D-Pad: I’m down for the 19th as well. So far, its 3 votes for the 19th? lol. We should all get food afterwards or something.
So, I take it he didn’t run into any of you at all then?. At least there was a location confirmation though, its something. Kinda makes me wonder who he ended up playing after all if even such a thing occurred. Cause when he said that he played some GGXX players up on Oahu, for a moment I thought “did he happen to run into the guys I played at ‘The Zone’ or was it like a random group of players?”. I was hoping he played some of you guys and you totally ‘owned’ his sorry ass after which he comes up with this seeming BS story in which he did ‘well’ and tells me about it. That or if he did happen to play you guys, I would end up hearing about if I knew of some random person from Big Island who sucked really bad at GGXX and played really scrubby. I was hoping you could validate that part lol, and know what I had to put up with at one time.
There is some back-story to all this though and I guess I will have to share it here.
It pretty much highlights why ‘I’ had to travel for comp at GGXX.
My friend is actually from Oahu but lives in Hilo now and he tells me that he and some of his friends used to play GGXX a good amount. This was when X2 was out. IIRC he told me one time that he ran up a 30+ win streak with MA or something against some peeps back in the day on an X2 cabinet. Fast forward to Fall 06. One of my Hilo friends tells me that they -found- me some GGXX comp, mind you most everyone played Tekken there and I was like the only guy who played any GGXX seriously on the island as far as I was concerned lol. We end up talking a bit and I decided to drive down to Hilo to challenge him so I could assess his ability, using #Reload cause that was what I had, SLASH was current though but no one really had access to it. So we play and I run DI, he runs KY cause during the earlier conversation I tried to assess if he had a main and was knowledgeable about the game. I beat him and summarized his then ability: scrubby spammed stuff with heavy OD usage, no FRC/RC usage, AND even attempted IKs. This was mostly with KY, TE, and MA. The whole time it was like that, me with my main and some randoms versus him mostly randoming the whole time. Results were one sided, all me. But some good came out of it, we became friends and at least I had one person to play GGXX with.
The rest of 06 into early 07 though was -interesting-. I make an attempt to help better his ability, pick a main, and such. We played once a week for a couple of months. You hope to see some progress right? I questioned his ability and he assures me that he -knows- how to play. I told him “practice your FRCs and combos and stop heavy ODing”, basically “if I can do it, you can do it”. Is there progress? Some but not much. Its bad when you can do stuff with a person’s main char who you don’t even use as your main or often at all and they can’t even do some of the basic stuff. His main was TE at the time. I wasn’t having any of it and called him out on this: his BS ability that wasn’t improving. It was quite epic cause I had done this amongst a large group of people that were gaming (it was a club event), yelling and just putting him down about it. End result: he disappointed me and I made him -question- his GGXX playing ability. That and no one in Hilo would play GGXX - with me at least lol.
Of course this may raise the question of “why isn’t there a GGXX scene here on the Big Island?” That’s another story for another time lol but it can be summed up with me saying “people have to want to play GGXX” as the main reason. But there was an effort to try and see if there were other players via a MySpace forum group. That venture failed for the most part but it did have one good positive, I got to know about D-Pad through it and his situation, which would have some benefits later in the future. Me and my friend reconciled for the most part and played some sporadic GGXX in early 07 but that failed cause he didn’t step his game up even though he said he would. Somehow there was talk amidst our group of friends about going to EVO 07 and I figured “what the hell, I’ll go” knowing full well it was going to be teams and I had no team at the time. Fast forward to around August and I’m off to EVO teamless and w/o comp experience but manage to play in official teams tournament and singles tournament. Jump to September and D-Pad asks me about my experience and points me to SRK and you guys on the forum. I come down in October and play, great times as well as finding other GGXX players in the 808. And now, jump to January 08 and a possible tournament on the horizon with those GGXX players.
That about covers it. And now you know about how things came to be and my involvement concerning said matters lol. The main thing is that there -are- players in the 808 that play GGXX and that I can be a part of that. A chance to play others despite playing alone is better than nothing. That is worth traveling for regardless.
I hope I didn’t bore anyone with this cause this post seems quite blog-like. If anything I entertained you all with a story that makes you say ‘WTF?’
KOG: He not worth bringing up for the tournament or to just session with. For starters he -rarely- plays despite saying that he’s so into the game but his ability says otherwise. That and he’d be with me and that’d be no fun to be lumped in with him. Besides, the only Big Island player worth playing is ‘me’ cause I stepped up to it and made the effort to come up and play you guys at GGXX. AFAIK, there are -no- other GGXX players on the Big Island, lol.
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