Well, as everyone already knows… this year Shoryuken announced that they would be having an all female Super Street Fighter IV “Femme Fatale” Tournament at this years EVO. The responses have, not surprisingly, been very negative. From people being upset that Marvel was replaced with an all female tourney to people feeling that this is just WRONG to put females in a different group then males for SSF4… the overall community just really believes this is a horrible idea. I’m still a bit undecided about this whole situation.


Mid last year I competed in a tournament called the “Ladies of Street Fighter” tournament in Rowland Heights, CA. The turnout was pretty good and a couple of the girls really impressed me with their skills. A few of the girls were really taking SF4 seriously at the time and even AFTER the tournament was over a half dozen or so of the ladies who entered decided that they liked competing and continued to enter tournaments mostly dominated by men. Many of the girls used LOSF as a way to show people that they were serious about Street Fighter and they were recognized for their skills in a way that they wouldn’t have been if they had competed in an event as large as EVO for their first tournament. In short… LOSF was a great “welcome to the street fighter competitive scene” type of tournament. The tournament was less aggressive then your average tourney to a certain extent. There wasn’t as much crap talking, there was no entry fee so there wasn’t the thought of “I don’t want to lose all my money” and there were coaches by their side to help when the stress got too intense… the tournament was a very comfortable environment to start off in.

I believe all female tournaments are good when they are small and local. These tournaments are good for helping females to start in the competitive scene because, as everyone knows, males are very harsh and a lot of times are non-supportive of females being in the SF4 scene. While they SAY they want more females, a lot of them just want eye candy and don’t really encourage females to compete. It’s tough when competing with men having them say “everyone knows girls SUCK at SF4″ and a lot of times girls can’t handle the pressure. I’m not saying ALL girls can’t handle the pressure, I’m talking about girls who are new to Street Fighter, new to competitive gaming in general. Street Fighter 4 has the most rude community I’ve ever met, so having these little Female Only tournaments are definitely nice for not scaring them away, HOWEVER, I do NOT think that a large tournament like EVO is a good place to hold a Female Only SSF4 tourney.

I think that Jared said it best in his blog “But discouraging these women is exactly what the girls-only tournaments tend to do. While I can sort of understand the idea of nobility behind wanting to open the door to female Street Fighter players by giving them an accessible taste of what competitive play is all about, at the same time you’re essentially regulating them to a sideshow in the worse sense of the word. You’re saying that because they were born with a vagina, they’re clearly inferior and not competent enough to compete with the boys and this type of thinking — whether its intended or not — is bullshit and a slap to the face to all the women currently playing the game to even suggest this.”

I personally am leaning toward the side of not competing in EVOs all female tournament at this point in time. Basically with EVO being the LARGEST fighting game tournament in the US this is going to be an opportunity for these girls to be put in the spotlight for all of the SRK community to see and ridicule. Basically while many of the girls entering will not have been playing for very long… maybe even as little as a month or two since they could have heard about this last minute, there’s a very good chance that they could… well… “suck”. While they could be playing well for someone who has just recently picked up the game, the other players don’t know how long anyone has been playing… they don’t know how much time and dedication went into practice… all they see is “she can’t FADC into Ultra so she sucks” and that is a shame. I don’t think that any good will come out of this tournament. I’m being told that I should enter since there’s a very good chance I will place high, but I would rather play with the guys in the normal SSF4 tourney and go 0-2 then place top 3 in another female only tourney. Many of the guys competing in EVO are 2-10 year veterans of Street Fighter so beating any of them is a great accomplishment.

The last LOSF tournament also had some negative results. Yes, a good amount of the females who competed continued to compete but many also began ganging up on each other in a strive for attention. Rumors spread, alliances formed, people started turning on each other. What was supposed to be a tournament to bring together the female players ended up resulting in being the very thing that would prevent these people from becoming good friends. Jared writes, “The previous events were rife with high school-esque in-fighting amongst some of the competitors and brought out the worst amongst others, even those who weren’t even involved. Can anyone even remember who won the first “Ladies Night” tournament? Despite her being a very legit player, the internal trash talk ensured that it didn’t matter. “

I am still playing SF4 9 months later because I strive to be better. 2D fighting games were a weakness of mine and I’m working hard to level up in Street Fighter 4 specifically. I hope that the females who enter the SSF4 tourney at EVO are prepared to be put under a spotlight and a microscope and to deal with the negative comments that they most likely will receive. I also hope that some good comes of this tournament otherwise it’ll be a shame to lose the potential to have more females in the community. Best of luck to all of you girls who enter. Most likely I will just be entering the regular SSF4 tourney, but if you guys can convince me something good will come from entering this tourney I might do it. I’m still leaning toward no right now though.

