Category: Entertainment & Lifestyle

Bandai Namco has announced that the Season 2 patch notes for Tekken 8 will go live on April 1 (March 31 PDT). In the meantime, they’ve left some notes that provides an overview of what we can expect for Season 2.

Prior to this, Bandai Namco had revealed that throw breaks would cause the defender to receive a small amount of chip in Season 2. Fans almost universally hated this change and proved to be very vocal about it, prompting a response from Katsuhiro Harada.

Once the patch goes live, the throw break change that punishes the defender will still go through. However, Bandai Namco has already revealed their intention to revert this adjustment in a future update due to the fan feedback.

“After the initial announcement, the development team received feedback from players and reconsidered one of the proposed adjustments. It was concluded that imposing a disadvantage on the defender for executing a successful throw break would be excessive, as throw breaking is a high-skill mechanic that reflects a player’s practice and proficiency,” stated the patch overview.

“As such, the following spec will be scrapped in an upcoming patch: When a throw break is successfully performed, player that was grabbed will receive 5 points of recoverable health damage.”

Aside from that, the patch overview talks about how the developers are trying to dial back the offense of the game. Although the developers are trying to avoid making Tekken overly defensive like with previous titles, many felt offense was emphasized too much in Tekken 8 Season 1.

Check it all out below:

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Fighting game fans were given probably the strangest guest character reveal in recent history with the announcement that soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo is a playable character in Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves.

And now we can see what Ronaldo is going to play like in CR7’s full movelist for Fatal Fury.

It appeared in the initial trailer that the football icon may be a stance character though that doesn’t exactly seem to be the case.

Ronaldo does have a few moves, however, with multiple follow-up options.

His Back Approach command move has two options with a headbutt and stomp that may be an overhead and a low attack respectively.

And then there’s his Deep-Rooted Step that has four potential follow-ups.

He has access to a stop, Slide Tackle, Over the Limit high kick and Ironclad Shoulder, so it seems he’ll have quite a few mixup options in his arsenal.

Unsurprisingly, his Gear Supers all revolve around kicking a soccer ball really hard like we saw in his trailer.

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is also running its second open beta test that’ll be available until Monday morning.

You can check out Ronaldo’s full movelist for Fatal Fury below.

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There’s 170 champions in League of Legends, so there should be no shortage to choose from for the 2XKO fighting game spinoff, however, it sounds like it’ll take quite a bit of time to see even a solid chunk of them.

According to the developers, 2XKO will be launching with a much smaller roster count of characters than many probably predicted.

Following the big developer update for the League fighter yesterday, Riot Games opened up an “ask me anything” session on the official 2XKO Discord server.

There one fan asked how many champions are planned for the launch of the game to which Director Shaun Rivera responded with a pretty open reply.

“We will have 10 playable champions at launch,” wrote Rivera on the Discord AMA. “We know it’s a smaller number than you would expect, but when faced with a trade-off of including even more champions resulting in delaying the release date vs. getting it into your hands sooner, we are excited about the latter.

“We also believe that experiencing these champions through solo/duo play via a number of different fuses provide a lot for folks to dig into early on. The fact that we are a live service game means that it will only get better from there via new champion releases and gameplay updates.”

So there you have it. 2XKO will launch with only 10 playable characters, and we already know most of them.

2XKO will be launching with 10 champions!

(via 2XKO Discord) pic.twitter.com/iBwE1Vz1hs

— 2XKO INTEL (@2XKOintel) March 28, 2025

Through the Alpha Lab 2 test, Ahri, Braum, Darius, Ekko, Illaoi, Jinx and Yasuo are all selectable, so that’s seven right there.

And in the first footage of the game as Project L, Katarina was included too, however, it’s unknown if she’s still planned to be in the game at launch.

This is a surprisingly low number of characters considering just how long 2XKO has been worked on over at Riot Games.

The Cannon brothers first teased the existence of Project L all the way back at Evo 2019.

From there, Project L was shown off in its early concept phase in October 2019 as a seemingly 1v1 fighting game.

It’s currently unknown how long exactly 2XKO has been worked on in its current 2v2 state in full production, but it’s certainly been multiple years.

Launching with just 10 characters is already a small number, but that becomes even more important with the game positioned as a team fighter.

Similar tag-based games like Dragon Ball FighterZ faced criticism for roster sizes, and that game released with 24 characters.

We also have to see how Riot chooses to handle post-release characters in terms of pricing and things like free champion rotations.

Ultimately, this is the reality faced by the developers given their release window, so it remains to be seen how that’ll go over with fighting game players and League of Legends fans.

2XKO is slated to release in late 2025 for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.

A second 2XKO Alpha Lab test is scheduled to take place in April.

Texas Showdown is back for 2025 and it’ll be happening in Houston, Texas, U.S.A and it’s a big one with a total of over 1,200 registered participants.

Notable players participating include SonicFox, TM|NoahTheProdigy, PAR|JoeCrush, Brian_F, Uriel Velorio, UA|Bass, Grr, Iago|Ryazo, TUE|Genghis D0n, DEUS|Incendiate, Trojan, Hamad, Dany, HB|Docta Afrikan EX, Shinku Kanme|Elsa, Ghost|Nomar, NG-Obscure, Sicoby, Rez|Dyloch, DG|KingGambler, BlueSkyGuyBSG and many more.

