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yrevalFrom 2015 to 2022, Celtic Throwdown was an annual (except 2020, for obvious reasons) celebration of fighting games and the Irish scene, held initially in the Ashling Hotel near Dublin city centre, and then in the Crowne Plaza Hotel in the north-western suburb of Blanchardstown. During its run, it attracted some big FGC names to Dublin; Daigo Umehara visited in 2017, and I played - and took a game off - future SFV Evo champion Problem X at the inaugural CT:
Unfortunately, not long after CT2022, AJ and Doom (organisers of CT, as well as occasional one-day tournaments in Dublin) retired from organising tournaments, and we've yet to see anything like it in Ireland since then. The closest we've come was on the weekend of November 2nd and 3rd, when Irish Gaming Market hosted a number of fighting game tournaments as part of its Winter 2024 edition.
Starting last year, Irish Gaming Market, billed as "Ireland's Gaming and Pop Culture Market", have been organising, well, gaming and pop culture markets every four months or so. This wasn't their first event with FGC involvement - the previous event, in July, saw tournaments for Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, Guilty Gear Strive, and an early build of the upcoming, Irish-developed, indie fighting game Moonatics. I considered going, but the event took place in Gormanstown, which is a nightmare to get to from Belfast if you don't drive, thanks to Ireland's almost non-existent public transport. The November edition, though, would take place in the much more accessible Dun Laoghaire, so I headed down to the Royal Marine Hotel for the weekend.
The main floor was just off the right hand side of the hotel lobby, playing host to booths selling retro games and consoles, as well as gaming and nerd culture related arts and crafts.
The main floor at IGM.
Have you played Atari today? If not, IGM gave you a chance to put that right.
On the balcony overlooking the main floor, there was a free play area with some consoles set up, as well as Stepmania and some bartop arcade emulation cabinets.
Karnovember comes to IGM - albeit with a stretched image with a Vaseline filter, and really poor quality joysticks.
Behind the balcony there was a corridor, at the other end of which was the fighting game tournament suite, where I'd spend most of the weekend.
I entered Guilty Gear Strive, Street Fighter 6, and Tekken 8. Here's how I did in each game:
Guilty Gear Strive
Character: May
2 wins, 2 losses
=17th out of 42 players
Winner: mattie
Just two days before the tournament, Arc System Works dropped a major update featuring the returning character Dizzy and a whole raft of balance changes. As a May player, not a whole lot changed - some minor nerfs to her normals were offset by the ability to vary the distance travelled by Split (the move where she leaps off her dolphin before it hits). Some other characters, though, were completely reworked for little or no apparent reason (my condolences, Millia and Potemkin players) - and ASW seem to have acknowledged that they may have gone a bit too far this time.
This made for an unpredictable tournament. First up, I lost to Birbfish (Ramlethal), before beating vandalhandle (Testament) to start my losers bracket run - but not before the match was interrupted by someone logging into the wrong PSN account on another console (the intended accounts for each console were written on a Post-It note stuck to the monitor - If someone logged into one of those accounts on another console, it would log you out and pause the game). I then won a close match against nate (Sol) to qualify for top 24, where I would be eliminated by Kaztec (Goldlewis).
Street Fighter 6
Character: Terry
2 wins, 2 losses
=13th out of 37 players
Winner: Nutrient
In my first match against Shane D (Ryu) I got off to a decent start - until I dropped a combo near the end of the first round, and it was all downhill from there. The silly mistakes continued against Dinkleberg (Akuma), and the frustration crept in, but I kept it in check long enough to secure the comeback victory. This gave me a match against DDDDooley (Ken), on the stream setup, to qualify for top 16. Game 1 was pretty routine, as was the first round of game 2. Overconfidence was becoming a factor, though - he was trigger-happy with his EX DP, and it was proving unwise to test his reactions on Modern controls.