The final day of the Pan American Championships was the day that StarSlay3r finally got some free time to do some interviews with the press. The following interview was done with Tico Gamers from Costa Rica and was posted on TicoGamers.com early this morning.

Escrito por K£¥RÖ
Miércoles 16 de Septiembre de 2009 10:31
Aunque el Pan American Championship 2009 termino, TG sigue con su cobertura post-evento con videos tanto del evento, juegos de GH WT y por supuesto las entrevistas a los mejores jugadores de América.

English translation:
Written by Keyro
September 16th 2009 10:31
Although the 2009 Pan American Championship is finished, TG continues with its post-event coverage with many videos of the event, GH:WT matches and of course interviews with the better players of America.



To learn more about Tico Gamers and for more coverage of the WCG Pan American Championships visit their official website

This footage is from the Howies Game Shack Guitar Hero event on Saturday, August 8th where StarSlay3r played for 4 hours taking on opponents non-stop and went undefeated on Guitar Hero: Metallica.

Quotes from what challengers told Howies GS Manager Brad Malvin

• “Ciji is badass, It was like going to a metallica concert.”
• “I got owned by Ciji, I want to play her again”
• “I don’t know how she does it but Ciji rocks at guitar hero”
• “when is she coming back?”

This Sunday, after sleeping in from my long day on Saturday, I went out to the Underground Tournament League Street Fighter 4 party/ tournament.

We arrived around 3:30 PM or so to find the party was already in full effect. I was excited to see a TON of people that I knew and found out the people who had been placing 1st in the past few tournaments were all there to try to hold on to their title. Everyone mingled for a while and practiced while the DJs were pumping out their music off to the side. (Great music by the way guys!) There were 4 set ups for SF4.

1. An HD projector aimed at the back wall with a white screen. Huge, no lag… looked great at night but was hard to play on before sunset.
2. A nice sized unknown brand HD tv.
3. A HUGE unknown brand hd tv brounght in by one of the players. I wish I could have taken a pic… great graphics, no lag… the best set up there.
4. The 2nd largest hd tv. This was a Samsung. I didn’t play on it so I’m not sure if there was lag or not but the graphics looked great.

One of the 4 DJs that came to the UTL SF4 event

I was SUPER excited when my buddies Shawn, Sam and KenjixSamurai all decided to show up as well. If you don’t remember, Shawn and Sam showed up at the GH: Metallica tournament and both walked away with prizes for high score and for coming the closest to my score the night before. Also, KenjixSamurai was my Zangeif teammate at the DIZeLAN 3 on 3 event.

I spent most of my time trying to get some practice in with Mike Ross since I hadn’t practiced SF4 at all really, only got about 10 or so games in at Video 94 here and there, but had a hard time doing that since everyone wanted to play with Mike. All of a sudden it didn’t matter that Christian, the 1st place winner of the last UTL SF4 tourney was there, or that Dan and his Guile were on a 15 win streak on HDtv #2.

The brackets were SUPPOSED to be randomized, but judging from my first match I will say that they weren’t very random at all. The guy who ran the tournament claimed that he did not modify the brackets but I was put against someone for the pure fact of the guys wanted to see that particular match up, which I thought wasn’t too funny. The fact that this was done reminded me of how people wanted to modify Devastatin brackets just for entertainment so I was a bit peeved during this match. I won my first match against a Cammy player 2 games clean. (4 rounds without a loss) I honestly underestimated this person and was surprised when each round I was left with only about 1/4 of my life left. That was too close for my liking.

StarSlay3r (SA) First Game in the UTL SF4 tournament

Later I had to vs my toughest opponent. Everyone gathered around to watch this match. Basically people had seen me beating him earlier during practice (I had a 5 game win streak with my Sagat vs his Gouken and beat his C.Viper and others) and figured it would be a good match. While I was a bit upset about having to vs him so early (we were hoping to wipe out everyone and place 1st/2nd) I was happy I’d finally get a chance to vs him in a tournament setting. Many people in the past have heard about me beating him here and there and have said “Yeah right, he went easy on you” or “Playing casually and in a tournament setting are two different things” so this was it. He has always said “I never go easy on you. I always play 100%” but this was his time to prove it since money was on the line.

