Write up of the day
The Write up I promised I'd do
Hello Gentlemen, this is the official first Irish Smash tournament write-up, or "Tir Na Smash" as we're now calling it, which is a name I'm glad took off.
I am now going to go into my account of the day. Forgive my excess of words, whenever I write about things, I am very verbose.
Saturday
The day began with us seeing our set-up on the side of Vaticon's gaming room. Three 14 inch TVs and plenty of plug sockets.
Myself, Tadonnen/Lauri and Kalignar/Darragh were the first to show up just before 11 in order to run things, with Darragh's Gamecube and a few controllers.
Eamon and Michael were next to arrive (I can't remember which one is 2022), making them the earliest attendants who weren't running the thing. Zac and friend of his showed up soon enough, and that was enough to get some
four player games going.
At this point though, nobody had brought any additional consoles, and I was concerned I would need to make a trip in my car to get an extra Wii from somewhere.
These fears were immediately put to rest by the arrival of Eriatarka/Jamie who was awesome enough to bring his Wii and a few third party controllers. I had an extra copy of Smash with me, so this immediately brought us up to enough for
eight player
games.
Padraig and Cian (not of Smashboards) had also joined the fold
It's worth mentioning at this point that we promised we'd bring cake, and this
was not a lie! This picture is of the plate of cake about 2/3rds already eaten, if I had thought to get a picture of the original amount of cake, it would be much more impressive.
By 12pm, which was my originally posted time for the START of sign-ups, we already had about nine people signed on, and I was feeling pretty optimistic about the whole thing.
Lynkx/Matt, Gory_Snake/Nathan, with their friends Evan and Roberto were the next to arrive, and bless em, they brough an extra gamecube.
This of course brought us to
twelve player
games!.
Enough people to occupy three screens was my most optimistic prediction for this tournament, and we did this in really short time. Good job all!
I insisted we mix up the groups on the three tvs so people were more "mingled" (Not just playing with the people they'd come to the tournament with) and also that everyone used their real names, since I steadfastly believe using internet handles in real-life is stupid.
As 2 o clock came close to rolling around, we had 18 sign-ups for the tournament, so I began making up the tournament brackets.
Since this was my show, and I had gone absolutely MAD with power (bwahahahaha), I thought it might be cool to NOT do the brackets randomly, but to actually draw up the seedings so that nobody was playing a friend of theirs in the first round.
The logic behind this being that the about three years ago I came to a small smash
tournament in Dublin from way down south. A friend of mine and I spent four hours on the
train each way to attend, and I ended up knocking him out in round one, which kind of
sucked for both of us.
I checked with the attendees to make sure nobody thought this was too stupid, but
everyone seemed cool with it, so I drew up the brackets for the singles tournament, which ended up looking like
this!
There was also a kickass projector at the far side of the room, where one guy was playing
Audiosurf on a PC, so I made an effort at persuading him to give up his projector for our
tournament.
It worked.
I also asked the Vaticon staff if we could get
more projectors than that.
We did.
We got two more.
Which brought us up to three.
Which was pretty awesome.
At this point I have to say that I was really proud how we expanded and took over pretty much the whole games room.
Here's a good shot of a bunch of us, with Lynkx/Matt on his camcorder.
The Vaticon staff were well impressed, and some poor fellow who was running a Halo tournament asked us, completely mystified, how we had such an awesome turnout.
"Lots of postings online, and fliers in shops." we replied.
With the amount of attendance we had, we could have actually filled five screens, but we only had enough equipment for three.
Just before the tournament got underway, a fellow by the name of Stefan wanted to sign up
(which would have given us uneven numbers), and insisted that Aidan/Pikaville was "On his way".
I knew Aidan was really good, and the tournament wouldn't be the same if he wasn't included, so I randomly stabbed my finger at the seedings, and put them in between Zac/Shane and Stephen/Evan.
It's at this point as well, Matt and I noticed there was nobody called "Risky" on the tournament sheet. This we found surprising.
In the first round, Darragh beat Roberto, Matt beat Eamon, Cian beat Lauri, Jamie beat Gareth, Nathan beat Michael, Zac beat Shane, Aidan (who showed up just in time) beat Stefan, Evan beat Stephen, Brian beat Colm, and I beat Padraig, making the second round seedings look like
this.
In the second round, Matt beat Darragh, Jamie beat Cian, Nathan beat Zac, Aidan beat Evan and I beat Brian; which left us with what we referred to as
The Final Five.
To decide the semis, we agreed that we'd each have one match against each other, and whoever lost the most was eliminated.
Jamie was eliminated here, but considering we had to persuade him to even enter the
tournament in the first place, I think he kicked all kinds of butt, and with Kirby of all characters!
For the semis, Matt and Nathan played each other. I don't know if it sucked any less for them as friends to eliminate one another in round 4 as opposed to round 1, but Nathan won here, and secured his place in the final.
I had the pleasure of playing Aidan. It was an awesome match I really enjoyed which came right down to the final life in our third match, but he was too good for me, and I was next to be eliminated.
The final match then was between
Aidan and Nathan.
I thought it was awesome as well that when we declared the final was taking place, absolutely everybody in the room dropped what they were doing to come and watch.
Matt was good enough to record these, for our viewing pleasure:
Round One.
Round Two.
Final Round.