There's an infamous Street Fighter 4 match I began thinking of at this point:
FSP, a reasonably well-known Rufus player from the UK, came up against Gandhi (not the Indian independence leader, but a local player with a, shall we say, highly unorthodox playing style) in pools at Dreamhack Winter 2013. Gandhi's play is best described as the competitive gaming equivalent of outsider art - he constantly does unsafe moves and goes for reversal DPs at almost every opportunity. FSP has no idea how to respond to this, and while it does seem, for a while, that he has figured out that he needs to play reactively and punish unsafe moves with simple combos, he inexplicably goes back to attempting aggressive play and more difficult combos after winning game 2, with predictable results.
Determined not to play the role of FSP this time, I took a comfortable lead in round 3 and decided to adopt what I like to call the Luigi strategy - as in "Luigi wins by doing absolutely nothing". This worked for a while, but a couple of throws later I began worrying that the comeback really was on. I got the win in the end, only dropping one round in the entire set, but it felt much closer than that. In top 16, I was eliminated after a loss to BreadBeard (Jamie) off-stream.
Tekken 8
Character: Alisa
1 win, 2 losses
=33rd out of 51 players
Winner: Fergus
Right after qualifying for SF6 top 16, my Tekken 8 pool started. I beat Purity (Bryan) before losing to eventual runner-up outterest (Hwoarang). Waiting for me in the losers bracket was Cheez (Bryan), who told me that he recognised me from an online tournament we had played each other in a few months ago.
The match started evenly, with both of us winning a round each - until the Tekken side of the tournament suite lost power due to a blown fuse. The SF6 tournament, taking place at the same time and at the other end of the room, was unaffected, and I played my top 16 match there while the Tekken players were waiting for the power to be restored. Eventually we were able to resume the match, and it wasn't nearly as close as our previous encounter - I don't think I took another round off him.
Overall thoughts
I had a great weekend, and will be eagerly awaiting details of the next IGM. In particular, I'd like to shout out SHIN-A and his crew who ran an excellent fighting game area, keeping well on top of any problems that cropped up. There was also decent prize support, with a total of €2,000 on offer across the weekend's tournaments (300 for 1st, 150 for 2nd, and 50 for 3rd in each game).
As for the "market" part of IGM: my haul wasn't the biggest, but I'm happy with the purchases I did make.
Left: Street Fighter shadow box from memyselfandmisha.com. Right: the official IGM sweatshirt from crazedaristocrats.com.
Until next time...
Unfortunately, not long after CT2022, AJ and Doom (organisers of CT, as well as occasional one-day tournaments in Dublin) retired from organising tournaments, and we've yet to see anything like it in Ireland since then. The closest we've come was on the weekend of November 2nd and 3rd, when Irish Gaming Market hosted a number of fighting game tournaments as part of its Winter 2024 edition.
Starting last year, Irish Gaming Market, billed as "Ireland's Gaming and Pop Culture Market", have been organising, well, gaming and pop culture markets every four months or so. This wasn't their first event with FGC involvement - the previous event, in July, saw tournaments for Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, Guilty Gear Strive, and an early build of the upcoming, Irish-developed, indie fighting game Moonatics. I considered going, but the event took place in Gormanstown, which is a nightmare to get to from Belfast if you don't drive, thanks to Ireland's almost non-existent public transport. The November edition, though, would take place in the much more accessible Dun Laoghaire, so I headed down to the Royal Marine Hotel for the weekend.
The main floor was just off the right hand side of the hotel lobby, playing host to booths selling retro games and consoles, as well as gaming and nerd culture related arts and crafts.
The main floor at IGM.
Have you played Atari today? If not, IGM gave you a chance to put that right.
On the balcony overlooking the main floor, there was a free play area with some consoles set up, as well as Stepmania and some bartop arcade emulation cabinets.
Karnovember comes to IGM - albeit with a stretched image with a Vaseline filter, and really poor quality joysticks.
Behind the balcony there was a corridor, at the other end of which was the fighting game tournament suite, where I'd spend most of the weekend.
