The High Roller’s Mystery Tournament at Northwest Majors last weekend was a pretty big success. We had 13 entrants and 10 different games. The entry fee was $40 a pop, hence the “High Rollers” prefix. It generated a prize pool of $520, which I believe was the 4th largest payout at the event, behind AE, Marvel, and the CPU Auction tournament.
For those who occasionally spend time outside, a mystery tournament is an event found almost exclusively in competitive fighting game circles. They tend to function as fun, cheap side-events during larger tournaments for big-deal games like Street Fighter. The idea is that players enter the tournament before they know what game or games they are going to be competing in. The tournament organizer then reveals the games and competitors must, in many cases, figure out how to defeat each other on the fly, as the games chosen are typically ones that are not normally played on any kind of serious competitive level.
The bracket went a little something like this
The games included were
Martial Masters – A legitimately awesome 2d fighting game themed around all the greatest wuxia tropes. Characters include a drunken master, a Wong Fei-Hung lookalike, and even a Christian missionary Westerner!
Not Tetris 2 – An odd version of Tetris from stabyourself.net, creators of the Mario/Portal crossover game.
Survival Arts – One of my favorite terrible Mortal Kombat-inspired fighters from the early 90s.
New Super Mario Bros. Wii – Coin Battle – The ultimate cure for friendship.
3 Count Bout – SNK’s lackluster answer to Capcom’s Saturday Night Slam Masters.
Outlaws of the Lost Dynasty – A Data East fighting game that was probably inspired in part by Samurai Showdown.
Blitz Meet – An interesting Pong-like indie game used for our Losers Semis.
Savage Reign – Our Winner’s Finals game. The predecessor to Kizuya Encounter.
Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style – Our Losers Finals game. A 3d fighter for PS1 featuring Wu-Tang Clan members as playable characters. We used cheat codes to unlock all playable characters as well as the “uncensored” mode that features wacky fatalities.
Nidhogg – Our Grand Finals game. This was a beta build for a yet-to-be-released game from indie developer Messhof. He was cool enough to supply us with a build for use in the tournament.
You can watch the Top 4 matches courtesy of Team Khaos Gaming’s youtube channel:
Nidhogg was pretty intense! Due to the interest it generated, I think I’m going to try to bring it out to some events so more people can try it out. Georgia also got plenty of crowd reaction footage I will be editing together with the game footage. It’s pretty amazing to watch our grand prize winner Heavy D get to the final screen, securing the point, but he still waits until “Winner” appears on the screen before springing to his feet with an uncharacteristically high-pitched victory scream.
Seattle’s “Heavy D” took home $520 for beating Portland’s “LordBBH” in Grand Finals
If you’re interested in entering one of my mystery tournaments, I hold them fairly regularly in the Lynnwood/Edmonds area. While this was a “High Rollers” event, the normal mystery tournies are usually only $1 to enter, so let me know if you are interested in attending my next one and I’ll make sure you have all the details!
Spin Drive Bastard 