The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

On the night of Valentine’s, I got a call from Essner asking me if I wanted to go to this release night Marvel Vs Capcom 3 tournament thing. I said yes, because, I dunno, it’s the sort of thing I said yes to, and my copy didn’t show up early. We went, then, to the Wal-Mart to play in this thing.

Of course, it looked, for a long time, that we were the only two people who were going to play. A Wal-Mart employee, and myself. Eventually they got the system set up, though, and Essner and I just started dicking around with the game. It was a ton of fun! Soon, another employee who got off of work who was a comic fan jumped in, so we had a three person “tournament” on our hands.

I started out really strong. There was awhile there when I was playing as Chris and was kind of unstoppable with him. I was also getting some pretty good hits in with Felicia as well, which surprised me. As the night went on and we stopped dicking around and started the “tournament” proper, though, I had lost my advantage. I didn’t know the moves, and when I am clueless on moves, but almost know them, and face people who are doing more button mashing? I lose every time, because I focus on trying to execute moves I don’t know. Of course, it also hurt that Essner knows just enough to supplement his button mashing with well-timed specials, making him hard to read.

Essner ended up using a lot of Dante and Iron Man, which served him well. Although I didn’t play as either, Dante seems both really good and really fun! He’s got a nice variety of very flashy attacks, and a bunch of different types of projectiles so that you never know exactly what he’s going to throw at you. Iron Man is Iron Man. Since none of us figured out how to super-jump, Unibeam was pretty godly. I couldn’t, say, cancel it with Chris’s gunfire. I knew I needed to super jump over it, but I couldn’t pull it off.

Other guy (I think I might have heard his name, but I don’t remember it) was a big Captain America fan, and actually got to be pretty damn solid with Cap by the end of the night. His play with the other characters (Deadpool and Spidey, mostly) couldn’t really cut it, though, especially not in the face of Essner’s well-timed beams and button mashes.

Anyway, it was decided that we’d all have two “lives” and the last one with a life left would win a free copy of the game. Once we started this tournament part, Essner didn’t lose once. I had a very close loss against him, if I recall, but basically he just steamrolled us all, and scored himself a free copy of the game. A game he wasn’t planning on buying, since all the play of it he’s going to do is probably going to happen at my house, and I already have the limited edition coming in the mail, but hey. That’s pretty cool, and it had a special cover art, so that’s nice.

After the tournament, the manager, who is not a gamer but recognized Ryu and Chun-Li and probably played Street Fighter back in the day, picked up the controller to play one match, and completely creamed Mr. Other Guy, laughing his ass off. Basically, the manager kept summoning in support characters, which we hadn’t really been doing the whole time we were playing, and the Other Guy had no idea what was happening and wasn’t blocking.

Anyway, it was a very interesting experience, and I got to dick around and see how badly they nerfed Tron early. (Seriously, the new command for her dash is going to take a LOT of getting used to, as it’s the key to Tron being any good and it’s much harder to pull off.) I also got this poster I hung up in my office. All in all, a fun time, and soon I’ll get to start working with MvC3 for reals, so that’ll be fantastic as well!