(The way the tournament is run is that the first person to win 2 out of 3 games advances to the next bracket. If you lose you’re allowed to change your character, but if you win you have to stick to your character. This is standard for SF4 tournies.)

Game 1 StarSlay3r (SA) vs Mike Ross (GK)

Our first match was me with Sagat vs him with Gouken. I made a lot of mistakes and my timing was a bit too early on many of my moves. We both even whiffed ultras at one point in time… it was not our best performance, but I won the first game 2-1.

StarSlay3r takes Game 1 vs Mike Ross

A bit upset about losing the first game he thought long and hard about what character to choose for game 2. Mike has been maining Zangief lately and I have had a lot of Zangief practice. When I’ve played my Sagat vs his Zangief at Video 94 I beat him several times thanks to the fact that Sagat and his fireballs and HK are godlike in this match. Mike then decided to pick E. Honda. I don’t have to tell you all why he picked Honda either….

StarSlay3r (SA) vs Mike Ross (HO) Game 2

Knowing I have never beat Mike’s Honda before I decided I’d do my best in this match and basically just try to do as much damage as possible. The first round came to an end and I ALMOST beat him! He was seriously scared. Mike was later quoted “I was thinking… oh my god… is she really going to win and mess this all up?” After seeing how close I came to beating Mike I had started to let it get to me mentally, and the next round he got a perfect on me making our scores 1-1.

Mike takes Game 2 2-0

The 3rd game it was all on the line. This is basically what will determine if it’s me or him. While I wanted to win (of course, who wouldn’t want to say they beat Mike in a tournament?) I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to place 1st and ensuring that someone else would by taking away their main threat. I stuck with Sagat since I didn’t want to risk a severe beat down by switching to anyone else I wasn’t 100% comfortable using under pressure.

Round 2 was when I really fought hard and survived several handslap 12 hit combos and blocked an Ultra just to come back from on the brink of death to surviving one more round.

StarSlay3r tiger knees her way to victory in Game 3 round 2

I didn’t want to go out just yet…. I wanted it to come down to the final round and it did. With everyone gathered around watching the match on the projector I was nervous as heck!Round 3 went to Mike and he almost got another perfect on me. A flurry of hand slaps made me nervous and I remembered back when we first started playing together over 3 months ago. I clutched out an Ultra when he was about to finish me off with a stomp and was excited I brought his health down to 1/3 or so before dying.

StarSlay3r clutches an Ultra in round 3

We went back and forth but in the end he won.

I wish I had played better, but at least I can say I went up against the #2 Street Fighter 4 player in the nation and it all came down to the final round of the 3rd game. I wouldn’t have wanted to lose to anyone else. Also, I was the only person who was able to beat Mike 1 game. Mike was able to beat everyone else in the tournament 2 games in a row all the way through to 1st place. I consider this a personal victory and will try harder to improve my skills to give him even more of a run for his money next time!

Congrats Mike for claiming 1st and showing everyone in the UTL why you’re one of the best! We’ll be attending the next UTL SF4 tourney which I’m told will be held in a dojo in Los Angeles. I can’t wait!!!

This weekend was full of awesomeness! On Saturday I teamed up with Howies Game Shack, American Guru Clothing, Coffin Case and Monster to run a Guitar Hero Metallica challenge where any and all challengers could test their skill against mine for a chance to win prizes from American Guru, Monster, Coffin Case and Howies Game Shack.

The rules were simple… beat me and win, although accomplishing that goal would prove to be quite a bit harder then that. With my last Guitar Hero challenge that I did at PAX (Known as the Judy Nails Challenge sponsored by Activision) I went 56-4 on the game Guitar Hero: World Tour pre release. At PAX the rules were that I was not allowed to practice the songs before hand and was only allowed to play while competing so during my 1 hour breaks when competitors were lining up to play the game, I was there giving them tips on the new slider gems and open strum notes on bass. With pros like Pulsar showing up and me having the handicap of having to use the slider bar if anyone picked hot for teacher (which 3 of the opponents who beat me did) I definitely had a few challenging matches to endure.

