Nonsense Machine.

Montreal Massacre

This past weekend I travelled to Montreal in the company of some of the Street Fighter guys from Toronto. This is the first time that I’ve travelled to a tournament and my first time participating in one for Street Fighter. I attended not with the intention to win, but just to have fun.

We left Toronto around 2:30PM and made it to Montreal around 8:30PM. After droppign by MTLHQ quickly to say hi we went off to find a hotel and meet up with the rest of the Toronto/Waterloo guys. Dinner ended up being Chinese food where pineapple chicken was a huge bait out. Please see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g9_uqfwiMA

Afterwards we just hung out in one of the hotel rooms and played SF matches/drank before going back to our hotel room and continued the drinking. (Also I mean that JS, Quan, DarkDragon, and Davero were drinking not me.)

After roughly 6 horus of sleep we woke up ate some lunch and headed to the already packed tournament venue. I believe there were about 60 or so people there and boy was it hot. I’m glad I wore my Team Spooky T-Shirt otherwise I’m sure I would’ve fainted at one point or another. As it was, I had to take a few trips outside into the cold air.

Arturo was running late to the tournamentso Dave had to hold it down for our team in the first two team matches. The first one he started off and OCV’d. in the second match I lost to a Balrog and Dave continued on to OCV them while I went to pick up Art from the lobby.

The next match I had to play was against Karamba, a Ken player from Montreal. Admittedly I was extremely nervous to play against him because I was watching him play earlier and he seemed really solid. I was also nervous because the match was on stream but at least Arturo was there to give me advice throughout the match. Even though I’m waiting to see the recording of that game, I know that I should have been anti-airing him. I’ll go over it once MTLSF releases the videos.

In my next match against Quan who is also from Toronto, I was able to get a round off him! Honestly, that was my goal for the weekend and I’m so happy that I was able to accomplish it. however I did drop it pretty hard in the last round because I was scared of the Sagat fireballs. I’m still a little unused to playing a game where moves like fireballs give out chip damage and eat away at your health. Even though it isn’t much, whenever I see my health bar going down because of the fireballs it worries me and I get reckless. Poorly timed jump ins and lots of button pressing that shouldn’t occur.

Arturo made the point to me afterwards that I shouldn’t be so scared of the chip damage. It may feel bad at first to have to eat it, but if I can pull of one combo it will more than even up the odds. Often times the opponent will get impatient and try to rush down too because they feel confident about locking you down at the beginning of the round. I’m going to try and keep that in mind as I continue to learn and play.

Overall I had a great time in Montreal. I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t get much of an opportunity to see the city but I did get my poutine! After the tournament around 5AM, the Montreal guys took us to a 24hr restaurant that served up some amazing poutine. I had the smoked meat one and it was delicious! It was great getting to meet more people in the scene and talk to those who I saw at T11 but didn’t chat with. Everything is a learning experience and I can only improve from here on out.

Time to get playing. =)