The Super Ultra Big Bad Fighting Game Tournament Turbo, a Concept

 Hello everyone. Before I jump into what I decided to write up today, my plans to get back into doing art got sidelined due to this Winter being a bit more of a mess than I would have liked. Plus I got a bunch of WIP's still on the fence that I wanted to knock out some more progress on before adding on more to my agenda.

Anyways, here's what I decided to write up, and it's something you likely wouldn't expect from this blog at the end of the day. Last year I made a post on Combo Breaker, a yearly fighting game event that, alongside Frosty Faustings and CEO, excelled in showing a large variety of modern and retro fighters with thriving communities of various sizes--all as main tournaments. And well, after witnessing one of the tournaments offered in both Combo Breaker 2022 and Frosty Faustings 2023, the "Mystery Tournament", a Warioware-style mashup of random head-to-head games that sometimes broke away from the grounds of a fighting game, I suddenly began to brainstorm something which combined the strange and often forgotten (sometimes for good reasons) fighters featured in the Mystery Tournament with the absurdity and... some of the "badness" of Games Done Quick's Awful Games and Silly Games blocks.

And after some experimentation and further thought, I landed on the idea of a fighting game event that centered around two types of competitive brawlers: One would be for the main roster, featuring "kusoge" fighters that have obvious mechanical flaws, poor balancing, and overall lots of "jank" but still feature enough redeeming qualities and amusing aspects underneath to make for a thrilling and enjoyable player and spectator e-sport that can excite crowds and provide a serious competitive match in spite of the issues surrounding the game. Comedy fighters designed to be silly by their nature, and weaker installments in otherwise well known fighting game franchises would make up the remainder of the main list.

The other, more interesting category of fighters would be for the "Awful" roster: fighting games that suffer from even more design flaws compared to the main selection and are infamous among the FGC for how bad they are but can still result in good, dumb fun with players, commentators, and audiences coming together to hype them up like a serious competition in spite of their sheer lack of quality. However, anything that is so broken and reviled that nothing good can possibly come out of it would not be featured, and I did make a small blacklist of games that would have no shot of appearing, either for just not plain working in a competitive environment (Rise of the Robots) or not offering a two player option (Human Killing Machine).

While certainly not a finalized list, these were some examples for the main roster of games:

• Breaker's Revenge (Arcade)
• Castlevania Judgement (Wii)
• Cho Aniki: Bakuretsu Ranto Hen (SNES)
• Da Kyanta 2 (PC)
• Dive Kick (PC)
• Dong Dong Never Die (PC)
• Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring (PS1)
• Guilty Gear: the Missing Link (PS1)
• Hokuto no Ken (PS2)
• Jackie Chan in Fists of Fire (Arcade)
• Mortal Kombat 4 (PS1/N64)
• Bishojo Senshi Salior Moon S (SNES)
• Shrek Super Slam (Gamecube)
• Sonic the Fighters/Sonic Championship (Xbox 360)
• Street Fighter the Movie: the Game (Arcade)
• Street Fighter I (PC, via a recent compilation)
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)
• Tekken 4 (PS2)
• Warpath: Jurassic Park (PS1)

And then for the Awful Fighting Game roster:

• Balls 3D/Scultor's Cut (SNES/3DO)
• Brutal: Paws of Fury/Above the Claw (Genesis/32X)
• Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls (SNES)
• Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu (GBA, use Link Cable)
• Kart Fighter (NES) (Super Kart Fighter mod)
• Kasumi Ninja (Jaguar)
• Mortal Kombat Advance (GBA, use Link Cable)
• Pit Fighter (SNES)
• Rise of the Robots 2: Resurrection (PS1)
• Shaq Fu (Genesis)
• The Simpsons Wrestling (PS1)
• Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi (PS1)
• Ultra Vortek (Jaguar)
• Way of the Warrior (3DO)

Of course neither of these lists are final, as I don't have enough experience with every game from this list to form a completely fleshed-out and polished game roster since I'm going off of others' coverages and retrospectives for the most part.

With that said, and now that you have an idea of what kind of event I'd be interested in organizing, how exactly would a tournament like this even work? As much as I would love to see it done live, I think the most realistic outcome would be a online event, if only because an event like this wouldn't be able to achieve the playerbase or audience of a real fighting game community event in a strictly local environment because it doesn't have any of the big-name fighters currently on the market as part of the tournament lineup. And to be fair, they would have easily overshadowed the main games of the event if they were hosted and stick out like a sore thumb.

If I was closer to the FGC and knew more about tournament organizing, I would be a lot more interested in possibly getting an event like this going as a yearly tradition celebrating the weird and janky fighters of an era long-passed. Until then, this wound up as yet another addition to the ideas pile and with nowhere else to put it, I decided to post it here. Who knows, maybe one year if I ever get into streaming, I might do a grand showcase of these fighters on my Twitch channel, but a full-blown tournament may be simply too much to ask just one person to organize and manage on their own.