I want to publicly thank DG, Giby, nilcam and of course The Answer himself for making this event possible.
Most ppl don't know how much time, effort and money The Answer had to spend in order to get the joysticks working and still we couldn't get everything to work. We had 3 Japanese sticks prepared (which all needed to be modded to work with the setup) and 1 stick started crapping out 1 day before the tourney (it worked the week before at The Answer's place) but we had no choice but to continue to use it. The "spare" stick didn't work at all, and only one Japanese stick that worked perfectly. The spare stick would literally reset the game if plugged in and throw a coin error code; we used it as the "reset" stick lol (came quite in handy actually).
Right before the actually stream finals, as everyone was waiting to be called up, our only good Japanese stick left stops responding; we had 30mins to fix it and it was like 11:00pm already lol.
Finally, the inevitable stream delays. We had to move the setup to the big stage and just wait there like the rest of you guys. Meanwhile, all the top4 players were just sitting around (mind you we've all been up for about 12 hours by now) wasting valuable practice time.
It was however, all worth it. It's was a pretty exciting tournament as it was but this tournament can really be viewed as a milestone to KOF being a mainstream game in US. It was the first official, "real" stream (SCR's webcam doesn't count), tons of ppl were interested and coupled with the announcements of Atlus as a publisher, EVO around the corner with DUNE himself (ARE YOU KIDDING ME?)--there has been no better time to be a kof fan guys.
Dune may not be known for the best KOF player around, but he's, unquestionably, the most influential Japanese player in the scene.
The whole kof landscape is shifting ladies and gents and one can't avoid the hype and excitement in the air. Sit tight, and let's show the rest of the fighting game scene what we already know; KOF is the best game out there =)
