i heard those players had jobs too
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have a nice Tekken scene. I know of 3 T6 cabs in Kuwait.
All over Kuwait you can find KOF machines, usually right outside shopping centers in Salmiya. But they’re mostly beaten up with bad monitors. On the top floor of Kit Kat in Salmiya we’ve got a bunch of arcades. Theres a huge HNK sit down cab, Last Blade 2, and some other games I can’t recall.
Awesome match BTW.
Butt hurt much?
listen to 3rd strike or tekken podcasts specifically ones where they talk to players who went to sbo.
people out there are serious in japan.
Where can I hear that Tekken podcast?
MYK has one.
the 1st episode he talks to RIP about his trip to japan
Japan as a whole is simply more studious. The western scene has it’s good players, but the amount that are truly high level in comparison to the amount that play overall is much less than Japan. Said games are simply taken more serious. This goes for many titles too, not just fighters. In Japan you can find frame data for titles such as Biohazard Outbreak and when you look at the given leaderboards, it’s apparent the west has some great players, but not the abundance Japan has. I think it honestly comes down to the cultural acceptance towards such activities there versus here. Of course there are stereotypes anywhere, but overall high level players at least receive some love there. Honestly until SFIV, the fighting game scene here and it’s players didn’t get the attention it deserved, games like Halo or Gears are regularly on television while our communities matches were more or less underground. If SFIV did anything, at least it helped bridge the gap.
About Japan and no-names… you’re not going to find extreme competition at the first arcade you lay eyes on after get off the plane. Maybe you’ll get a great player at the random arcade at the train station next to where you’re staying, but the ubiquity of Japan’s skills are exaggerated, and if you’re on top of your shit, you’ll have to look around to find comp on your level.
That’s especially true for games that aren’t quite as popular outside of competitive circles. Good luck finding anyone who gives a damn about TvC. I’m not convinced that SF4 is so insanely popular that the average arcade patron has high level understanding of the game. VF5R is nowhere near as popular as VF4E was. Tekken is the king fighting game in arcades, and even if you can’t immediately find someone with your skill level, you’ll always find comp.
However, if you go to a well-known arcade… unless your name is well-known… yes, you’ll get destroyed… by somebody you never heard of.
There’s a difference between FG scene and competitve scene.
Yes i know Flipperin and is awesome, the problem is that is too far from where i live… the Blazblue scene is now pretty big there.
The UMK3 scene is on Diana Merced game center, is maybe the only game with MVC2 and Tekken that has a strong scene on there.
this is interesting to see considering that all I usually see is Starcraft from Korea
I find it weird that a MK game has a tourney scene. Especially since a lot of people say UMK3 was good only by accident hahaha.
I can talk about the Brazilian scene although I’m fairly new to it.
We have a pretty strong Smash Bros community. The guys at 1UpSmash have organized big events that gathered players from all the country. More recently, at EVO South America, one US player (I forget his name, I think “Affinity” would be it) showed up and scored top 5, which is good, but shows that at least 4 of our players did better. So the gap must not be as big as we initially thought.
Up to 2009 another strong scene we had here was the MvC2 scene. It still runs strong and MvC2 is still the favorite game in places like Rio de Janeiro, even after many players jumped over to SF4. There was also the CvS2 scene leading in Paran for a while and, of course, KOF and ST scenes in some other parts of the country. The CvS2 scene died out for the most part. We know there are a few hardcore groups playing it in Teresina and Paran, but they account for a tiny percentage of the Brazilian fgamers (who are few to begin with). Same with the Virtua Fighter scene (there is a VF4FT machine in Brasilia btw, the only one in Latin America!). As for Tekken, Guilty Gear and SoulCalibur communities, I don’t know how strong they are, but they are mostly concentrated in So Paulo. I expect the Tekken scene to make a strong show with the release of Tekken 6, but the truth is that I don’t know much about the Tekken scene around Brazil to gauge their level compared to Koreans or Americans so it’s hard to tell whether they are strong or not. The Guilty Gear scene is ok, not too strong, but has a dedicated cult and can be seen organizing competitions every now and then. Many of them also play Melty Blood nowadays I hear.
SoulCalibur I know they run several tournaments, have good representatives (some of the nicest and most pleasant fgamers I’ve met! Thanks Yamaki, Edge and Vini!) and there are some very strong players among them, but I don’t know much about SoulCalibur despite them offering to teach me multiple times (one of these days, guys!). The 3rd Strike scene has a loyal cult as well and they recently brought RX from Japan to play (and win) their national tournament. The 3S players are mostly concentrated in one city and they organize their own events from time to time, centered around their favorite game.
