As usual, it is to be held in the Mardyke Bar, Sheares Street, Cork on October 27th from 1pm to 6pm. Casuals will begin at 1pm with the actual tournament getting underway at 2pm.

The cost of entry to this tournament is 12.50. Not only will this entitle you to entry to the tournament but there will also be some free finger food and drink served on the day as well.

So come all and get hype!

( Dressing up in your Halloween costumes is optional. )

Here is a map as to the location of the venue in relation to the train station and the bus station;

We will be running tournaments in Super Streetfighter 4 – Arcade Edition v2012, , Street Fighter X Tekken, 3s, HDR classic, Ultimate Marvel v Capcom 3, MK9 & Tekken Tag Tournament 2!

So come along if you think you’ve got what it takes to compete with the very best in fighting games in Ireland and around the world.

We have the registration page up and running at www.sf25.eu. If you can, please go to that site and put your name in so we can gauge numbers.

The price structure for the day is as follows;

Entry to venue : €3

Single Tournament Entry : €10
SuperCombo Deal (Any 4 Tournaments) : €30
UltraCombo Deal (Any 6 Tournaments) : €40

And here is a the most up to date timetable of how games will be played on the day;

Please note that while the timetable is pretty much set in stone at this point, it is still subject to change.

* Flights, seeded place and accommodation prizes available to residents of Ireland and Northern Ireland only. Cash prizes available to all.

Anyway, we’ve got a new ( slightly cheaper ) venue, all thanks to the efforts of Shokashi; The Mardyke. What’s more, we’re also getting more bang for our buck as he has being able to secure us a package that includes free food and drink ( soda in this case. )

The time for the event is from 12pm to 5pm. We’ll be opening at 12pm for registration and casuals and will be beginning the tournament at 1pm, all going to plan. The game that will be played at this event is Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition Version 2012.

SSFIV details:

Entry is €10 to the Street Fighter 4 tournament. You will receive a 5 euro discount if you bring a friend to the event.

Casuals and registration start from 12.00. The tournament itself will start at 13.00.

The tournament will be run exclusively on Xbox 360s.

There’ll be a couple of extra pads on hand for those without, but please bring your own controller of choice if possible.

Here is a map as to the location of the venue in relation to the train station and the bus station;

For more information, the discussion on boards.ie can be found here;

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056733883

Now normally this would be on every 4th Saturday of the month but due to the fact that June 23rd clashes with Q-Con in Belfast, I decided to go with the earlier date of June 16. That means no one has any excuse now to not come down!

There will also be a station set aside ( numbers permitting ) after group stages for casual games / money matches and you’ll be more than welcome to play as you please on it.

Anyway, with that out of the way, onto the tournament details;

SSFIV details:

Entry is €10 to the Street Fighter 4 tournament.

Casuals and registration start from 12.00. The tournament itself will start at 13.00.

The tournament will be run exclusively on Xbox 360s.

There’ll be a couple of extra pads on hand for those without, but please bring your own controller of choice if possible.

Anyone who can bring equipment (Games, consoles, monitors, etc) please do so!

If anyone needs to contact me and wants my mobile number, email me at adrianc1986@gmail.com

Here’s a quick map of the venue in relation to the bus and train stations.

For more information and to ask any questions, please refer to this topic on the boards.ie fighting games forum

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056652277

The first of 4 new trailers and gameplay videos is below, with the remainder embedded for your perusal, after the break. Well hopefully anyway, this computer is really slow and doesn’t play too well with the wordpress editor.

For more Devil Gem action keep it on randomselect.ie, Ireland’s no.1, and only, fighting game news site.

Ogre and Jin

M.Bison and Akuma

Clarissa Dan explains it all.

There were tournaments scheduled across the weekend for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition v2012, Blazblue Continuum Shift 2 and a retro tournament for Marvel vs Capcom 2 on Dreamcast. Unfortunately there was some technical difficulties tuning the Dreamcast into the TVs and the MvC2 tournament was replaced with an Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 event instead.

Before I get started on the nitty gritty of this event I’d like to first remind you that this is only Akumakon’s second year running, and as an anime convention the focus of most of their growth was placed on the anime side of things. With this is mind, please try to be a little lenient with your opinions. The Games Room was definitely better this year, but it still had plenty of problems that will hopefully be ironed out in following years.

Firstly, I was contacted several months before Akumakon to give recommendations of tournaments to be held and what rules those events should have. This seems to be the trend with conventions in Ireland lately and it’s great to see RandomSelect acknowledged as being knowledgeable about these sorts of things. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the con additional rules had been made to the fighting games, specifically ‘Oni Akuma’ and Phoenix being banned from SSFIV and UMvC3 respectively.

It’s kind of a shame that after the effort of discussing rules back and forth over email for several weeks the rules were altered anyway based on local opinions. Thankfully after further discussions with the very amenable Games Coordinator, these rules were dropped before the tournaments.

