One of which consisted of me eating a back, forward K+G kick from Goh, which bruised my ego some. We each took a game and went into the final best of five rounds playing very cautiously.

Fulan took the first round of the final game. During the second panic gripped my heart the moment Brad’s turnaround kick got caught by Goh’s sabaki kick, causing a back crumple. Luckily Fulan was so surprised by this he failed to dash in and land the low back throw, in fact he failed to follow it up with anything at all. I took this round with implementation of some well placed forward P+K elbows. The third round went to Fulan who employed a good mixup of strikes and delayed throws, giving him matchpoint. The fourth round was the slowest one of all, both of us darting back and forth, chipping a bit of damage here and there. At a certain point I managed to dash in and get an elbow in on a crouched Fulan, staggering him. I followed it up immediately with another elbow and felt myself pressing the K button as well. Jamming the G as quickly as possible didn’t help. Fulan recovered fast enough to block the elbow and duck under the kick and punish me for it with a simple forward P P, ending the match.

Never being one with the ability to hide my feelings I was pretty sour. But it had been a good match, with both of us making our share of mistakes, landing combo’s and throws when we wanted them, fuzzy guards, successful throw escapes, evades, the lot had passed across the screen. While I was going over the match in my head the announcement was made that not just the winner but the second placed of each pool would go through as well. This put me back in the game, but caused me to feel a bit weird about the tournament organisers who pulled this out of their hats all of a sudden. My next match would be against twice DoA4 champion of the Netherlands Krye… Hoo boy…

The Quarter Finals

The quarter finals we were about to play would be best of five game matches and thankfully so because I lost the first two games against Krye before my fight-mind kicked in properly. The third game saw me finally making proper use of my knowledge of Lau’s moves to actually take initiative when he was at -4 after strings and ducking under the high kick of his low-high combo. I took the third match quite comfortably really but Krye wasn’t done yet. The fourth match saw high upping the ante as well, ditching the moves I had proven to handle well he sought new avenues of attack. A successful rebounce combo from Lau and a rising kick crushing Long Ducking K+G among other things saw us in the last forty-five seconds of the game. Once again I tried to use a defensive strategy and slow the game down until I found a good opening. The opening never came and with my back to the wall I found myself doing the exact same thing as in the last seconds of the match against Fulan, forward P K… blocked… K.O.

I was a lot less disappointed with this match even though I played decidedly worse in those first two games. I had already thought I was out before and saw this as an extra shot with nothing to lose I guess.

After my quarterfinal Spoon and NGKrush were still at it to decide who of them would be passing on to the semis. Spoon was using his almost psychic insight on the usage of Aoi’s forward, forward K K against dashing opponents to play a murderous keep away game. NGKrush decided to call him on this tactic and going for the almost exclusive usage of Jeffry’s downforward K and dash-in Splash Mountain throws. With most of the other competitors gathered around the two of them engaged in a dangerous Tekken-esque dance for space and range. In the end a few surprisingly long range Splash Mountains had Spoon getting the short end of the stick.

Fulan had a weird quarterfinal as his opponent had vanished only to show up during the exact minute which the judge had decided would be the last call moment. Their quarterfinal was brief and brutal with Fulan’s Goh landing his throws whenever he felt like it and draining health with the faithful forward P P. It was shortly after this match that the GameKings (a tv game show) crew showed up and one of them wanted to play a match against Krye, who all but executed him on national tv. Of course he went for some extravagant combo’s and flashy tactics to make for better broadcasting.

The Semi-Finals

The semi-finals were to be MasterPasje vs Krye and Fulan vs NGKrush. I’d like to iterate at this point these would be the last games to be played this day and the winners would go to the ultimate final at a later date. The semis were planned to be fought three hours later, leaving us to roam the Free Gaming festival for a bit and grabbing a bite to eat. Well, Spoon and me would need some food, as the semi-finalists’ dinner would be provided by the WCG. We hoped to find some shops open in downtown Rotterdam but sadly found almost all of them closed. After having dinner at the Mac we made our way backstage of the large central podium were the last matches were to be held and discussed our experiences on the day so far.

After a while Spoon and I made our way back around to the front to watch the matches from the spectators side. MasterPasje and Krye were up first, Lion vs Lau. There weren’t a lot of spectators, but Spoon and I tried to make the most of it with shouting support and cheering at good manoeuvres. This caused quite a few of the onlookers to stare back at us in surprise and even got a foto crew using us a centre piece to show the enthusiasm of the crowd. There was also a tv camera who made a wide pan shot at one point, but that probably made for some pretty sad footage with a half empty square and the attendants in a circle around the edges.