Some details about the event:

1. I did not practice any more than 30 minutes in the past month on this version of Guitar Hero and only practiced 1 song before the event.
2. I was using a guitar I had never used before for the first time and found out it activated star power on its own (easily resolved by turning the tilt sensor off)
3. The challengers picked whatever song THEY wanted to against me, I did not pick any of the songs against any of my opponents to ensure the players could choose their best/favorite song
4. The challengers were allowed to pick hard if they wanted to giving them a point advantage
5. I allowed photographers to take pictures of me while I was playing even with flash on!
6. I still rocked out while playing. LoL Even headbanged for a few songs.
7. Players that had scores somewhat close to mine were allowed to rematch me if time permitted
8. I allowed all Activision and Neversoft employees who tested on Guitar Hero Metallica to come to the event and challenge me as well

With a gamer bashing me on their website stating “facts” that are untrue about my guitar hero skills, I decided to show everyone what I’m REALLY capable of and raise money to help the homeless in Southern California at the same time. I had to borrow a guitar for this event since my last guitar broke at Devastation in Arizona a couple months ago and I haven’t bought another once since. (Mostly due to Nightmare Armor Studios and Coffin Case working on 2 special custom guitars for me… but shhhh you don’t know about that yet )

I arrived at Howies Game at 6pm and was told I’d have to compete for 4 hours. I was like… LETS DO THIS! To get everyone attention we cranked up the speakers in the center arena of Monster Alley and I started whaling on the guitar to the Mercyful Fate Medly. I average about 960k on this song usually and did a bit lower this time, but at least I got rid of my jitters really quick and was nice and warmed up after the solos.

The Metallica set up in Monster Alley at Howies Game Shack

Gamers gathered around and started taking pictures and signing up for the chance to challenge me. While some people started walking by shouting “I think I can take you!” they sure did run away fast once they saw my score! I walked around for a few minutes to check out the awesomeness that is Howies and I see now why this is one of the best Lan centers that exist. I then was taken outside for an interview with the Orange County News to talk about the event and how we’re here to help.

Howies Game Shack PC rigs

I wasn’t aware what the ultimate prize for beating me was until AFTER the event but Howies Game Sshack had a prize on the line with a value of $7,000 if anyone could beat me! It’s good to know they had that kind of confidence in my skills and I was able to come through undefeated. The manager, Brad, later made the comment “I could have said the prize was 1,000,000 hours free and it wouldn’t have mattered because nobody would have won.” The two people who had the highest score and came the closest to my score (closest scorer had a score of about 49k below mine) received prizes.

My favorite matches of the night included one against a kid who couldn’t be any older than 10 who approached me and said “I wanna do this!” I looked at him and said “Alright… what difficulty do you want?” I was willing to make an exception for some players if they wanted to do HARD difficulty since even though they’d score more points per note, again, I wasn’t worried about losing. The kid looked up at me and said… “I’m going with Expert!” I said “Heck yeah! Lets do this!” The crowd applauded and everyone started saying “EXPERT?! Are you kidding me?!” This kid probably had the most guts of all the players I versed. People started looking at what I was doing. I’m assuming people thought I’d go easy on him just because he’s a kid, but I did not. My thoughts were this… if I’m going to challenge someone I want them to give 100% for the match. When I play against Mike ross and Justin Wong they go 100% on me and if I get perfected then that’s because they are the BEST and I am still learning. This kid wanted a REAL match, so I’m not throwing it. He would not have had fun going to school saying “I beat a pro because she stopped playing halfway through the song.” He had fun playing against me and thanked me for the match, as did his father. I ran over and gave him one final fist bump after our match and they all left smiling and his father congratulating him on his performance.

After my matches were all done I went in the back with Mike Ross and we started talking to Howies Game Shack owner and American Guru Clothing owner about future events and possible new sponsors for me. (but the sponsor thing I’ll get into on a future date ) With the 4 of us brainstorming we decided to do another event but this time it will be a Street Fighter 4 tournament run by Mike Ross! I’ll post a new blog with more details about the event shortly, but first I need to gather all the details since this is going to be HUGE!

A special thank you goes out to Howies Game Shack, American Guru Clothing, Monster Beverage Company, Coffin Case for making this happen and to Sam Cohn, Shawn Belew and Mike Ross for coming out to the event! Also thank you to all of the competitors and to everyone for being a good sport. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the fact that everyone said “good game” and shook hands after… good sportsmanship FTW!

There WILL be another event featuring me in the future but the game will most likely be BlazBlue this time, but we’re still working on the next game as well as sponsors and prizes. I’ll let you all know what’s going on as I find out more details! See you next time in Monster Alley!

Howie's Game Shack Monster Alley

I’ll edit this post later with pictures as I get them, video footage once that’s up on youtube, and will link to the interview once it’s up! Thanks again everyone!

