First, I just want to say congrats to Le for another successful tournament. It was good meeting all the new faces at MaxOut. Just wanted to say that I am glad that there is new blood and new life getting breathed into the scene. We just need to make sure that it keeps growing, and nobody gets left behind. Everyone needs to work together to keep the scene alive. Le, Nick, Jesse, Jeremy, Andrew and whoever I am forgetting, it was nice seeing you all again. My job’s schedule right now sucks, and has made it damn near impossible to keep current. I am working hard to change that, though.
I just became an owner/business partner of The Basement Games and Hobbies, and along with my fellow co-owners, we are trying to bring gaming back to KC in a big way. For now, they are focused mainly on Magic the Gathering, Warhammer and other various board games, but they didn’t have the mindset of including video gaming. Or to be more specific, they didn’t include the Fighting Game Community. That is where I came in. I brought it to their attention that there are more gamers out there, and we all want the same thing; to have a place where we can all meet up to game in peace. I want to have a stable place where we can go, with enough room that we aren’t all smelling each others armpits ;). Somewhere we can get hyped without having to worry about disturbing the neighbors, or have to worry about our girlfriends/wifes making us cancel a hookup at the last minute. This is where I need you guys though. We need input from the scene as to what you guys want.
On that note, JSpot and I have decided to start a tournament series called ***K***ansas City ***O***nslaught (K.O.) that we hope will have the support of the scene, as we plan to make it grow into what we hope will be one of the premiere tournament series around. I know it won’t happen overnight, but we want to get like Wednesday Night Fights (WNF), where we have weeklies with high caliber gameplay, and then that will culminate into bigger tournaments on the scale of MWC and higher. I am looking into sponsorship so that we can get extra prizes like sticks and other gaming related items. To do this though, we have to have a good showing at the tournaments, and we need to be consistent.
To start, I will need the support of you guys with setups, ie Monitors and consoles. In the end though, our objective is to have most, if not all of the setups (consoles and monitors) provided by the tournament so that all you will have to bring is your own stick or controller. My reasoning for this is that it provides for a smoother tournament organizationally since all the setups will be provided by us and we will have the minimum amount of setups to run the tournament as efficiently as possible. This also makes it more convenient for participants if the only thing they need to keep track of is their own controller/joystick. The monitors that we are looking to get are Asus monitors that have been proven to be able to hold up to the scrutiny of the Fighting Game community. If you attended MaxOut and played with JSpot at our casual setup for AE, then you saw the Showcase match monitors we plan on using. The model is VK278Q. It is a 27" LED backlit monitor. It features a built in webcam so that we can show the players of the showcase match without having to have extra equipment. The other monitors will be either the VE278Q, or one of the other Asus models with the response time that we need.