The next big issue with the tournaments was the format they were run in, and this is almost entirely my fault as I drafted the tournament ladders – so apologies in advance! I misread the timetables and thought there was 2 hours for each event, but there was actually only one hour for the tournaments and then an hour of casual play, during which there was supposed to be no tournaments.

This resulted in my having to do some fairly spectacular surgery to the brackets on the fly in order to fit the events into the time allotted. BBCS2 was run double elimination, but the losers bracket had to be cut down to single games instead of best out of three. UMvC3 was hit the worst as it had the largest turnout and resulted in the first leg of knockout games being best of three and every game afterwards – including the finals – being cut to single games. SSFIV was spared most of this as it was allotted three hours to itself on the Sunday.

However, as I said, this mess up was not entirely my fault. Each tournament being given a single hour to run was madness. It’s unlikely that in the best of conditions tournaments in any format will fit into such a short timescale. At an anime convention where people are coming and going constantly and organisers are trying to wrangle crowds and keep track entrants it’s basically impossible. Add into the mix a drastic shortage of equipment – there was only a single Xbox available to run games on – and tournaments get bogged down very fast.

Either way, the tournaments went ahead sort of intact. The first winner of the weekend was Xinkai who defended his BBCS title from last year, using his Platinum to beat out a sleep deprived Chueytoo in the finals.

UMvC3 saw two new faces in the finals with Huzelos from London and Valormeer representing Cork. Valormeer’s incessant aggression from his team of Vergil/Spencer/Taskmaster saw him take the win decisively.

The SSFIV final was between Sairus and Xinkai and despite his opponent’s bribes and requests to use his unpolished Makoto for the match, Sairus took down Xinkai’s Sakura without a reset.

Unfortunately the sheet with the results for all the events was lost, so no names were announced for the closing ceremonies and I can’t remember who won the Smash Bros tournament. If anyone does know, let me know in the comments!

I know this write-up paints quite a dreary image of the con, but it wasn’t all doom and gloom!

• Replay Games from Co. Down kindly supplied an arcade cabinet with both SSFIV Arcade Edition and King of Fighters XIII on it which saw a lot of use throughout the weekend.
• The Games Room had a massive projector set up for an Xbox (though the lag was a little too much for tournament usage) which always seemed to have a crowd playing some form of fighting game on it.
• The convention’s Xbox was fully patched with most DLC which is a rarity at cons. The BB tournament in particular had many intense matches, which alas were not recorded.
• Finally, there were several new fighters in attendance whom had never heard of Random Select that were very interested in the prospect of future tournaments. If you’re one of those players, welcome aboard!

So in conclusion, Akumakon wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t great either. I’m willing to cut the con some slack as it’s still in its infancy, but there’s a couple of things that’ll need to be addressed for next year: longer time slots for the tournaments and more consoles. Hit those two marks and they’ll be well on their way to a travel worthy Games Room.

Thanks to Padraig O Connor and Aindriú Mathúna for the photos.

Make your way to the Exchange in Temple Bar, Dublin on February 4th to take part. Doors open at 10:00 and registration starts at 11:00. The tournament itself will start at 12:30 and should be finished up around 17:30. Entry fee is €5 for the venue fee and €5 per tournament. Both tournaments will be running on Xbox 360. These tournaments will be seeded based on the three previous tournaments Please bring your own controller or converter.

For full details and discussion of the event, please check the forums.

As usual, the Space in Queen’s University Belfast Student’s Union is the host for the event.
The tournament will start at 14.00 sharp so please show up before then. Entry to the event if gloriously free so you have no excuse not to go!

As usual, for full details and discussion of the event, head over to the forum thread.

The tournaments will be held in the Exchange in Temple Bar, Dublin. The venue will open from 12.00 noon with tournaments starting from 12.30, so make sure you’re down on time for registration! Tournaments will be running in King of Fighters XIII, Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, Blazblue Continuum Shift 2 and Mortal Kombat – in that order. All tournaments will be run on Xbox 360, except for MK which is on PS3.
Entry to the venue is €5 and you can either pay €7 for entry to one tournament, or €10 for entry to all 4.

For full rules and details of the event, head over to the forums. If you still haven’t made up your mind check out the trailer below!

The NewPort Cafe Bar on Paul’s Street will be host to this terminal event as usual. The venue will open for casuals and registration from 12:00 and the SSFIV tournament will start at 13:00 sharp.
It’s €15 to enter the tournament, but if it’s your first time you get €5 off. Alternatively, if have been before and you bring a new player you’ll get €5 off both your entries – so get recruiting!

As with last Tempest there will be a smaller side tournament that will run from around 15:30 with a €5 buy in. This month’s side event is either King of Fighter 13 or Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. To vote for this month’s side event and discussion of Tempest in general head over to the forums.