Tearing myself away from Modern Warfare 2

This past week Modern Warfare 2 was released this past Tuesday. It's a common in-joke in the community that productivity would drop sharply as soon as the game was made available to the public. People attended the midnight releases, called in sick for work, and just sat themselves down to the sequel to one of 2007's most critically acclaimed games. Indeed, when one of my own classes was canceled due to furloughs on Thursday, I originally planned on going home to play it then come back for my campus club meeting in the evening. I ended up getting sucked into the game and stayed home.

Konkuri is a great site for amateur tournament makers

Months ago, I stumbled across Konkuri thanks to the Download Squad. It lets you organize tournaments painlessly with a good range of customization such as round robin or bracket tournaments, the number of rounds per set, and randomly generating matches.

King Of Fighters XII embarrassingly marked down to $11 in Japan

Reported over at Kotaku, the game touted as a revival to classic fighting franchise, King of Fighters XII, has been marked down to ¥980 yen or $11 in US dollars. Even games a year old don't go down that harshly and KOFXII is barely three months out.

"Tires don exits" or the controversy of balance

When you play fighting games, one thing is bound to cross your mind: "[character x] is totally cheap and overpowered."
Do tiers exist? Are all characters balanced? An infamous Internet meme was sparked by this issue. One disgruntled Smash Brothers player got onto the Smash World Forums and angrily posted "Tires don exits." To this day, this phrase is invoked in order to either defuse a serious discussion on balance or to just troll the thread.

Inevitably, it's this humble writer's belief that there's no such thing as a perfectly balanced game. Characters are bound to have more tools and options to make them more appealing from a technical standpoint. In order to get a better idea of where I'm coming from, I present to you this video at Japanese tournament, Kohatsu. It arguably has the best players of their representative characters, Nu and Tager. Nu is the archetype zoning character with low health; where Tager is a grappler who gets in close to grab you, and who has lots of health to compensate for range.

Blazblue: Continuum Shift intro revealed

The new intro to Blazblue: Continuum Shift has been unveiled--courtesy of intrepid arcade goers at nicovideo and someone who of course transferred it to YouTube. The high quality version is here but you need to have an account at the nicovideo.jp website (and it's in Japanese).

A number of things you get to see besides the attention to detail Arc System Works put into highlighting in the video:

• At 00:20 you see how Noel's drive, Chain Revolver has changed. Not only is it darker, but apparently the rumors that you can jump-cancel it are true.
• At 00:26 you see a new move from Litchi.
• At 00:47 you see one of Tsubaki's distortion drives (or super moves).
• At 00:58 you see an ominous glimpse of Hazama's astral heat (do want).

As you can tell, I'm dedicated fan and am glad to bring you this latest bit of news about the sequel. Hopefully the wait for the console release isn't too long.