Tag Archives: audiable facepalm moments

VP tops SK in a seemingly half-filled arena

I watched the grand final of DreamHack Masters Las Vegas last night and I’ve got a few questions that I want to, at first, ask rhetorically then immediately revert to type by spilling disorganized prose into this post via my keyboard.

DreamHack sure as hell doesn’t give a shit about fucks, right?

Personally, I don’t mind the lack of a language filter when it comes to expressing how important a previous play was or how impossible it appears that a certain team would lose in a situation, but compared to the last big CSGO tournament, the ELEAGUE Major (which Valve are keen on identifying as the Atlanta Major presented by ELEAGUE), there seemed to be a more relaxed-yet-mature atmosphere surrounding the entire production. While innuendo wasn’t necessarily the center stage of analyst desk segments and floor interviews, I don’t think the amount of joking present in this establishment was terribly out of place or demeaning to the nature of the broadcast.

How about them Poles, folks?

Virtus.Pro proved it deserves to remain a top-tier professional team by defeating the recently reorganized SK Gaming roster to win DH Masters Las Vegas two games to one (8-16 Cobblestone, 16-11 Train, 16-13 Mirage). The $200k USD first prize is a slightly bigger payoff than the team’s second place showing at the Atlanta Major and it’s about time.

SK’s roster woes aren’t really woes, but I’m sure they’re pretty disappointed with how quickly VP deconstructed their game plan. When the Virtus-plow is on point, you get rekt. Considering VP only needed the one map to warm back up after an extended downtime from playing, it’s pretty clear that the Polish side have rediscovered the advantage to its rock-solid roster in the current meta of CSGO.

Where was the audience?

I think it’s safe to say that the attendance for such an important event for CSGO was a little disappointing. There’s so many pockets of empty seats that are shown on camera even during wide-shots of the stage between rounds.

Now, I understand the MGM Grand arena is a considerably larger venue for a States-side DreamHack event to be held in, but you’d think they would be trying to give out tickets left and right to entice people to take a winter vacation to Las Vegas and watch a premier offline CSGO tournament live.

After taking two seconds to look up ticket prices to see how expensive it was to get into the arena for the weekend, I instantly understood why the areas in front of teams were filled with so many patches of empty seats: they were assigned to the $150 Premium ticket holders.

A bit of an oversight for an event that didn’t sell out.

Here’s what I learned from CheckPoint S3E24.

  • Sports games that aren’t FIFA can go die in a fire. That said, I hope they rip this non-FIFA sports game a new one.
  • Black Friday jokes? Neato. “Celebrate family by murdering family” is a bit too violent of a thought to be funny, in my view. I’d have gone with “Celebrate family by lining up outside a retail establishment for days on end without them.”
  • A new free-to-play Soul Calibur game? Now this could be a real step forward for fighting games. Their previous titles had weak stories to combine with a campaign-style mode that made playing a fighting game alone a reasonable notion. The depth of the character creation tools in previous titles in the series would allow players to completely customize the move set. If anything like this is on the horizon for the next Soul Calibur, I think it’s time for CAPCOM and other fighting game publishers to take notice.
  • With the cameras being shipped (or promoted) with the next-gen consoles, Sony’s approach to outsourcing photo content verification to Facebook seems like a pretty good call. Not only does the third-party integration strengthen how connected the Sony service feels, but it adds more and more value to having a Facebook account (along with a real name which is verified by the Facebook account) associated with your gaming profile. For consoles, the trend of moving away from anonymity doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
  • The football management genre of simulation games has finally come to American sports simulations in such a way as to finally be noticed. It’s not groundbreaking. It’s not even newsworthy to explain how it works further than “it’s fantasy basketball in your fantasy basketball based on how fantasy basketball works with other meta bullshit”.
  • “I hope senpai makes it to the Final Four.” OH DEAR GOD GRAHAM PLEASE LET’S NOT MIX COLLEGE BASKETBALL REFERENCES WITH JAPANESE DATING SIM-SPEAK.
  • A “recursive Xbox setup” is exactly how I’ll be using my systems when I decide to pull the trigger on the Xbox One purchase, provided the display lag isn’t terribly game-shattering.
  • A short reference to Sony’s “WE OWN YOUR X” clause in relation to communication over the Playstation network stuff. But it does kind of make sense, don’t use a gaming console to facilitate drug deals. Do it on the street corner like everybody else.