game developer, yuri enthusiast, your beloved problematic girlfriend


email
christine@loveconquersallgames.com
get an email when I make a new game
news.loveconquersallgames.com/

In January at Frosty Faustings, after entering on a whim, I went 3-2 in my first ever tournament and had so much fun I was inspired to start taking this game truly seriously. On Thursday, I practiced at locals playing some of the best Street Fighter I've ever played in my entire life, the culmination of months of serious grind. I set myself an ambitious-but-achievable goal of doing one better than Frosty and making it out of my pool this time. And on Friday at Evo I got murdered instantly!

Yeah my first match was against my worst matchup in the whole game, and yeah, my second was against one of the four people who would eventually make it out of my bracket. But still, I fumbled it real bad. I was insanely salty! I've never been that salty in my life! Felt genuinely like shit! Everyone I talked to said yeah, they've been there before, everyone has to be there eventually, but you know what, being there sucks ass! Yeah I did my best, but my best clearly wasn't very good! I am generally a pretty chill person and I'm playing videogames to have fun and this is just a hobby to me and I'm mostly here to just share a good time with my friends... but after drowning in pools, I went back to the hotel room and really surprised myself by bursting out crying. Just some real ugly crying over a god damned videogame. I felt ridiculous. But I also felt a whole lot better after that! I just really needed to let it out. And then I started taking notes on all the stuff I got killed by that I need to lab and all the weak points and new things to practice now that I'm not fully locked in on executing my Evo gameplan and worrying about "well, now would be a bad time to add that to my mental stack."

Usually after Evo weekend I end up feeling really fired up, going "damn, I should really get back into fighting games," reinstall Street Fighter or whatever, and then play for a month or two. And you know what? Now that I've gotten over myself and got to watch that crazy top 6 in that arena, I still feel really fired up! Yeah I got humbled a little bit. That's fine. I can take it. This time it feels like a different kind of fired up, though. Now I'm leaving with some homework to do and some vegetables to eat. I had to put off learning new stuff for a bit, but now I can finally get back to it, and that's a really different kind of exciting. (I did a little bit of labbing on the airplane and it took like an hour to figure out how to handle the Akuma play that sent me home. It was kinda comforting to know that I wouldn't have figured it out on the spot.) It might have been real rough, but it's also good to know that matter what I enter next, I'll never do as badly as I did at Evo 2024. It's all up from here!


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @love's post:

The only fg event I attended was dreamhack during SFVs lifespan and I was so nervous I literally forgot how to play my character and drowned in record time haha. I was admittedly not very good at all at the time but it still hurt. Cheering for you and your future victories! You clearly got the drive necessary to tear some mfs apart

Tournament nerves are soooooooooo real. Part of the reason why I've been trying to enter as many in-person events as I possibly can is that I have a problem with my hands outright SHAKING so visibly other people could see it and I dropped a ton of stuff at Frosty as a result... but by Evo they were only trembling a little bit! Just takes a lot of getting out there!

ANYWAY THANK YOU FOR BELIEVING IN ME 🫡

HELL YEAH, THAT'S THE FGC WAY!!!!

Nothing wrong with getting punched in the theoretical/emotional gut by a reality check or just poor luck. What matters is getting back up, it's why most fighting games worth their weight in their $60 price tag let you rematch on a ranked random match. You learn nothing by getting your ass kicked and moving on, you learn something when you can put that in to practice and find out if it works.

Glad to hear you still entered after seeing the hype build up, my fun little Akuma grind to masters has me stuck in gold, hopefully both of us hit our goals by the end of Evo 2025 :eggbug:

Actually I meant to say this earlier before you got pulled away, but I just wanted to say, all the advice and encouragement you've given me over the years is a really big part of why I've been finally sticking with it recently! It might have taken a while but it really did make a huge impact. I've been making it out to locals and taking notes on my matches and watching replays and probably a bunch of other things that I forgot you were the one who put into my head... and I think maybe I'm even going to manage to convince Aevee to give me the runback. Anyway, thank you for all that! If I stick with it a little more, I think I might even one day replicate the high of those GDC hallway UNI matches! Well, maybe.