AEX COOP. CUP 1 weekend

Been lazy about this... Anyway, we held this tournament in Milan on April the 25th, at the usual place. It was right after the ranbat season and just before Super Street Fighter IV, perfect timing to do something different. Teamplay is always a cool thing so this time it was the main concept behind the tournaments, with the nice bonus of the first BlazBlue tournament in Italy. So it was like this, SFIV -> 3on3, 3s -> 2on2, BB -> 1on1. I actually wanted 3s to be 3on3 too, and we had the amount of people to do so, but Fugo and Fran suggested otherwise, so whatever. At least the tournament became more unpredictable this way, even though it was all about the 3 best teams hands down: me+LEVA, Fran+Gogu and Fugo+mitsu. But more on this later.

I'll try to be short on the useless stuff. Tournament was Sunday but I managed to reach Milan on Saturday, getting together with 3s heads and eating at Oscar's, an epic pasta place where I wasn't really able to finish off my stuff. Just epic.
After that we met for the first time Vernon from Rome and Stratos, that traveled all the way from Naples with Manlio! This is real love for 3s...
A lot of great / new people showed up the day after as well. I'm mostly talking about the BlazBlue guys (what a great crew, let's keep it up guys) and all the people that filled the 12 spots available for 3rd Strike. We had our usual players plus people from south (team Borbonacchi) and Ziano from center Italy. Great playing with them and see that they did pretty well in tournament too.

Anyway, the day started with BlazBlue. I'm playing and enjoying it A LOT. To be honest nowadays I'm playing BB rather then SSFIV... Anyway, everything went pretty well except for my (lovely) Noel knocked out by two Litchis (Galrod, who I play A LOT online, and Wronged, "old" PS3 player). But no problem, I got to top8 anyway (7th place with Ronove), and Galrod got second place after Kazikal (Noel/Nu), not without some bizzarre pad drama, lol.

Street Fighter IV went like this: team Rome (Beralius, Sean, Shirl) was definitely out of luck for the day, team Milan (Rushing, Bucio, Coden) could have won but didn't, team Torino (MAO, alexarandom, Rambo) won mostly thanks to Rambo, a dictator that proceeded to timeout every-fucking-one to death, viewers included. I gotta say that this game was, and still is, boring as hell. I just can't stand some (a lot of) matchups/characters... Whatever, to each his own I guess.
Oh, good showing from team Milano2 (leva, spinal, trapy) as well. 3rd place, definitely the surprise of the day.

ZZZZZZZZ anyway

Ok, now the main thing. This 3s tournament was probably the best ever because of too many reasons. Me and LEVA played badly most of the time because we're mostly playing other games right now and... Who am I kidding, that's not the right reason for me. Look at me vs. gogu. I had it, did a terrible mistake at the end of 2nd round and then immediately switched my brain off. And against fugo I was doing something like that. Last round, huge lead and I end up winning with only thanks to a lucky hit at the end. Chokkini-time...
Whatever. It went down like this: first of all we defeated Ziano+CFC (DU/MA), then it was WSF already and we defeated Mitsu+Fugo (MA/UR) to enter top3. So in WF we finally met fran+gogu (YUx2, damn) and lost by a hair. In LF we met mitsu+fugo again and won again, only to lose in the first set of GF. MVP of it all was gogu. I talked about him enough, he got serious about the game and with fran he's been the most dedicated player in the last months... Good stuff guys. Of course me and LEVA weren't so happy about the second place but really, between those 3 teams it could have gone in any way. Definitely a great challenge, I want more and I know I'm not the only one. Also, the finals were actually - for once - pretty hyped. This game will never die.

Highlight of the tournament? Accidentally dropping my stick on LEVA's feet after our victory in LF, lol. You can hear him scream in the video too! Talking about the videos, here's the playlist of top3:
>>> AEX COOP. CUP 1 - 3rd Strike 2on2 videos <<<

Oh, our team was named JINBE-SAN. Just wanted to let you know.

Full results for every game and stuff will be up on arcade-extreme sooner or later. In the meanwhile... Play more BlazBlue!
Really, do so. I'm loving Noel a lot (playing her properly feels kinda great, plus learning all that stuff was almost natural... Great feeling) but I'm actually looking forward to play Tsubaki on Continuum Shift. More on this in some other post, maybe.