I entered Guilty Gear Strive, Street Fighter 6, and Tekken 8. Here's how I did in each game:
Guilty Gear Strive
Character: May
2 wins, 2 losses
=17th out of 42 players
Winner: mattie
Just two days before the tournament, Arc System Works dropped a major update featuring the returning character Dizzy and a whole raft of balance changes. As a May player, not a whole lot changed - some minor nerfs to her normals were offset by the ability to vary the distance travelled by Split (the move where she leaps off her dolphin before it hits). Some other characters, though, were completely reworked for little or no apparent reason (my condolences, Millia and Potemkin players) - and ASW seem to have acknowledged that they may have gone a bit too far this time.
This made for an unpredictable tournament. First up, I lost to Birbfish (Ramlethal), before beating vandalhandle (Testament) to start my losers bracket run - but not before the match was interrupted by someone logging into the wrong PSN account on another console (the intended accounts for each console were written on a Post-It note stuck to the monitor - If someone logged into one of those accounts on another console, it would log you out and pause the game). I then won a close match against nate (Sol) to qualify for top 24, where I would be eliminated by Kaztec (Goldlewis).
Street Fighter 6
Character: Terry
2 wins, 2 losses
=13th out of 37 players
Winner: Nutrient
In my first match against Shane D (Ryu) I got off to a decent start - until I dropped a combo near the end of the first round, and it was all downhill from there. The silly mistakes continued against Dinkleberg (Akuma), and the frustration crept in, but I kept it in check long enough to secure the comeback victory. This gave me a match against DDDDooley (Ken), on the stream setup, to qualify for top 16. Game 1 was pretty routine, as was the first round of game 2. Overconfidence was becoming a factor, though - he was trigger-happy with his EX DP, and it was proving unwise to test his reactions on Modern controls.
There's an infamous Street Fighter 4 match I began thinking of at this point:
FSP, a reasonably well-known Rufus player from the UK, came up against Gandhi (not the Indian independence leader, but a local player with a, shall we say, highly unorthodox playing style) in pools at Dreamhack Winter 2013. Gandhi's play is best described as the competitive gaming equivalent of outsider art - he constantly does unsafe moves and goes for reversal DPs at almost every opportunity. FSP has no idea how to respond to this, and while it does seem, for a while, that he has figured out that he needs to play reactively and punish unsafe moves with simple combos, he inexplicably goes back to attempting aggressive play and more difficult combos after winning game 2, with predictable results.
Determined not to play the role of FSP this time, I took a comfortable lead in round 3 and decided to adopt what I like to call the Luigi strategy - as in "Luigi wins by doing absolutely nothing". This worked for a while, but a couple of throws later I began worrying that the comeback really was on. I got the win in the end, only dropping one round in the entire set, but it felt much closer than that. In top 16, I was eliminated after a loss to BreadBeard (Jamie) off-stream.
Tekken 8
Character: Alisa
1 win, 2 losses
=33rd out of 51 players
Winner: Fergus
Right after qualifying for SF6 top 16, my Tekken 8 pool started. I beat Purity (Bryan) before losing to eventual runner-up outterest (Hwoarang). Waiting for me in the losers bracket was Cheez (Bryan), who told me that he recognised me from an online tournament we had played each other in a few months ago.
The match started evenly, with both of us winning a round each - until the Tekken side of the tournament suite lost power due to a blown fuse. The SF6 tournament, taking place at the same time and at the other end of the room, was unaffected, and I played my top 16 match there while the Tekken players were waiting for the power to be restored. Eventually we were able to resume the match, and it wasn't nearly as close as our previous encounter - I don't think I took another round off him.
Overall thoughts
I had a great weekend, and will be eagerly awaiting details of the next IGM. In particular, I'd like to shout out SHIN-A and his crew who ran an excellent fighting game area, keeping well on top of any problems that cropped up. There was also decent prize support, with a total of €2,000 on offer across the weekend's tournaments (300 for 1st, 150 for 2nd, and 50 for 3rd in each game).
As for the "market" part of IGM: my haul wasn't the biggest, but I'm happy with the purchases I did make.
Left: Street Fighter shadow box from memyselfandmisha.com. Right: the official IGM sweatshirt from crazedaristocrats.com.
Until next time...
