South East Asia Majors 2014

Wasn’t able to post anything last week because I had to prepapre for my trip to the fighting game tournament happening in Singapore known as Southeast Asia Majors 2014 or simply SEAM2014.

For this year there’s Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, Tekken Tag 2, King of Fighters 13, Blazblue: Chronophantasma and Ultra Street Fighter 4. Last year, there were ten plus games, but having a smaller number of games help tournament organizers focus more in marketing the event, and ensuring that everything goes smoothly.

People from all over the world fly over to SEAM2014 to find out how good they are and if they can win the top prize of the games they are joining in. Contestants from home country Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia, Australia and the Philippines are part of the event can be found in this tournament for personal glory and a bit of nationalistic pride for the fighting game community of their home country.

Casuals ongoing while the tournament is underway. For first time visitors, I do suggest you tuck away your shyness and approach players and ask them if they can play with you. This type of thigns don’t happen often afterall!

Streaming area where the second part of the tournaments are being held like Tekken and Blazblue.

Arcade sticks galore! Do you own one for fighting games or do you prefer to use pad?

Some Capcom vs Snk 2 action going on where the arcade stuff are located. Despite being an old game, it’s still being played by a lot of people until now!

The Blazblue Team of the Philippines, that’s me second from the left. Last year there were only 2 players from the Philippines that joined SEAM, this year we had a whopping 12 players! We even brought our best player to join as well.

This is the Imperium Pro Team. They’re the ones who sponsored the Marvel players to Singapore.

IPT. Garrett wearing his grandma’s shirt for luck, which actually got him to 2nd place in Marvel!

Erick, one of the Ph players getting ready for his KOF13 match with Singapore’s best, Xian.

Arcsys, the makers of Blazblue and Guilty Gear, also had a booth in the event. They sold keychains, clear files and a very lovely Tsubaki Dakimakura. Too bad they got sold out really fast.

Terumi/Hazama dakimakura can also be found. Personally, I was looking for the Azrael mousepad for the lulz. Besides, it’s a great conversation starter.

Even my comrade in the Philippine Fighting Game Community couldn’t resist this dakimakura.

For the players who registered way ahead of time, they’re given free memorial booklets which are somewhat hard to find these days so it’s a real treat for BB and GG players to receive these.

William Ku Ni, one of the head organizers for the BB tournament, was giving away lots of free Arcsys stuff as well to people from sticks and towels, to posters and fan artbooks. I managed to snag one myself ^^;;

BB community in one pic! Although that’s not everybody because there were 51 participants for the BB tourney!

After a long weekend, we finally have our top 8!

In 7th place we have Yensen who managed to beat the odds and got into Top 8! Right beside him is Souma-san who works in ArcSys who is representing his company today. The man is fun and he loves Millia Rage’s character design a lot!

Tied also for 7th place is Hiro. I managed to play with his Taokaka last year using my Hakumen, too bad I wasn’t able to play with him with my Azrael.

Ourozama, a net player, got 5th place in this year’s tournament. Do any of you guys netplay fighting games?

Dinman, from Malaysia, also got 5th place. His Tager managed to knock me to loser’s bracket. It’s always a Tager that manages to beat me down oTL

Vietnamese player Ice Cube received 4th place with his optimal combos from Azrael.

3rd place goes to Complexity for his really superb mu12 zoning performance.

At 2nd place we have Singapore’s finest, Seo, who gave everyone a heart attack with his close call matches versus the champion.

And finally the Champion! From the Philippines we have Blickwinkel who not only wins the pot money and some cool prizes, but also gets a spot in the Arc Revo tournament! Me and some comrades sponsored our best player because we believed he had the talent to grab the gold and put his skills to the test in Japan. Congrats bro!

Once again congratulations to Robert Andrada aka “Insan” aka Blickwinkel for winning the tournament. It was a really fulfilling experience to actually see one of our players, and a friend, become a champion on the spot.

ALSO, we were able to get several other placings as well. IPT Garrett managed to get 2nd in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 beating several of the japanese players and Xian who were the favorites to win (nobody saw that Spiderman!), Deo for finishing 7th in UMVC3 and AK for getting 2nd also in Tekken Tag 2!

Aside from the main contest, we also had a Tsubaki/Izayoi tournament wherein players can only use Izayoi or Tsubaki and it’s only one round, single eliminations. Benedict, Dix, Padilla, another Philippine player, won this. We all know he’ll have a better night’s rest with this now.

Gelo and I were at commentators side during pool 4. During Seo and Blickwinkel’s match I was extremely out of words while Gelo was firing word after word like a machine gun which was fun to listen to as well!

I love the South East Asia Majors as it really brings together different people from really different cultures. Despite those differences, we all love fighting games. We’ll trashtalk each other, beat each other, taunt, but at the end of the match we all get along quite well. Above picture was taken by Edmund Yeong. This was a rock-paper-scissor tournament (YES, IT’S A JANKEN TOURNEY) wherein the prizes are Razer equipments like keyboards and mouse. To the left we have Alden from the Philippines and to the right we have Alfred Kunae (RChusan) who won the Janken tourney. Time to practice lol

In less than ten minutes RChusan and Blickwinkel got along really well and started trash talking each other while playing for twenty straight matches in Street Fighter. Hope SEAM2015 will happen again in Singapore. The community there is really lively and they get along quite nicely with the others as well, ithelps that it’s easy to go around the city too! Till next year! Shoutouts to Rebel 2 and the Tough Cookie crew for bringing everyone together! You can find out more about Tough Cookie here.

Links to SEAM2013
SEAM2013 DAY 1
SEAM2013 DAY 2