The virtual rival thing could be cool. There's a lot of room for it to go wrong, and we're no worse off if it does. But replay takeover is huge. This is the holy grail of fighting game training mode features. You can go into a replay of a match and correct the things you did wrong or find answers to situations that are difficult or time consuming to recreate yourself in training mode.

I know most are probably talking about Path of Exile II or Diablo IV's latest expansion, but those are online-only, and I don't care even a little bit about "seasonal" content, so this is the one I'm excited for.

$50 for the base game, $70 with DLC included.

Steam link provided. Also available on Epic.

This game has made the rounds before, but now it's got a slightly new title and plenty of new gameplay footage. Finally, more campaign FPS games!

This one's been in early access for a while, but it's finally hitting 1.0. If you're unfamiliar, it's a procedurally generated murder mystery immersive sim. A murder happens, you scan for evidence, track people by their address in the phone book, and make connections with red string yourself. When I played the demo a while back, someone came home while I was snooping in their apartment, so I escaped in a vent and ended up in the apartment on the floor below them. I waited for that resident to finish preparing their dinner and sit in front of the TV so I could leave through their front door and get out of there. This game is awesome.

I'm on Kubuntu 24.04, rocking a build that was pretty darn high end in 2021 with an AMD 6800 XT, and of course, Wolfenstein: The New Order was already old news by then. Proton does miracles, but this game freezes my entire machine. The last time I saw something like this happen was with Monster Hunter World in 2018, on a much older version of Proton. I can reliably get the game to freeze my machine in the opening level of The New Order, even across multiple versions of Proton, even with the renderapi launch parameter that should switch it back to OpenGL. Of course, even if I report this to Steam support, they'll tell me that they only support Steam Deck and not bespoke Linux desktops, and the game works fine on my Steam Deck, but would they be interested in some logs and a bug reported against the GitHub project? This is assuming no one here has an easy fix, of course. But if not, how would I get the logs? I wouldn't know what I'm looking at in those logs, personally. I'm also not sure if they'll write out correctly. Because it freezes the entire machine, I end up having to hard shut down the computer by the power button, and once or twice during my experiments, it failed to mount my game SSD (a separate drive from where my OS is installed) at boot, and I had to set up the automatic mount in the partition manager again. So assuming that doesn't impact the ability to write out the logs, I can collect them with some instructions, if you kind strangers in the know wouldn't mind providing them, please. And if Valve is interested in looking at them.

They are no longer going to be any form of independent from Sony/PlayStation anymore. The Final Shape's sales were never going to be able to prevent this from happening, says Jeff Grubb on his morning news show (paraphrased).

Whelp...I'm out. (I expected this to happen before they said anything though, honestly.)

The Tournaments

These are going to be skewed through the lens of what I was personally interested in watching, but there was a lot worth watching.

Mortal Kombat 1

SonicFox took their 7th Evo championship this past weekend using at least three different characters, by my count. Strangely, they took the title in a mirror match against Nicolas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEYVZzJnQEs

Nicolas and his twin brother ScorpionProcs have been on a tear through the Mortal Kombat scene since the world emerged from the pandemic, and they're both so young that they still need a parental escort to these events. The two of them have both been taking wins at different majors, typically only challenged by the likes of SonicFox and Rewind. ScorpionProcs didn't make it into top 6 this time around, but Nicolas got very close this time.

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike

3rd Strike is a game I tend to like more in theory than in practice. The parry system is awesome, but it's also so pervasive that it basically invalidates zoning, a major component of most fighting games that introduces some variety to play styles. Being 25 years old with no patches, in an era where characters like Sean were designed to be bad on purpose, it also settled into a rigid meta. That meta is Yun and, if you're lucky, Chun-Li, which is what the top 6 looked like in Evo Japan this year. The top 6 this weekend somehow had 6 different characters, if I'm not mistaken, including when players picked a pocket character, like Elena as a counter pick.