One of the GameKings guys was on hand to do the announcement and commentary bit at the tournament. He calls himself Skeet, which always reminds me of skidmarks, but ok, he’s a pretty funny guy, very exuberant type. MasterPasje told me beforehand that he felt out of his league a bit, but then Krye told me he could never get a handle on Lion’s moves and had preferred to fight either of the other two semi-finalists so he had a better idea what was going on. Match one began and both players’ unease seemed gone. MasterPasje was pushing for a short exchange game, using Lion’s sweeps and long range moves while Krye tried to force a standup fight to utilize Lau’s superior mixups and straight damage dealing capacity. It looked like a game of cat and mouse really.

As the rounds followed one another MasterPasje was obviously tensing up causing him to miss some opportunities and losing a couple of rounds. He recovered from this and planted quite a number of excellently timed back, back K launchers in Lau’s face. Krye took the hits and forged on regardless. Even while Krye was ahead you could see that even after winning two games and losing one he still couldn’t get a grip on his opponent. At one point he attempted to utilize up K+G and upforward P to hop over the many lows that were coming his way but couldn’t get them to land properly against his wily opponent. The match was chock full of situational excellence as the players tried to get into their comfort zone and neither being able to, leaving them to react in the spur of the moment to sometimes superlative results. In the end Krye won with a comfortable margin as Masterpasje started to wear down in the later games and ate quite a few throws.

Fulan and NGKrush were up next. The first round was over in a flash with Fulan’s Goh landing a launcher shortly after the start into and well employed rising pressure to secure a win. The second round saw NGK’s Jeffry playing more defensively and making some strange decisions and losing again. The game was paused at the beginning of the third round and it was revealed that the control settings were wrong. Before the match started the controls were set, but the two players also decided to use their customized characters, loading up the memory cards overwrote the previously set command settings, causing NGKrush to stand no chance in the first two rounds. The third round saw a more even matchup but Fulan pulled out a win after all.

The following game wasn’t pretty as NGKrush had trouble getting back into his game, annoyed and pre-occupied. During this game he hit three forward K knee launchers but failed to capitalize on any of them. In the meanwhile Fulan took excellent advantage of the opportunities afforded to him, and even threw in a combo he later confessed to only hitting about 60% of the time in dojo (buffered shoulder off a jab, which only gives 2 points damage more than simply doing P, K).

The fourth game saw Jeffry getting back into the swing of things, forgoing combo’s he’d failed to land during the last game, throws became the order of the day. Fulan, who had practiced intensively on throw escapes beforehand, had to watch his Goh getting mangled by Splash Mountains, which had all been weaved into attack patterns that threw off throw escape timing.

The fifth game Fulan gritted his teeth and prepared his worst as he had to utilize his lead while he still had it. NGKrush still wasn’t playing his best game (I know, he has murdered my Brad on more than one occasion), but drove on all the same, knowing that one or two calculated risks for combo’s or throws from Jeff do enough damage to win a round. It was in the first round of this game that Fulan landed a 90+ damage wall combo and felt confident enough to start hunting. The last rounds of the match saw Fulan taking over the momentum of the game and NGKrush shaking his head at the final K.O. screen.

Closing Thoughts

The grand final between Fulan and Krye to determine who will represent the Netherlands will be held at a later date. I wish the both of them the best of luck, you guys kicked me out of the tournament, so you’d better not let me down at the WCG!

The ridiculous screen on the main stage:
http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs228&d=08265&f=s6300043489.jpg
From left to right:
Skeet (with microphone), guy from organisation, NGKrush, Tournament Judge (great guy, props for putting up with the lot of us), Fulan.

The VFDC crew present:
http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs228&d=08265&f=s6300046452.jpg

From left to right:
Fulan, NGKrush, Spoon, Vortigar, Krye (MasterPasje is behind the camera being the only one smart enough to actualy bring one.)

 

I posted in the wrong thread; Anyways great report!

 

Fulaani man, you know I have your back.

It only seemed like yesterday me and you were just starting this game and now you are shaping up to be playing at WCG.

I'm surprised you are using Goh over Eileen but it seems to be working.

Good luck man.

Hopefully I'll see you there.

 

Nice report vortigar /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/laugh.gif

Congrats to Fulan and Krye... and everyone else who participated!

 

Nice pics.

I knew Fulaani looked like that in real life.

Should have that red seen to though.