That’s actually another problem, there are few hardcore gamers in Brazil and even fewer dedicated fighting gamers. To make it worse, the country is too big and the players are segregated by their regions and games of choice, some hating on anyone who plays a different game, making it harder for the scene to grow as a whole. In my city specifically I know of a very strong arcade filled with KOF’98 and SFA3 machines running weekly tournaments and all, but they have nearly no contact with the rest of the country or even anyone who doesn’t know their arcade (I found it by accident), it’s like a closed “members-only” club. The best efforts to unite the scene come from the communities at fighters.com.br (specially pre-2009) and more recently portalversus.com.br (where I’m a moderator and blogger). Most pro tournaments around the southern region of the country (where most players can be found) are organized by or are influenced by the Versus Team and have been the most successful in terms of gathering players from all places, running live streams and basically generating all sorts of hype. Because of that we have received invites for partnerships both in Brazil as well as other neighboring countries such as Chile. However, we try to support anyone’s initiative not just our own as much as we can by posting about their events in our blog, letting them market their stuff as much as they want to in our forums and attending whenever time and money allows us. Of course, with growth comes a lot of hating, pointless flaming and trolling, but that’s another issue we are learning how to deal with.
As for 2009, the year provoked dramatic changes to our scene just like what happened in USA. First because of Street Fighter IV on consoles, but the BIG influx of new players came with the release of Street Fighter IV PC. Because next-gen consoles are too expensive here, everyone has a PC and you don’t need a strong machine to run SF4, so this turned out to be the most successful platform to market SF4 in. Even some of our arcades use hacked PCs that run SF4 PC on a coin-op basis, making it technically better than the actual SF4 arcade cab (the PC version has all characters, after all). This made possible for some arcade places to flourish with competition again.
Right now we can say that the Street Fighter IV scene is easily the biggest around the country, but with all the new games that came out, we have new players all around for other games as well. Any half-assed SF4 tournament attracts dozens of players easily. The BlazBlue crew is one of the most actives and most helpful in our forum even though they are fewer in number. I’ve been supporting the BB scene since before it was released, always hyping it up, posting news and even conducting an interview with HeartNana that was posted on release day (many people, BB and non-BB fans, loved that). So far not many BB competitions around, but we are keeping an eye on that scene for 2010. The King of Fighters XII wasn’t well-received around here, I don’t know of anyone playing it at the moment. MvC2 on PSN/XBL was a letdown for our most hardcore MvC2 players who wanted to let their Dreamcast rest in peace, but many of them play it online on PS3 and X360 “for fun”. STHDR kinda split people, many prefer the classic ST, but some others (like me) only play Remix. Either way, it’s certainly not one of the most popular, but I would say it’s the preferred “game to play on the side” by the SF4 players. Everyone plays it, just a minority is actually dedicated. Tatsunoko vs Capcom is in the same situation as BB, but I think it has even less players. Lack of online (for now) and Wii doesn’t help it (as I said, new consoles are too expensive here), but considering the size of the Smash Brothers community, with the release of TvC:UAS those numbers can change considerably.
If any foreign player is ever interested in visiting Brazil and getting some matches with our players, just drop me a PM or register in our forums and feel free to post in your language (be it Spanish, English or French) and we’ll try to inform you and set you up for some good run. We’re holding a big SF4 and MvC2 event in January 2010, the Versus Rio Tournament. A good time to drop by Rio de Janeiro, it’s summer 
P.S: Maybe I got one or two things wrong with the whole “history lesson” or might even have popped up someone’s vein for not mentioning their game or scene, but don’t kill me, as I said I’m fairly new to the Brazilian scene and I went with the facts mostly off the top of my head and from talks with other veterans.
Latin America dominates UMK3. I’ve seen the mythological Cyrax bomb setups with my own eyes. Jersey boyz are sayin’ hell no, though. They might have what it takes to bring those brown titans down.
Basically, Brazil is some years late in comparing with some other countries like US, Japan, S. Korea and Canada.
There some split pot tournaments, some with little prize, and depending on the game, it can gather from 20 to 40 people, regarding prizes, location and previous announcement. The earlier, the better.
As for SF4, the numbers growth was so impressive that a single “get together” event, free play party stuff, got 100+ people, making it possible now to grow bigger.
Basically, about the location, if you aim at south, southeast, you’ll have an outnumber of players compared with other locations, always.