I have to say I’m extremely disappointed at how the most recent Street Fighter tournament was run on Saturday. I’ve attended many tournaments but only a few for Street Fighter but enough to get a general idea of how SF4 tournaments should be run. With the fact that I know many of the DIZeLAN staff members and have for a while now and have gone there to play Unreal Tournament and such, I really thought that while their place was small that this would be a good environment for the tournament… I was a bit wrong it seems.

First of all let me say that this tournament was set to start at 10pm. Knowing that most SF4 tournaments run for a good 4 hours at least I was a bit bummed to know that it was starting so late. I was under the impression that there were about 18 teams there due to that being the amount of people I saw on the list for sign ups. When I got to DIZeLAN (about 8pm) I was told that there was about 30 teams now and that there was only 4 tv’s to compete on. Also, the game was supposed to be double elimination style meaning that would almost double the amount of time to complete the tournament.

Well… 10pm comes and 28 teams show up and each person has to pay $10. $30 per team seems like a bit much, but that just means the pot should be set for a good $800. They have about 90-100 people at the frag center so the rule is that if your team isn’t playing that you have to wait outside in the front or the back.

As time goes on people start to get hot and tired… the lights keep going out due to the circut breaker tripping… at least the tv’s weren’t going out. There was incidents such as people’s wireless controllers connecting to xbox’s and mysteriously disconnecting leaving the game paused for a good 5-10 minutes while they have to locate the controller. Rules should have been set that all wireless controllers must have the batteries removed when not in use, but this wasn’t enforced to my knowledge.

Late into the night a team’s name is called out and the team doesn’t show up supposedly. This, according to the rules, means the team forfeits their match. One of the team members finds out that they were disqualified and goes in to talk to the DIZeLAN worker about the issue. He says “two of us were inside and one of us was outside the whole time… we never heard you call our name” and then goes around asking everyone if they heard their team name called. Apparently they tried to work out the issue and got their money back when the worker called the team member a bitch and a verbal fight started to break out almost turning into a physical one. AJ Papa caught some of this on tape…

The fact that this tournament started at 10pm, there’s so many people, it’s hot, it’s unorganized, people get irritable. I’m VERY disappointed to see that a DIZeLAN member participated in this drama and would not have expected for the tournament to be run like this. I feel like if the tournament had started at 2pm a lot of these issues wouldn’t have happened.

Moving on… the tournament didn’t end until 5am… and when it did end the winners (Mike Watson’s team YJDK) found out they only got about $300. Now… out of over $800 you would think that the winners would get roughly $500 or so because it is common in street fighter tournaments to go 60%, 30%, 10%. Where did the rest of the money go? Turns out DIZeLAN kept a whopping 40% of the total money earned from the tournament. The fact that DIZeLAN kept 40% is only part of the problem… the major problem is that they never told anyone they were going to be doing this. Most of the SF4 events I’ve attended charge a “venue fee” of $2-$5 then the entry fee money goes to the pot which is split accordingly. Had DIZeLAN at least announced the fact that they would be doing this up front people may have been ok with it, and the ones who weren’t wouldn’t have just skipped on attending. The 3rd place team got only about $16 per player… when you break it down they competed for 7 hours to get $6 profit… that’s horrible.

Basically what needs to happen is either DIZeLAN needs to skip on holding SF4 tournies all together or they need to fix all of the mistakes they’ve made by having an earlier start time, more copies of SF4 to run more games at once, post brackets in a location accessible to everyone and ensure that players know at least one match ahead of time as to when they’re up to play instead of when the match is supposed to start, and most importantly they need to work out the money situation. Realistically I think DIZeLAN shouldn’t have taken any more than 20% of the total earnings because it’s not like they had to rent the location out or this was a special event… we’re talking about a lan center that has its tv’s on 24/7 so it’s not like they had to cover extra electricity use or anything. Also don’t blame the people who attend the event for not having enough copies of the game. I heard one person say “we asked people who called in to bring copies of the game.” If you’re running the event it’s YOUR responsibility to supply the copies of the game, don’t blame the participants for not bringing their copy of SF4 for tons of random ppl to use. Hell, if they had to they should have went to Blockbuster and rented a few extra copies or something…. that’s just my opinion though.

Basically I’m a bit upset (if you can’t tell) at how poorly this went down. I hope that this does not discourage people from wanting to participate in more SF events and hopefully we can see something a bit more organized next time

One bit of advice to DIZeLAN… I highly recommend you take 20% of that 40% you kept on Saturday and give it to the top 3 teams, they earned it!