The best fighting game players in Victoria descended on Battle Arena Melbourne last weekend, along with a few overseas fighter celebrities, to decide who was the best in their chosen game on the day.
I had no idea Super Smash Bros was this huge.
People had told me it was gaining popularity in the competitive scene, but the two most popular competitions at BAM were Super Smash Bros Melee with 250 entrants, and Smash 4 WiiU with 128. By comparison, Street Fighter 4 and the recently released Mortal Kombat X, by all accounts a great game, had close to 70. That blows my mind.
BAM had a number of international competitors in the Smash series, such as Mango, Leffen, Lucky, Wife, Hugs, S2J, ChillinDude, and Alex19one. Mango took out the Melee competition.
Taking out the latest version of Smash on WiiU was Venus “Villyness” Liao (pictured top), 16 years of age. She took home $1,300 and other prizes. A minor with a not-so-minor victory.
Fighting game jack-of-all-trades Perfect Legend (above) was visiting from the US to win the MKX and Dead or Alive 5 competitions, though Sam “Baxter” Baxter did well enough in the tournament to be sent over to Thailand to compete in the MKX Asia Championships. Baxter took one round from Perfect Legend, and pulled off a few really nice air kick combos:
If you have enviable amounts of time, you can check out the entire stream on Melbourne Melee, or on New Game Plus. Daniel “Berserk” Chlebowczyk, President of CouchWarriors, has provided a few helpful timecodes for the latter version:
9 min: Perfect Legend (USA) vs Ebabil (VIC) Dead Or Alive 5 Last Round final
3hrs 22: Middle of Smash 4 finals with Atyeo (ACT) and Villyness (VIC)
5hrs 25: Perfect Legend (USA) vs X5_Baxter (QLD) Mortal Kombat X final
7hrs 55: Somniac (VIC) eliminates Perfect Legend (USA) from Ultra SF4
There was some decent cosplay at the event as well, which you can catch here.
Well done to the winners!
Photos: CouchWarriors / Duong Thieu Nguyen
Comments
14 responses to “Watch The Best Fighting Game Matches From Battle Arena Melbourne”
Why did nobody tell me? I could have signed up for that.
The same thing I was wondering. This event didn’t had a major broadcast to know it was happening ! Probably I’ll keep an eye for the next year,
The Melee finals had about 8000 people watching on twitch.tv but generally I agree, the smash scene has a bit of difficulty getting word out to people who aren’t already involved in it.
If anything this big ever comes to Sydney, I’m totally signing up.
Sydney were the original tourney hosts with Ozhadou. OHN13 is on this year there still I think, but BAM is bigger:
http://www.ozhadou.net/
The Melbourne scene for Smash is somewhat bigger and better than Sydney’s, hence the biggest tournament being held down there. Sydney is not without its share of tournaments though. In the lead-up to BAM7, there were tournaments every 1 or 2 weeks. I feel like the tournament organisers have difficulty getting word out about them to people who aren’t already involved in the scene. Fresh faces are definitely very welcome though!
Generally the two main tournament series that happens in Sydney are “Smash City” and “Smashing Good Time”. The organisers make sure that these never clash with each other, and usually alternates between Saturday and Sunday to accommodate for people who have work/church/other commitments.
The main place for information is the smash boards thread for Sydney: http://smashboards.com/threads/nsw-bam-training-weekend-16-17th-may-uts-underground.366938/
The first post will be updated whenever a tournament is up-coming (though it hasn’t been updated since before BAM7).
I did see those but they are tournaments that play with customs enabled. I don’t have anything against customs themselves but when you can’t practice online with customs on, it makes preparation for those kind of events pretty difficult.
There is a large disparity between rulesets used in Sydney compared to Melbourne apparently. Melbourne uses 2 stocks no customs, but Sydney uses 3 stocks with customs. Even at the Sydney tournaments though, most people don’t use customs and it’s just a few players who use one or two customs. Imo it doesn’t make that big an impact on the game, but I support customs in that they give some weaker characters better tools. Also, practising on For Glory isn’t the best thing for tournament prep since many different stages besides Final Destination is used (in fact FD is very rarely played at all in tournaments from my experience – Battlefield and Smashville are superior neutral stages).
I do realise that, but my problem is I have nobody else to practice with locally (and even the CBD is a long way for me to travel) so online FG is about my only option in that regard.
Looks like Sydney’s big thing has been organised: https://www.facebook.com/events/551105998360705/
July 10-12th at Ashfield Civic Centre
Hmmm…very tempting. Will my wife allow it is the question 😛 Looks like it’s again allowing customs though.
I’ll see once registrations open.
Smashboards link: http://smashboards.com/threads/town-sydney-an-australian-major-smash-tournament-july-10-12th.404180/
1. If I had known about this
and
2. if I known some of the biggest smash names were going to be there:
I would have made an effort to go check it out.
Baxter took one round from Perfect Legend, but but pulled off a few really nice air kick combos
This is either a typo or Junglist has broken out the woefully underused ass pull terminology
This post will be the death of me 😛