Super Versus Battle 2010 just took place in London this week, with over 8 different fighting games being played in tournament style over the full weekend. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like SVB have managed to come up with a stream, so we’re going to have to hope that most of it was recorded and will be uploaded in the coming days.

The big surprise of the weekend however seems to have been that Prodigal Son aka Ryan Hart managed to put Daigo out! Daigo initially selected Cammy against Hart’s Ryu and lost the first game. He switched to Ryu afterwards but Ryan Hart managed to win it out without Daigo taking a single game.

Apparently earlier on in casuals Daigo wiped the floor with Ryan’s Dhalsim, and Ryan asked for a blind select when he came to face Daigo in the tourney. Daigo went with the Sim counterpick and must have regretted it! According to a recent tweet Daigo was saying he’s been playing the hardest he’s ever played with this visit to the UK!

Luffy took the Super SF4 title, putting out Yota in the semis. Yota completely handled me at ECL with his awesome Dhalsim, and it was great to see that he’d ranked so well as he seemed like a really nice guy.

More results to come as I find them out, but Neoempire is yet to be updated with the full results listing.

Let’s get straight to the point; Valve, makers of the Half Life series, Counterstrike, Team Fortress 2 and Portal have released a new game. The name of the game is Alien Swarm. It’s really good, and what’s more; it’s absolutely free.

Alien Swarm was originally a fan made mod for Unreal Tournament, and is now a standalone Steam-based game. It’s an almost-top-down 3D shooter with up to 4 players working in cooperation.

Each player gets to choose from 4 classes; Officer, Weapons Specialist, Tech or Medic. The officer is pretty solid in battle, but their main bonus is stats that will boost team performance, so you can do without an officer on a 1-2 man team. Weapons Specialists get boosts to their health and heavy weapon damage, acting as both tanks and walking sentry turrets.

Techs can hold their own in fights, and are able to hack which is a necessity in certain levels. Medics not only heal, but can cure players who are infested by parasites in later levels. They can carry guns as well, but have the option of carrying healing pods and a healing gun simultaneously.

In order to perform well in Alien Swarm you ideally want to have a well balanced team of 4 players. You can get by with fewer players on the earlier levels, but as you get deep into a campaign you’ll need to cover more bases.

Here’s a video to let you get a look at some of the gameplay. Keep reading for a link to get Alien Swarm and some Hints and Tips for playing.

Looks great huh? Well you can get it for free on pc right now, over at Steam.

Next page; Tips and Tricks for Alien Swarm.

Minimum System Requirements:
o OS: Windows® 7 / Vista / Vista64 / XP
o Processor: Pentium 4 3.0GHz
o Memory: 1 GB for XP / 2GB for Vista
o Graphics: DirectX 9 compatible video card with 128 MB, Shader model 2.0. ATI X800, NVidia 6600 or better
o Hard Drive: At least 2.5 GB of free space
o Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card

Recommended:
o OS: Windows® 7 / Vista / Vista64 / XP
o Processor: Intel core 2 duo 2.4GHz
o Memory: 1 GB for XP / 2GB for Vista
o Graphics: DirectX 9 compatible video card with Shader model 3.0. NVidia 7600, ATI X1600 or better
o Hard Drive: At least 2.5 GB of free space
o Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card

Just saw an advert for Knight and Day, the new Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz flick. What the hell is going on? The tone of this trailer is all over the place and leaves it feeling like an ad for a awful tv show nevermind a bad movie.

Is it meant to be funny? It’s not very funny but it seems to want to be funny. The action looks like the cheesy unnecessary overuse of cgi we’ve seen for years. It tells us it’s thrilling, but somehow I don’t believe this trailer.

Oh yuck. I just realised something. Their characters surnames are respectively Knight and Day, aren’t they. Noooo.

The tournament runs from July 30th to August 1st. Games featured include COD4, Halo 3, GoW, Fifa 2010 and a little game called Super Street Fighter IV.

The Super tourney runs on the Saturday only, runs all day and now only costs £10 to enter! This is not too shabby considering that the original price for entering for SSFIV was £50.

That was dropped to £25 and then finally they made it so that entry to the SSFIV tournament is technically “free”, but that you have to buy a Saturday pass to get into the venue, at the cost of a tenner.

And, I’m going! That’s right, yours truly, world famous not-very-good Akuma player paulietheboss will be in attendance. This will be my first ever tournament for anything, so I’m crapping myself. Spoke to WorstGiefEver the other day, and Josh who is helping run it and got everything arranged. Read ECL for more info.

Now I’m not sure what the player base is going to be like. I was speaking to one of the organisers and apparently there is a 200 player cap on the SSFIV tourney and they’ve yet to hit 100 preregisters for it.

