Champions Cup 2018
The ninth (!) edition of the (now called) Champions Cup turned out EPIC. It was so exciting with points at the end!!! Some new things for this year: A new league with their own prize to the "Best non-gamer", and of course that the games were unannounced before the competition, so that they came as a surprise to everyone.
We had the same lovely venue as always, situated across the street from our flat. We introduced the regular smörgåsbord of deliciousness, including video game cupcakes and a fruity punch.
Edible cupcake toppers ordered on Ebay, yummie! (even though some were skeptical of said "edible" feature)
It was an amazing group of people that defied the cold and showed up for the cup. Lucy and Anders C was there for a while, did the quiz and did a test run on the racing game (and instantly beat everyone, she would've placed 4th in the category!), then went on their way.
The racer for this year was no other than the classic 8-bit F-ZERO, to SNES. Simple enough: race as fast as you can around the circle course for 5 laps and try and get as good time as possible.
Anders G dominated this game, with a time of 2:56:50, almost 2 seconds better than the runner up!
The puzzle game for this year was a favourite of mine (can't even guess how many hours I've spent on it): Zoo Keeper, to Nintendo DS.
Time Trial, you have 6 minutes to collect as much points as you possibly can. Some animals are lucky, fill the quota to level up and, thus, get more points.
People seemed to get the hang of it, and many of the participants gathered an impressive score!
The game for the fighting category this year was “Marvel vs. Capcom 3”, to Xbox One. Yes, a game that Darren has played competitively, but so has he in Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter and Tekken, so what is a girl to do?
The participants were put into groups of 4-3 as they arrived, to make it random, and the two best ones (the ones who won the most games) moved on to the final bracket play.
In group A, we had Darren himself, Georgos, Julius and Anders. Darren won all his games (quite swiftly), Georgos beat the other two and finished second, hence moving forward. Julius managed to beat Anders and took third place in the group.
The rest of the pools consisted of 3 players. Group B was a really nail biting one, everyone finished with one loss and one win! We had to go to characters still in play to decide who came out on top of that pool (in this fighting game, you pick and play with 3 characters in one match!). The two players progressing to the final bracket were Fabian and Nicklas (Jessika died with the most characters)
The C pool was dominated by Monica, who beat both Jonas and Johan. Jonas had his eyes on the Champions Cup (after having had it at home for a year) and managed to beat Johan and move on to the end play.
In the last pool, Christos found himself the champion. He beat Peter and Andreas for first play. Peter won against Andreas to finish second.
The bracket play was really exciting, and now matches best of 3 games. The most thrilling one was probably the match between the two brothers: Georgos and Christos. When Georgos thought he had the game in the bag, Christos made an incredible come-back with his last standing character Chun-Li (with about a milimeter of life left), and won the game. 
Monica beat Fabian, Peter took out the five time Champions Cup winner Nicklas and Darren took out Jonas.
Peter beat Christos (with blisters on his thumb!) and Monica was taken out by Darren. Peter and Darren in the finals!
Really well played by Peter, but (to no surprise) Darren won the fighting category!
This year's "surprise" (because, come on, what kind of game is that?) was an old-time favourite of many who were there: Worms. No matter the game, they all work the same. Kill the other guy's worms and try and keep yours safe! Very time-consuming, but still fun. I'm glad I had it once during my 10 years of me doing this tourny.
We were going with 4/3 people at a time. 4 x 4 worms equals 16. It was a bit chaotic at times, and yes, we got to see a fair few amazing suicides xD The two that survives longest with his or her worms moves on to the next round.
In the first game, with Johan, Darren, Fabian and Andreas, Darren and Fabian started targeting each other, and the other two were like "Hell, let's do that too", so it was an easy win for Johan and Andreas there.
The rest of the games were 3 people, so only one needed to lose all the worms for the rest to move forward. In group B it was unfortunately Anders that went first, leaving Peter and Jonas to continue in the bracket.
In the next game Nicklas and Jonas, horribly, kicked out Monica of the match for top placement. In the last group, Georgos was the one to go, while Christos and Jessika progressed onwards.
In the next round, we had Johan and Christos bite into the sour apple (saying in English, no?), when Nicklas and Jonas took them out to be able to move on to the final themselves.
In the other semi finals, Julius and Jessika were the victorious ones when they managed to survive longer with their worms than Peter and Andreas.
I sat and corrected the quiz during the final, but I heard it was intense! Here, you needed to not just place top 2, but survive as long as possible. First one to go placed 4th (Nicklas), next one placed 3rd (Jessika) and the winner was Jonas, leaving Julius 2nd!
Albeit improvised last second, I had planned an insanely hard shoot 'em up, and to compete against each other and see who could make it furthest (no points, only distance). I went with Teslapunk, for Xbox One. You have randomly been put up against someone else, and all you need to do to progress in the bracket is to beat that person's score. Easy, right? Well, not always of course (depending on who you're up against)
It was really exciting to watch at times, we had some reaally close ones (like when Georgos took out the competitive shoot 'em up player Nicklas first round by only 600 meters!!). Click on the bracket to see it bigger. Basically, Andreas won this category with Monica placing second and Georgos ending up third. Overall best distance during the night was Nicklas' 41 575 metres, impressive!
The quiz this year was hella different from any previous year. I had put together a little video game music quiz, for the participants to listen to the short track, and then try and guess what game it is taken from. Difficult as fudge, apparently, but people did really well!
Best was Anders C, who was there for a short while before leaving. He got 11 points out of 20! Handing out the prize to the runner up became harder than I thought (that's what she said) because it was three people on 10 points! Both Jonas, Anders G and Nicklas had guessed 10 correct games. I had to turn to the tiebreaker question: How many pixels were there on the bead art on the prizes?
Out of the three going for the Quiz prize, Jonas was closest with his guess of 790 (Anders G guessing 750 and Nicklas 666 beads). The closest guess out of everyone was Fabian's, with his 1800 pixels. Right answer was 2027!!
The funniest answers I got this year was "Happy Crappy Poop Game" or when putting "Gears of War" on every row the person didn't know the answer to (which was a good shout since I DID have Gears of War, but he hadn't put that on the actual row to get a point for it!) xD
Looking at the scoreboard, you can see that we had no less than 3 (!) people on the same highest score! Julius had signed up for the "non-gamer" class, which he will not be allowed to do ever again, so he had to settle for the Prosecco prize. Nicklas and Jonas settled in the best elimination game ever: Battle Game, from Mario Bros. 3!
First to 5 to win. They sure knew how to make it interesting for the crowd, what a game! So many times we thought it was over, but they managed to keep it alive for ages!
Couldn't have picked a better game to crown the winner in. Nicklas was up 4-1, but Jonas managed to bring it back to 4-3. Alas, in the end Nicklas came out on top, beating Jonas with 5-3.
It was incredible though! The prize ceremony could take place, and everything went well, we managed to finish at exactly midnight (something I'm aiming for each time).
Happy winners! From left: Julius: the best non-gamer, Monica: best lady, Jonas: first runner up, quiz-winner and winner of best shirt, Fabian: Jumbo prize winner (fewest points collected during the evening), Nicklas: First place, Darren: Third place, then me at the bottom and next to me Peter: best individual performance (for finishing second on Marvel vs. Capcom).
Some of us went back to mine and Darren's and had an epic afterparty with Beer Pong and Singstar.
Thank you all so much for coming and making my night magical, see you next year!!! <3 <3 <3
