A marathon of a weekend concluded last night at Las Vegas for Evolution 2009, aka the big daddy of fighting game tournaments. Yesterday was finals for all of the games and even though I wasn't at the Rio to watch the madness and the HYPE, watching the online stream throughout the weekend was pretty good being the first time Evo streamed the event LIVE for the folks at home. As if more than 2,000 people were sitting in one hot sweaty ballroom, more than 20,000 viewers watched the stream live at times especially the Street Fighter IV finals. Even though SoCal represented big at SF4 as most of them made past pools, only Edma and Shady K made top 8 as well as a somewhat disappointing performance at the 5v5 exhibition not making the grand finals as one of the favorites to it. The SF4 Grand Finals got the dream match we wanted to as Justin Wong, arguably the best SF4 player in the U.S., faces off against Daigo, aka the best Street Fighter player now. Here's the epic grand finals match between the two below via the stream (keep in mind its a stream, so it will be slow, but the audio enough describes how HYPE it was as it felt loud and rowdy, but amazing at the same time). This is what u expect out of the two of the best players in the world, but maybe Justin celebrated too soon at times especially coming from Losers and winning the 1st set. I'll post something later about the other highlights of this year's Evo.
UPDATE - Since these videos are taken down, go to the post above for the Evo 2k9 stuff.
