It’s hot across Australia as we get well stuck into summer, with major heat wave breaking records across the country. A perfect time, in other words, to blast the air-con and remember cooler times with the the Frosty Faustings event taking place this weekend, which is bursting at the seams with random fighting game tournaments.
Frosty Faustings is a sprawling fighting game event based in Elmhurst, Illinois. Now in its eleventh year, it features prize pools across dozens of tournaments.
Top billing goes to Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2, an excellent anime fighter that rarely gets its due at larger events dominated by the likes of Street Fighter and Tekken. BlazeBlue Cross Tag Battle and BlazBlue: Central Fiction will also be on display at Faustings, as well as more obscure games such as Under Night In-Birth EXE: Late[ST]. Yes, that’s the name of a game and not my cat walking across my keyboard.
A special shoutout needs to go to the event’s Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars tournament. Among the 30 other competitions going on this weekend, the Faustings organisers managed to fit in one of the most oddball but underrated fighting games of the 2000s, pitting Capcom icons against the more obscure characters starring in classic Tatsunoko anime series such as Casshan, Teknoman and G-Force: Guardians of Space, the plots of which are too wild and contain too much energy to be described in this particular post.
Ever wanted to see Mega Man’s sister, Roll, beat the crap out of Yatterman-1 from the series Yatterman! Gan Takada? TvC has you covered. Did I mention that the game only released on the Wii? Fortunately, it supports fight sticks and GameCube controllers in addition to the Wii Remote and Nunchuk.
Unfortunately, Capcom’s licensing deal with Tatsunoko lapsed sometime in 2012, so we never got a sequel. Where there’s anime, there’s hope, though.
Matches across all of Faustings’ tournaments started today, with top eight brackets for some of them taking place while the rest are slated to finish up tomorrow. You can find a complete schedule of all the matches over on the event’s website. A lot of the bigger tournaments, as well as TvC, will be hosted on Will English’s Twitch channel.
Elsewhere in the world of esports this weekend, the group stage gets underway in Dota 2’s The Chongqing Major, that game’s first big tournament of 2019. Matches start at 1:00PM AEDT today, followed by the next round at the same time tomorrow. You can watch that event on Dota Starladder’s Twitch channel.
Finally, Hearthstone may be stagnating a little but it’s far from dying, something that can’t be said of all card games. This weekend, the top players from the Americas will face off in the Winter playoffs. Matches start at 3:00AM AEDT on the Sunday and end at 3:00PM AEDT before resuming across the same hours on Monday. The entire event will be streaming live on Blizzard’s Hearthstone Twitch channel.
If you want to get a feel for the current meta and what decks will be big at the event, Hearthstone podcaster and analyst Steve Lubitz has an interesting breakdown of what all the big competitors are currently playing over on his blog. Hint: Hunter secret decks remain very popular at the moment.
Comments
12 responses to “The Capcom Crossover Fighting Game People Hardly Ever Talk About”
Ah great game, I gave away a lot of my wii games but held on to a handful of exclusives such as this. My brother and I would play it for hours.
Good to see TvsC still gets some coverage. Great fun game. I think the fact that it was only released on Wii is what hurt it’s popularity. Great to pick up and play in an emulator for anyone interested.
I bought this and some a-hole broke into my house and stole it (along with a few other rares like The Last Story )
Insert Liam Neeson meme here.
I have my Wii U still just for this, Last story and Rhythm Heaven.
Shame it was on a console you had to buy additional controller to even play.
This was on the Wii, not the Switch :p
Exactly my point. Far as I can remember the Wii used motion controls and you had to spent nearly 100 dollars for a regular controller.
I just used my Gamecube controllers.
It was perfectly playable with a wii-mote/nunchuk. It played a little like Smash’s controls in a traditional fighter.
You could do some cool things traditional controls couldn’t like endless Spinning Bird Kicks.
Teknoman obscure? how dare you! CheezTV generation will beg to differ
I tried it just the once at a Fry’s Store in Texas and that convinced me it was not the fighting game for me, and that the dumbing down of Capcom fighters had gone to a new level. I miss the days of KoF’97, Marvel vs Capcom 2, and Vampire Saviour.
Friggen awesome game. Never been much into fighters (and still didn’t quite get this one) but spent plenty of time with this one and became a big fan of Eighting’s work because of it.