Ordinarily, the most exciting match will be grand finals, not just because the most is at stake but also because it tends to be where you'll find the two best players in the closest competition. 3rd Strike this year is the exception. The star of the show is a player I'd heard about months ago from Justin Wong videos, Hayao. I had been following this person in particular through the entire bracket, hoping for him to bring a Hugo to top 6, and he delivered. He unfortunately was masterfully counter picked by his opponent in winners with a knowledge check that he just didn't have the answer to, but Hayao's match in losers quarterfinals was one of the all time greatest fighting game matches I've ever seen, on the 20th anniversary of Evo Moment 37.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8DpmASk_ho

Skullgirls (community tournament)

Personally, this is my main game, so it means more to me than any of the 8 games that Evo ran in an official capacity this year. It may have only been a 47 person bracket (it's harder to convince great players to sign up for a community tournament when there's no promise that Evo will avoid scheduling conflicts with other games), but the developer threw up a pretty substantial prize pool--from what I can tell, it was over $16k--and there were at least three great players who had a shot at winning the whole thing, Dekillsage, Reis, and SonicFox. Dekillsage finally took a bracket over SonicFox, winning decisively from the winners side of the bracket after sending SonicFox to losers. Unfortunately, there will be a bit of lag on the VOD, so I don't have it ready this morning to link to.

Guilty Gear Strive

One by one, my friends and I watched all sorts of top players get eliminated as they narrowed it down to top 6. The Strive scene is packed full of people who could have taken it all, and neither of the previous two Evo Vegas champions, Umisho and Leffen, made it into top 6. I like watching him play, but I never would have predicted Nitro would take it all, playing Jack-O', no less; the previous two years were both won by Happy Chaos players. Congrats to Nitro!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwUYASA9hc4

EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot! I love the things that the crowd gets into at big majors. There will be "See ya later!"s during Marvel 3 and "TO MEMPHIS!" in Street Fighter 6, but I heard a new one when Zando came on stage and played his Asuka. Asuka is a zoner who's playing Magic: The Gathering in the middle of a fighting game match, and he can cast a bunch of spells that send out cubes, giving the opponent no choice except to block for 10, 15, or 20 seconds in some cases. It's strong, but it sucks for the viewing experience and for the defender. So, facetiously, the crowd will yell "CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUBES!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ik06KNRJIo

Street Fighter 6

I didn't follow the Street Fighter V scene very closely, largely because I didn't really like Street Fighter V, but Punk got his win that sounds like it was a long time coming. There was some phenomenal adaptation from both players. Punk with his masterful shimmies, that his opponents would catch on to a bit too late, and then Punk getting stingy with his meter on three different rounds that cost him three different games as his opponent Big Bird capitalized.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-C435HjNhg

The Reveals

SVC Chaos shadow dropped after the KOF XV finals, which caught everyone off guard. I would have thought that this would be part of a Capcom Vs. SNK collection, but the fact that this game is re-released at all bodes well for a CVS collection later. The reputation this game has is that it's the worst of those three games that SNK and Capcom collaborated on, but it's good to have it re-released with rollback anyway.

Somehow, Heihachi returned. Death is already meaningless in fighting game stories, but Bandai Namco has been beating the "Heihachi is dead" drum for a while now and even leaned into it in the reveal. It seems the only thing they're capable of killing is Soul Calibur. RIP.

Guilty Gear Strive showed off the next four characters coming to the game. Dizzy is a fan favorite, and I'm excited for her XX era song, "Awe of She", to be added to the Strive soundtrack. Venom is another fan favorite, but I wasn't sure if he'd be added due to his similarities to the current version of Jack-O' in the game. I never would have predicted Lucy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners.

Street Fighter 6 showed off Terry Bogard, and his face looks weird.

The largest Evo to date by unique entrants, growing by about 8% over the previous year, which makes sense since Street Fighter 6 is very young still and Tekken 8 is here for the first time. Guilty Gear Strive has hardly dropped off at all despite being 3 years old, and this will be history's largest Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike bracket. Plus, other nerdy data is here, including which players of game X also signed up for game Y, and what the most popular games by country are. Competition ought to be pretty damn good this year.