If they don’t hit the 200 cap then anyone else in attendance for other games that day will be free to sign up if they choose on a first come, first served basis until the cap is hit. That means there is a chance that a number of new/casual players will end up in the tourney, but at the same time I’ve also heard that a few top players are coming over from France for it, so we’ll see how that pans out!

If you’re coming along too, give me a shout. I can’t wait to get randomed out or just fully styled on. Woo!

Did you sign up for IGNs coverage of EVO 2009 last year? Did you too wait around for ages for the videos to appear, then wait in vain for all the pools videos that they promised they’d bring?

Well get on your Paypal account immediately! Go to Profile, My Pre Approved Statements under Financial Information, and then click on IGN Entertainment and cancel that noise. While you’re at it log into your ign account and look for something that says “you have subscriptions” and cancel that too.

IGN are well aware of this situation, but they have everyones premium account set to auto renew. They’ve also written into their small print that all charges for subscriptions are non refundable. What a shower of slime artists.

I wouldn’t even mind if they’d taken a decent course of action, like sending everyone out an email a week before their subscription runs out, to remind them that they’re about to be charged. My problem is that they charged an old Paypal account, linked to an old bank account I never use. Now I have to go to the bank and put money into that account to cover their charge.

If I’ve managed to save anyone from this scam I’ll be delighted, please let me know if this has helped you out.

The arcade version of Super Street Fighter IV was recently confirmed by SF director Yoshinori Ono.

However, it was only yesterday that the very first Japanese location test of the arcade version was held. The following screenshot was taken at the loctest yesterday, and reveals that there are two new empty character slots at either side of the screen!

Click here to see the full photo!

All the buzz right now seems to mainly center on the new characters likely including Elena, R. Mika and Rolento. I’ve been saying for a while that although Rolento is a great character, I’m not sure how he would fit into the SFIV system. Most of his special attacks are multi hitting and therefore would stuff any focus attempts.

Ono originally said he’d wanted Hugo to appear (yuck, worst character) but this seems unlikely since Hugo ended up in the background of the new Metro City construction stage. Then again Bison, Vega and Balrog show up in the background of the airfield stage, so who knows?

What do you think? Anyone in particular you’d like to see? Is two more two too many?

How do you unlock personal actions and colours in Super Street Fighter 4?

Time to find out!

The short version is this; start a versus match, player vs cpu.

As soon as the fight starts press start and return to the character select screen. Rinse and repeat.

I’ve put this video together to explain the ins and outs of how you go about it;

I’ve had messages on Youtube, Xbox Live and through the website. Thanks to everyone who was appreciative of what I did and passed the links around.

Special thanks to Eventhubs for featuring my video on their homepage. I’ve ended up with the following awards from Youtube as I post this;

#3 - Most Viewed (Today)

#88 - Most Viewed (Today) - Global

I’d like to point out again though, that I’m just responsible for compiling and editing some video together. The real thanks goes to the players who attended the playtest and spent their time recording new ultras and gameplay for the community.

This goes out to them. After a bunch of requests and great messages I’ve gotten a hold of some additional ultra videos, as well as a couple better quality ones and put together an update to the original ultras video.

Check it out and leave comments below!

No particular reason. I just had a lot of work on before Christmas and was still playing a lot of Street Fighter IV.

Anyway, I’ve finally bought it from Steam and I’m loving it. I’ve been playing games most evenings this week with my brother and an old TF2 mate.

There are a lot of reasons to love L4D2. New maps, new weapons, new special infected, new music, new characters. Well, maybe not so much the new characters. They aren’t quite as good as the old L4D mob. It could be nostalgia speaking, but I loved those guys. Ellis is my favourite out of the new bunch.

I’ve been trying to convince a couple of friends to grab a copy of Left 4 Dead 2, but I’ve not been having much success. Then I realised the other night what part of the game elevated the intensity of the Left 4 Dead experience for me, and really made L4D2 stand out.

Ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present “Left 4 Dead 2 Adrenaline & Katana Brutality”

P.S. If anyone fancies a game I’m Jeemer on Steam. I don’t really play FPS games on consoles.

Capcom Unity ran their playtest event for Super Street Fighter IV last night.

Players got to try out some of the new cast, as well as seeing what tweaks have been made to existing characters. The build being played yesterday was the one with the 4 blank character slots, so anyone worried about the recent post-famitsu stream pic with those 4 blank slots removed can now calm down.

Some of the new ultras were tested out by the community and uploaded to various places online.

I’ve grabbed a few of them and compiled them together into one video for your viewing pleasure.

I also uploaded a separate video of the new Viper Ultra, Burning Dance.

They’re both available to view below.

20+ new ultras:

Vipers ultra, Burning Dance:

Edit: Cammys added, CQC:

Leave any comments below!