Evolution 2010

Really cool EVO this year, unfortunately I couldn't go because the family has a vacation planned for Taiwan during November so money is really tight. Had to watch everything on stream pretty much. Historic event for Melty players, as it was the first time MB was a major event at Evolution.

Melty had 146 entrants, so it was divided into 4 pools. Unfortunately Pool 1 and 4 were extremely stacked, so many good players weren't able to make it to Top 8. Sadly Melty got no stream time at all pre-Top 8, which was expected, but EVO also did not let the community set up their own personal streams because of G4 or something like that... pretty dumb if you ask me.

Garu and Chelsea from Japan were able to make it over for this event, which is pretty amazing. On Thursday night, Tempered set up a casuals stream and Garu basically ran a train on everyone, only losing once to Brandino during a 4-5 hour period. Before coming over, Garu stated on IRC that he was starting to play H-Kohaku more than his main(H-VSion), but I was expecting him to play HVS over here since he would be more familiar with the character. H-VSion is also considerably easier to play, and I thought that Garu would get frustrated over the PS2 input buffer and not play H-Kohaku. But he proved me wrong and stuck to his guns, and also played a bit of H-Shiki as well.

Chelsea is Garu's friend, and is nowhere near as well known but he has appeared in a couple of videos. He plays F-Arc in videos, but he was able to run a bunch of characters at EVO like C-Shiki, C-Arc, and C-Sion. I was expecting him to be a bit stronger, but he ended up being about mid-level by US standards. Chelsea however was hilarious and provided some amazing commentary, and it seemed like everybody really enjoyed hanging out with him.

The final top 8 for Melty was pretty much what I expected, although I was expecting bell and sp00ky to get farther in their pools. Top 8 for Melty was unfortunately streamed first on Sunday at 10AM in the morning, but people were able to get up for it and I think it peaked at around 14K viewers. Stream was handled very well, though apparently the player camera was broken so we couldn't get shots of player reactions and the commentator's table like all the other games. bell did a great job commentating and keeping it clean for the EVO stream, but Sp00ky was obviously very tired from streaming SSFIV the previous night so he was pretty quiet. Some people captured some of the matches of the stream and put them on Youtube, but the vids are mostly 1)incomplete and/or 2)bad quality. Luckily someone saved it on JustinTV.

http://www.justin.tv/unowner/b/266597281
http://www.justin.tv/unowner/b/266603408

Very exciting Top 8, as almost every match was amazing. Unfortunately the Grand finals between LordKnight and Garu was terrible as not only was it an H-Kohaku mirror, both players' execution just went down the drain so it was dropped combos everywhere. Very ugly finals, and sadly it gave the impression to many non-MBAA players that the game was very broken. I feel that LK should have chosen a different character, like C-Warc, after he lost the first set, since Garu plays regularly with the best Japanese H-Kohaku, Hagi. It would have also made the grand finals a lot more interesting as well.

Melty getting into this year's EVO was kind of a miracle, and I don't see Melty getting back in ever again, but it seems like the game was able to make an overall good impression. From what I heard, Garu and Chelsea seemed to have a very good time so maybe they can encourage more Japanese players to travel over here in the future.