East Coast Throwdown 3: Day 1

Day 1 and things were already getting pretty hype. Good high level play in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. But it seemed to me that the event is a bit unorganized when I tuned in as the stream was switching to the Street Fighter x Tekken (pronounced "Street Fighter Cross Tekken") exhibition and Capcom Special Advisor Seth Killian was nowhere to be found. But to be fair, the venue was packed, with competitors and spectators practically shoulder-to-shoulder.

Easily one of the most popular attractions, besides the regular tourney action, was the Street Fighter x Tekken demo and live stream exhibition, with many good players including my friend, "OMG itz Andre", having the basics of the combo system downloaded and ingrained into their minds and ready to perform at their fingertips. Seth Killian, himself, was on hand on the stream commentating, giving details on the games development, combo system, and teases a new build of the game with more characters at Comic-Con in July and hopes for a "complete" build at EVO. By "complete", I believe he means from a balancing and mechanics standpoint rather than a finished product, as the game is expected to be released sometime in 2012.

Following the Street Fighter x Tekken exhibition, Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition (SSFIVAE) singles' play returned to the stream. There was a lot of good high level play but not too much new or extraordinary. Mortal Kombat pools were next up on the stream and the player who impressed me the most was Arturo "Sabin" Sanchez and his Reptile. When I first saw his Reptile on the Power Up 2011 stream, he has shown quite a mastery and improvement with his Reptile since then. His precision with his Street Fighter Dhalsim, to me, has carried over into his play with Reptile. LI (Long Island) Joe's Ermac is also very amazing. For those not too familiar with LI Joe, he's a competitive Street Fighter IV player but is also an accomplished Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (UMK3) player. And while UMK3 and the recent MK have different play styles, Joe proves that no matter the Kombat, he is not free.

Marvel vs. Capcom 3 pools resumed on the stream following MK9, while nothing stood out too much, there was some impressive runaway-play against Phoenix players amongst the Empire players whose names I fail to remember... but showed that they can, indeed, "control it" even when Ms. Jean Grey cannot.

AE evening pools come back to the stream after Marvel. As always, one of the standout players is the Midwest's very own Wolfkrone and his C. Viper. Nothing that I haven't seen from him before but it is always a pleasure watching his mastery of Viper on a standard PS3 controller. Amongst some other matches, I think the most important moral victory for SFIV players is Dieminion and his Guile's 2-0 victory over Henry "Golden" Cen's Yun. After much adjustment and adaptation against Cen's very aggressive Yun (which "aggressive Yun" is already redundant), he overcomes, what is commonly seen to be as, a bad matchup for Guile and showing that "The Twins" are not invincible.

Another great match that evening was Tinshi vs. Dr. Chaos. Tinshi is a Makoto player who, I regret to say, I'm not familiar with but Dr. Chaos' Ken had quite a showing at EVO last year. Both players demonstrated exactly what had gotten buffed for the respective characters. Many players consider Makoto underrated in Vanilla Super but has become significantly better in Arcade Edition. In contrast, Ken is considered to be one of the better "shoto" characters in this iteration with easier links into his sweep, among other things. Dr. Chaos takes the first game with great pressure and mixups with Ken's ambiguous cross-ups and kara throws. Game 2 went to Tinshi who had Dr. Chaos completely guessing by the end of second round with Makoto's, almost Third Strike-like, pressure. Match-point in the third game which, despite Dr. Chaos' best efforts to readjust, went to Tinshi.

Being only human, I finished watching the stream for the day because it was about 1 at the tourney's venue and midnight at home. I will be covering Day 2 of ECT3 with Top 8 for the major tournaments appearing on the stream such as MvC3, SSFIVAE, MK, as well as if there may or may not be another Street Fighter x Tekken exhibition.