The thread title’s kinda catchy doncha think?
Anyways heres a little story bout a man named Ranma, his dream, make Texas Showdown 6 the best tournament ever… In other words trying to improve on Texas Showdown 5. Little background into this. Last year, Texas Showdown 5 partnered with Major League Gaming providing one of the largest venue’s we’ve ever had as well as tons of equipment, a 24 hr venue in the same hotel most people were staying at! All in all, with SBO qualifiers, Justin vs Sanford in MvC2, BAS/Otaku/Kindevu as special guests, it was hailed as one of the best, if not the best, Street Fighter Tournament ever.
Unfortunately, after TS5, MLG partnered with Evo2k5 and supported a Tekken 5 tournament series. The Tekken tournament series was ill fated, and Evo didn’t quite turn out as well as both sides would have liked, thus making MLG make the decision to ultimately drop fighting games from its schedule altogether. This meant TS6 would not be sponsored this year and thus meaning we lost over 20k in sponsored equipment and venue. Knowing this was more than likely going to happen, I had already tried to damage control the situation immediately after Evo. Personal turmoil destroyed my brain and enthusiasm towards working on it until November.
November, I talk to various people about working on projects for TS6. This included poster design, t-shirt design, finding a proper venue, machines, equipment, volunteers, etc. Alex Ennis(aka [_] ) was in charge in helping me acquire a venue for this year. The actual room we held TS6 in was our 4th or 5th choice. Over the span of the next 2 months, I spent countless hours, and too much money on preparing supplies and materials for the tournament. Then I found out we no longer had the venue we thought we did. Designs for posters and T-shirts were still not ready. We didn’t even have a way to transport the cabinets from Stargate to the venue planned.
With the help of master manipulator Alex, we were able to finally secure a venue for certain. Freddy Cano helped us out with T-shirt and Tag designs. Alex Smith designed the poster. From there it was the staff at Planet Zero that helped us with advertising and planning. Emotiongear John and Scrabble Vixen Deneice have been behind us supporting TS6 almost from the beginning of the inital planning disaster.
Now that most of that was done, the next matter was finding staff and equipment. I thought this would be the easiest part of the planning, but ended up being the hardest. In fact, so many things went wrong with this that I’m going to start planning out equipment for next year first. Anyways, I’m not going to get too much into it. Around this time its February, crunchtime for TS6. We get confirmation that none of the Japanese players will make it this year. We also hear that John Choi, Valle, Combofiend, Nestor, etc have bought their tickets and are confirmed to show. Then DSP tells me that all the hotels nearby are all booked for the rodeo. Unbelieveable! Honestly, I was hoping people would have tried to book their rooms early, I did say that the UH Hilton would be the closest hotel, literally its about a 2 minute walk from the venue. So now I have to scramble to find people housing, locations for motels, etc.
I found Red Carpet Inn. I know. Its horrid. But on short notice, thats all I could find that I KNEW would have rooms. Little sidenote on that place. Joe Epstein, Tony Huynh, and Skye should remember that place, it was basically where they all stayed and partied after the first Texas Showdown. So that problem is solved. Now comes March. Javi for sure can’t be there on Saturday, so I know the staff I currently have will be stressed out and things will be hectic.
The week of Showdown went like this:
Monday - Freaking out because the shirts STILL aren’t ready. Poster and Tags were done over a week ago.
Tuesday - Trying not to panic about the shirts, concentrated on locating some more equipment. Struck a deal with a friend more a crapload more TV’s.
Wednesday - Finalized transportation plans with the H-town crew to pick up people from the airports, and trying to work out the tournament schedule.
Thursday - Get off work early, shirts are FINALLY ready, go pick them up, look HAWT! Head over to Planet Zero for the Pre-TS6 party. Find out small details that are building up. Dragonball Z cabinet still hasn’t arrived. Ruin and Vegas crew post up saying they made it to town already! 
DSP, and Alex G are confirmed to be picked up. Nestor and his crew came into town as well. Party at Lay’s after the PZ party. I forget to sleep cause I gotta pick up Flashmetroid, JeRon and Rachel from the airport at 8:30 am.
Friday - Go home, shower, pass out in front of the computer for an hour. Wake up… it’s 8:30… Rush outta the house and speed down to the airport. Note: I got to the airport roughly 15 minutes later, but didn’t see them the first time I passed by the pick up area. Then it took me almost another 10 minutes to get back around. Stupid airport. We start talking about random stuff. I didn’t realize Flashmetroid was so friggin young. Grill JeRon about the rest of NYC not coming, Justin flaking, etc. :arazz:
Then we go eat at IHOP. For some reason this IHOP was incredibly packed. The waitress sits us down, and it takes forever to get anything. They screwed up the order a few times. Rachel’s toast was fated to be given away. FlashM will forever want those strawberry pancakes. Then the waitress looks at us all crazy and bitches when we small tip her.(Sidenote: I tipped a buck when I didn’t even order food, so I dunno what happened) I gotta take Flash to Target, because with his incredible packing skills, he forgot underwear. Anyhow, after that PZ won’t be open for another hour, so I take them to Dunobaby Teahouse down the street. After much contemplation, JeRon FINALLY tries it. Flash then proceeds to drop his keys behind the bench, at an almost impossible angle. Amidst all that, we also find out Flash lost his $400 phone. Its not in the car, or anywhere near us. I look up the IHOP numbers and call the one with the bitchy waitress. We’re all praying that she didn’t find the phone cause we know she’d just chuck it or something. We get ahold of the counter lady and find out she has the phone, go down and pick it up, case closed.