In the end, Aidan's "Zombieshiek" reigned supreme (I'm the pleb at the end who declares Aidan to be the best player in Ireland, I didn't even notice Matt was filming), and we had to stick an extra A4 page on the tournament list because Lauri got a bit carried away with her big fonts.
Congratulations Aidan!
Sponsored by
Coke!
At point, I decided that we might as well do the doubles tournament right then and there, because we had even numbers for teams, and everyone who entered the singles tournament has expressed interest in the doubles.
So after a quick flurry of taking names, and deciding the team orders ACTUALLY randomly this time (by rolling a d8 borrowed from a Dungeons and Dragons game), and the listings looked like
this.
I didn't see any matches but my own here, so I can't comment on everyone, but I'd never played a team game with team damage on. It was fun and chaotic. Myself and Darragh's teamwork unashamedly sucked, and I think we got just as many kills on each other as our opponents.
Our third match against Eamon and Michael was pretty close, and came down to myself, Eamon and Michael each on one life each, but they accidently hit each other with projectiles, which allowed me to kill them. D'oh!
Aidan and Zac beat Tommy and Lynchy, Cian and Stephen beat Pete and Stefan, Matt and Nathan beat Jamie and Gareth, and myself and Darragh just barely scraped by beating Eamon and Michael.
I don't recall much about the second round. Matt and Nathan beat Cian and Stephen,
Aidan and Zac beat myself and Darragh pretty soundly; with a lot of team killing
going on on both sides.
So the doubles final rolled around with
these four gentlemen in the running.
If you guys want my totally uneducated opinion, I think Matt and Nathan were the better team. Their movements were well co-ordinated and fluid looking. I rarely saw them hit each other, and didn't see any team-killing (unlike Me/Darragh and Eamon/Michael XD).
Unfortunately for them though, Aidan was the better player, and this resulted in an
Aidan/Zac victory.
Whoo!
At this point it was 5:58pm, and it occured to me there had been 20 or so of us in that room,
doing nothing but playing Smash for a solid seven hours.
Bloody hell.
Well done everyone, it was a testament to how awesome and fun you all were, that we were all able to stay so totally invested in the action for that long without getting bored.
Since I hadn't got to play Matt in the Final Five matches, I sat him down and we had a few good fights before we all broke up and went home.
I occurs to me as well though that I should have played Nathan more too, since we only had one match against each other, where my Captain Falcon proved rather ineffective against his Marth.
My personal awards for the day were:
Best Kirby I've ever seen: Jamie. Jamie's Kirby was surprisingly effective against everyone he played. I've never thought Kirby was an especially good character, but all Jamie's matches were really close as far as I could see.
Best Link I've ever seen: Matt. Much like Jamie, I've never considered Link to be that good a character, but Matt had a really interesting projectile spam style I'm going to try to work into my Link play.
Best Ness I've ever seen: Eamon. Who knew Ness could be played well in a tournament setting? I didn't. Eamon bloody well did though.
Most surprisingly mature Smasher for his age: Gareth, who as far as I could tell, was only about ten years old, and shockingly good at the game. And he didn't complain once when he lost, despite being the youngest person there by about 8 years.
(Actually if anyone sees him around Dublin, get his e-mail address for me. The one his mom gave me was wrong, and he only found out about the tournament through our fliers. Therefore he won't know about our next big meet unless we do more leaflets).
Thanks for bringing cake award: Lauri. Woo-hoo! Cake!
All pictures taken that day by myself and Matt
are visible here., including my awful looking attempt to take pictures of the Doubles Final.
Sunday
Sunday was a lot more low-key, there was only about a half dozen people, and I only had time to hang about for a few hours before getting Darragh to his train home.
So that day was just me, Darragh, Jamie, Gareth, Tommy, Lynchy and some other dude who hadn't attended Saturday playing.
What was funny though was that between the lot of us, we had enough equipment for one Wii, one copy of the game, four controller but no memory card.
So we played 3 stock winner stays on, items on low, all stages open, with the 14 characters
that come with the game.
That was heaps of fun too. Especially for me, since I hadn't played many free-for-alls on Saturday, what with all the organising.
Highlights of Sunday:
"You got the Mute City Trophy!"
Woo-hoo!
"You got the Maxim Tomato Trophy!"
Yeah! Get in!
"You unlocked Marth!"
Awesome!
Thus ends Tir Na Smash
In case any of our foreign observers are curious about who we play (and actually read this far through all my demented rantings) here's a list of characters played in the tournament as far as I could see:
Jamie: Kirby
Cian: Falco
Stephen:Link
Nathan: Marth
Matt: Link
Gareth: Samus (and some others)
Darragh: Samus
Stefan: Fox
Aidan: Shiek, Falco, Pikachu, Marth
Zac: Peach
Tommy: Roy
Padraig: Yoshi
Lynchy:Kirby
Eamon: Ness
Michael:Samus
Lauri: Shiek
Dave: Bowser, Mr. Game & watch, Mario, Samus,
Captain Falcon, Ganondorf, Kirby, Marth, Peach
I have to say again though, that was a really quality group of people. If anyone is interested in getting any regular Smash games going (not even tournaments, just games) be sure to send out an e-mail. We all have each other's addresses now.
- Dave
. Tourney thread http://smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=158843
) recently, man that game is fantastic. Although I can see what people mean about the floatiness and how its not as quick as Melee and all that, it's still a terrific experience. Looking between Kirby, Pikachu and ROB as future mains.