I am curious as to what the thought process was with selecting MK:DS. I can see it drawing fairly well, but this runs against what was presumed to be the modus oprendi of Evolution. What is next, Tetris? Halo? World of Warcraft? It wil also be interesting to see if any of the ‘mainstay’ tournamented got dropped (wither ST?)
Free wi-fi at Evo is a nice addition though; curious to see that no one else commented about it.
Bring out your luckboxes, folks.
-Dippy
This would be awesome news If this weren’t Evo. With 2d fighting games dying out, and Evo considering running older games (#R instead of Slash) it seems like this could be a start of a destructive trend for the games we as a community have devoted so much time to. I’ve been a little worried ever since this section of the boards was renamed to ‘Evo Championship Series’ instead of ‘Evolution Fighting Game Tournament’ or whatever it was before.
mario kart ds? :wtf: couldn’t that slot be used for a fighting game?
Either this is a joke, or necessary due to one of Evo’s new sponsors…
it’s called expirimenting! out of all games I wouldn’t have guessed this at all, but I’d like to see how this will go…It’s inspired me to get back into MKDS!:tup:
Dunno if counting the boxes left is a good idea. There may be a 2-in-1 or perhaps an “unlockable” feature…
i dont care. mvc2 is still there. 
EVO people was too much time close to MLG!!
I guess this is what happends when you get close to a community that doesn’t respect the fighting genre.
You start experimenting the wrong way.
I was agains including in EVO a MLG game favorite like Super Smash Brother, but at least it is a fighting game.
I represent a small community of fighting in the Dominican Republic and we were hoping to send our SCIII Champ to Evo. Now that I see the slots left, that game might not even be included. In favor of what, a Mario Driving Game??
:wasted: I just feel like after one of those Super Turbo ReDizzy Combos.
My favorite game is Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution, but what are my hopes of finding competition, when events that should support fighting games are switching to racing games (with funny characters).
There are so many fighting games that are missing the chance to be in EVO!!
If popularity is the issue, any KOF or the new SCIII will bring enough people to match Mario Kart.
Well I don’t know what else to say. We at www.honmaru.org always used EVO rules and games selection as a model, but now, I don’t know anymore.
I guess that the only thing that I am waiting is to see a good reason for it. Maybe Nintendo became a SUPER sponsor of Evolution and is paying for half of the event costs. :razzy:
Please don’t get me wrong, I think that Mario Kart DS is an excellent game and is very fun to play, BUT this is not a game that is supposed to take a slot of EVO and above all, it’s not even a fighting game.
Heta Akira
p.s.
English is my second language, please forgive me if I write with mistakes.
One of the key problems of Evolution as of late has been its switch to console. The Evo organizers know as well as we do that lack of arcade has been unfruitful to a hardcore fighting game tournament every year.
This is a bold move, but I actually don’t think it’s a bad idea. Why?
Because you simply can’t make everybody happy in a fighting game console-only tournament. Unless the next generation of consoles changes things, Japan will still get arcade-only fighters several months to years before the console release just like always.
Not only do I find this a welcome change; I think it’s a necessary one and I think it’s one that “reflects” the American scene more accurately.
I guess you guys had a trick up your sleeves after all, and there’s a lot of experimentation this year, but I’m willing to give it a try. I for one know that I’m not in Japan anymore, so I’m willing to see what Evo has to offer this year now. I will play two games now at least, so I think I can justify going 
I’m also pleased to see now that you guys aren’t going to try to run every fighting game like older years. Evo should not be a tournament that tries to please everyone; it’s trying to set it’s own bar, and I can respect that. ST is looking to be dropped with the additional remaining slots, and it really makes sense–Cigarbob’s tourney was going to be the “official” ST tournament no matter what for the guys who care about it. With less fighting game tournaments, you can focus more on resources and actually running a smooth tournament.
Good luck guys~
Bleach DS at EVO!!!
…dude…
People should stop whining. It’s just another game, and hell, it’s a GOOD one.
A competitive racing game. A competitive fighting game.
Time to go order a DS Lite + Mario Kart DS. :D!
My question is not how fun MKDS is, but if it is tournment worthy. I don’t have DS myself, but I played the past MK on SNES and 64. The 64 version was kind of a joke with people in the lower placement getting the better items, great fun, but not a serious competitive game. So my question is if this game is a series of luck and fun, or a strategic racing game.
An odd choice, but Mario Kart is awesome. Looking forward to seeing how it turns out this year. :tup:
gross
How about some F-Zero?
The voice of another die-hard fighting game enthusiast cries out in the wilderness that is Nevada, RenoROB: I second your opinion.
As a NEO-GEO fan, I have to say that I did not (and still don’t) expect to see KOF or any other NEO-related title make the list of official EVO 2006 tournament titles. That being said, I also never expected to see a non-fighter as a tournament title at one of America’s premiere fighting game events.
I concur, except for the part about “MKDS [being] the shit” – I have never had an interest in racing games or the Mario franchise, so I have no experience with this game. But you raise a very valid point: is MKDS a game that appeals to the majority of EVO attendees? and does that level of appeal warrant its inclusion as an official tourney title? Providing wifi in the gaming area is a great idea, and could prove an effective way to gauge the popularity of MKDS among the EVO participants in order to decide the question of its inclusion in EVO 2007. But to seemingly pluck it from the aether and grant it tourney title status, apparently without researching the popularity of such a decision, strikes me as a little rash. If the EVO organizers have conducted research that has shown the tourney-worthiness of MKDS – or if, as some others have postulated, EVO has other reasons for including it – I’d be very interested to hear about what led to this surprising selection.