Now it was time to goto PZ… At this point I tried to crash on their couches. People kept waking me up… it didn’t work. I say fuck it and start seeing who’s all getting in. PZ slowly starts getting packed. Around 6pm, Kensou shows up with my supplies and we start registration. My big mistake that night was waiting til 10pm to do the brackets. I still think it would have been ok if we started at 10, except it needed to be single game the whole way. Also once we started highlighting a game, like Hokuto no Toki, everybody stopped to watch it. That slowed things up bigtime. All in all, it was nice, it could have been run better on my side. The way PZ was setup for the tournament was hella nice. I just wish we would have finished before 8am :wasted:
Saturday - Earlier Friday night, Emotiongear John was way exhausted and couldn’t help us out with the cabinet moving. Meaning, I had to find another means of moving the cabinets… in like 2 hrs… I tried looking up U-haul online, then passed out. Cmutt calls me up and asks whats going on. I’m surprised he could understand what I was saying and hooked us up by going to get the truck himself! BIG THANKS CBUTT!
With that done, I take a shower to wake myself up(yes, I had about 1 hr of sleep only.) Get all the other bastiches up that crashed on my floor, and call up Daniel and [_] to see if they needed help with setting up and registration. Thats when I get the news… they’re both just now leaving their houses… this is at like 11:30. I called my friend with the equipment, he tells me he went down there and saw nothing and already left, he lives way out in the sticks and was already attending to other business meaning we lost that equipment for the tournament. Not only that, I sent off Kensou and David to help load cabinets with Cmutt. Meaning it was just me going to UH to help setup etc. When I get to UH, Daniel barely showed up and was handling registration. I couldn’t find [_] yet, and I walk into the venue to see… a karate class…
After I roundhouse kicked them outta the venue, we had to personally unload all the tables, move the chairs, setup the equipment. Then we had to wait for the cabinets. Meanwhile I found out EVERYTHING was closed on campus except the Games Room. Pizza Hut FTW! We started about 3 hrs late. Which was still a miracle in itself because there was literally only 3 people moving shit around in the beginning. We get brackets and pools drawn up and start. Well things seem to go ok, CvS2 and MvC2 starts up… Then we realize the horror of only having 6 stations instead of 16. And that CvS2 is 2 out of 3 games. I think this pretty much spelled the end of 2/3 round robin pools for us. CvS2 will be single game from now on in the pools. MvC2 was a little slower than usual because we were missing a cabinet. The monitor on it broke down while we were moving it. This pretty much set the tone for the entire day. We were getting frustrated, pulling our hair out trying to get things in order. Players were getting upset about how they weren’t playing anything. By the end of the day, we only cancelled one tournament(Soul Calibur 3), and ended up only about 1 hr behind schedule, meaning 3rd Strike and MvC2 could not finish their 16’s.
Also I played in 2 tournaments, ST and MvC2. My pool became known as the Megaman pool, featuring myself, Preppy, and like 3 other people who used Megaman. It was pretty nutty. In my first match I almost won against Total Toanage, but that was like the first time I touched a SG MvC2 cabinet in like half a year, so rusty and forgot how to play, but no excuses, GG’s Toan. Isaac fuckin Graham! You’re too good, but I had you! Jummpeee gettin hella cash off me, where my cut!? Irvin, go back and relearn Cable. CBlue, I shoulda stuck with Cable, you dicked me with Storm/Sent, poor Commando wasn’t cutting it. Everybody else I played, GG’s! Rudy! Good job qualifiying, but, I pwned you! And I got my revenge on Preppy! For MM users, there can be only one!
ST I scrubbed out, Blanka almost took out Jesse’s Fei, only to get randomized and dejected by Jeff Hill’s old Fei. Ah well, fun times, I love that game, 2nd favorite behind the Marvel series!
Sunday - Finally got some sort of sleep, roughly 4 hrs. Grab lunch and head down to UH. Once again, had to setup for the finals. Stupid Lay slept more than me and showed up hella late :arazz: We wait for MvC2 and 3rd Strike to finish their 16’s so we can start the show. Setup looks nice, gettin all the players together and all, intros, and the tournament itself ran fine on Sunday. No real fuckups that day. Finish everything up, kick everybody out, packed everything up. We didn’t leave UH until 5am. Grabbed some food, drove home, passed the fuck out. Then David calls me up saying he missed his bus and needs a ride to work… you bastich!!! :annoy:
So yeah, that was Showdown from my end. Oh and if you haven’t guessed yet, my thread title was a lie. :wgrin:
:lovin:
Chris Chou is a hoss.