Again, not having an interest in MKDS or games like it, this news does not excite me the way it does you, Master Chibi. However, I must say it concerns me.
Since the mid-to-late-'90s, there has been a steady downturn in the production of fighting games. Rarer still are original/new fighting titles – more and more, it seems the only fighters that make it to release are those that are simply the latest sequel in a very popular series (SF, KOF, DOA, VF), or are based on an already-existing popular work (Hokuto no Ken, Spectral vs Generation). I (and I think, many others) saw the upswing of American fighting game tournament events like EVO as new life being breathed into the fighting game community. After all, if software developers see that the fighting game genre is undergoing something of a renaissance (in terms of popularity and player support), might they not be more inclined to consider producing more fighting games? and would such a thing not be of benefit to the community? In the business world, competition breeds innovation, after all.
That being said, I feel uneasy when I see EVO – in my opinion, one of the last bastions of the American fighting game community (along with the other large fighter tournies around the country) – begin to apparently slacken its previously steadfast support of the fighting genre by including a completely different type of game as one of its official tourney titles.
Seconded. Aren’t there other tournament events already in place for non-fighters like MKDS (and Halo, Quake, etc.)? Why should EVO want to be more like those tournaments? If all tournament events eventually cater to the same titles, would there be any real reason to choose one event over another? It seems to me that the fighter-centric nature of EVO (and other fighter tournaments) is what set it apart from other game tournament events.
While I would agree that the fighting game community will probably always be split on the issue of cab-tourney vs console-tourney, the one thing you could consistently count on them agreeing on: they all enjoy fighting games. Now some of them enjoy fighters almost exclusively, while others may have other game genres they enjoy and play just as frequently – but they all enjoy fighting games. That being said, it seems at least a little odd for a fighting game tournament event to take one of its limited number of tournament slots and bestow it upon a non-fighter. Granted, if that slot were given to a fighter, there would be attendees who didn’t care for that particular title and wouldn’t enter that tournament. But doesn’t it seem more likely that, with an audience of fighting game fans, more of them would be inclined to participate in a tourney for a fighting game than for a game in a completely different genre?
Given that we’ve seen the current and previous generation of consoles resulting in the development of a number of quality console-only fighters – and given the slow death that arcades seem to be undergoing in recent years – I would imagine that we’re likely to see more fighters developed as console-only titles than in years past. Especially once the the issue of lag in online fighting games is solved.
And as far as the delay from arcade release to console release goes, well, that’s always been the nature of arcade titles hasn’t it? In particular, arcade titles created by Japanese companies: the American branches of those companies can’t release their English-language console port of a title until a Japanese console port of that title already exists. And, with arcades dying off at a much slower rate in Japan than in the U.S., there will continue to be a delay between the Japanese arcade and console releases – after all, they want the arcade editions of their games to make as much money as possible before cutting into that with a console release.
And in cases where a Japanese console port exists but a U.S. port does not, EVO showed their willingness to run import console titles on modded PS2s with their Guilty Gear XX # RELOAD tournament (even though the U.S. Xbox port of the game had been available for nearly a year).
Perhaps it reflects the American gaming scene in general, but I have to wonder if it accurately reflects the American fighting game scene – which is what I thought EVO was all about.
–Chris
At first I agreed, but maybe those MKDS players also play fighting games casually (casual players). All that means is, more money in the pot for the fighting games. So in a sense, DS should be welcomed.
Lol, Duck Hunt…
If they got Nintendo as one of the Sponsors, I hope they give out a DS or two. :razzy:
Wow. Just wow.
I’m not going to Evo this year anyway, so anything I say is purely hot air to be ignored. With that said, this announcement is just ridiculous. It makes no sense on so many levels.
MKDS is a fun game. It’s a hell of a lot of fun, actually. It is not, however, a game that stands up to the litmus test of what Evo has stood for since its inception:
It’s not a fighting game. Yeah… I know. They’re shifting focus to “competitive” games and not just fighting games. I get that. However, not only is this not a fighting game, it’s not even a particularly competitive game. FPSs would have been a logical next step, since they are action-based and require a similar mental skill set to fighting games. This just seems so arbitrary.
It has no community. Sure, over a million people own it. Sure, people play it on Wi-Fi all the time. And? There’s no unified community for MKDS and, therefore, will not help Evo to expand to other, non-fighting game enthusiasts… which I assume is the goal of this broadening of the spectrum.
We’ve been told for years that the reasons genuine fighting games like GGXX (before a community developed), SNK games, Alpha 3, XSF, the Japanese games (HnK, MB, etc.) were not considered for Evo was because they had no community and would only attract minimal attendance from people who would be going to Evo anyway. If you guys were unwilling to promote the development of a community before, how is this different? What changed? I’d cry conspiracy and blame the new corporate sponsorship, but that seems like a trite cliche.
Please don’t misunderstand… the Cannons and company have almost single-handedly kept this community on life support for years by maintaining this site and running Evo (at a loss, for the most part) and for that, they should be thanked profusely. For the most part, they’ve also listened to us in the past, despite our incessant whining and bickering. So have you guys finally given up on this community and decided to make a money-making venture out of Evo? Frankly, I wouldn’t blame you guys… but Mario Kart hardly seems like the direction to take this in.
I could certainly understand including it in the BYOC room… like I said, it’s hella fun. As an official event? Color me confused.