Street Fighter 6 leads the charge in entrants with over 280 followed closely behind by Tekken 8 which almost also hit 280. Mortal Kombat 1 is next in line at just under 150 signups followed by Guilty Gear Strive, Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising, Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike, a special Ultra Street Fighter 4 memorial tournament in honor of BrolyLegs, Under Night In-Birth 2 [Sys:celes], Super Street Fighter 2: Turbo and Guilty Gear Xrd REV 2, all of which surpassed 50 participants each.

Tournament play will also be featured for BlazBlue: Central Fiction, Dragon Ball FighterZ, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Capcom vs. SNK 2, King of Fighters 15, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Vampire Savior (Darkstalkers), Killer Instinct and Soul Calibur 6.

There will also be a ton of side tournaments outside of the official games.

Streaming is being done at TX Showdown Live, FX Games GG, Full Bar Esports and Riz0ne.

Battle of BC is back for its 7th installment and will be happening in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

BE36|Hurt, Zeta|Acola, FaZe|Sparg0, SR|Zain, Cody Schwab, Liquid|Hungrybox, C9|Mango, 4TW|ChrisCCH, Sayff, Fennel|Miya, Liquid|Riddles, LG|Tweek, RC|Shuton, LG|MkLeo, SR|Light, SR|Moky, FLY|Jmook, Thunder DeLangis ,Envy|Wizzrobe, DTL|Syrup, SR|Joshman, Raru, Zomba, Solary|Glutonny, Snow, ShinyMark, Pocket, Moist|Kola, Tempo|Axe, CeroBlast and Zykles, but also many more where they came from.

Battle of BC 7 has over 1,500 entrants total, so there’s going to be a ton of hype matches across various games to keep you entertained throughout the weekend.

The main event is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate which sits at more than 430 participants followed by Super Smash Bros. Melee which has over 350 signups. Rivals 2 is next in line with over 170 players. All of these games also have Doubles competitions and various other side events like Ultimate Squad Strike and Giant Melee.

Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 both have around 100 people playing, but there’s also a special treat for the top 4 placers in Street Fighter 6. They will play in a separate special bracket later on for a qualifying spot to the Red Bull Kumite which is happening in Paris next week.

There will also be tournament play for Guilty Gear Strive, Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising, Dragon Ball FighterZ, Under Night In-Birth 2 [Sys:celes] and BlazBlue: Central Fiction.

Streaming is being done at Galint Gaming, BTS Smash, Satellite Smash, Tampa Never Sleeps, Rivals of Aether, Mang0 and Van Street Battle.

There had been much discussion leading up to the release of Bleach Rebirth of Souls about whether it’d be just another anime arena fighter or something closer to a traditional fighting game.

Now that Bleach is here, we can see that the game does show some promise, but it also has issues that need to be worked out before it could be considered a competitive fighting game experience.

Pro fighting game player Diaphone recently released an excellent new video breaking down the current issues with Rebirth of Souls as someone who’s been enjoying the game overall.

Besides the poor launch state of Bleach’s PC version, Diaphone notes the existence of infinite combos that are being banned from the tournaments that are taking place for the game.

Some characters have combo strings that essentially force a restand, but the player being hit cannot act or even block after flipping out of these simple strings — so the only means of escape appear to be invincible moves.

What’s extra strange is these infinites may only work in online matches too.

There’s also strike-throw option selects in the game that make it extremely difficult to open opponents up.

Some characters can grind down guard gauges like head captain Yamamoto that can’t really be countered either.

Diaphone also shares some examples of glitches he’s run into that have impeded the experience including an opponent’s big Super attack always whiffing, which meant that he couldn’t take away a life stock as necessary.

And for some reason, Bleach didn’t even launch with a Ranked Mode option, so it leads to the question of how much Tamsoft and Bandai Namco even planned for this game as a competitive title.

We highly recommend checking out Diaphone’s new video below to learn more about what’s holding back Rebirth of Souls at launch.

The modding community for Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is on a whole different level, and they’ve joined forces to completely change how the game is played.

The Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Community Edition project recently released a new trailer showcasing the new characters that have been added to the experience.

There’s a total of seven modded fighters shown off with their own trailers compiled here pulling from both companies using both brand new and classic characters.

Rival Schools’ Kyosuke, Bad Box Art Mega Man, Devil May Cry’s Nero, Marvel’s Blackheart, Street Fighter’s Juri and Yun, and Saki Omokane from Quiz Nanairo Dreams.

These aren’t all of the characters available either, as there’s now a total of 61 palette swap fighters to choose from with collaborations across the modding community.

You can check out all of the new characters in the trailer below, and more information can be found on the official UMvC3 Community Edition Nexus Mods page.

Riot Games provided an hour-long update on the development progress of 2XKO today, but that’s not all they had to talk about.

The 2XKO Alpha Lab 2 has also been announced starting in April with a ton of changes over the first test from last year.

The second at-home play test for the upcoming 2v2 fighting game is set to run from April 18–20, 2025.

It’ll be available to players in the United States, Canada, and Brazil only, and the overall player pool is said to be smaller than the first.

The new test will be playable on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, however, prospective players can only register for the PS5 and PC.

Those who were accepted for the first test will not automatically be invited to the second, though, they are signed up for it — so there’s no need to register again.

Alpha Lab 2 features 2 brand new fuses!

Let’s take a look at the Sidekick fuse first:

“With Sidekick Fuse, your point and assist champions never switch places. Instead, your point champ gets a health boost as well as a defensive boost while below 30% health. Meanwhile, your… pic.twitter.com/N0Gd5vRCPO

— 2XKO INTEL (@2XKOintel) March 27, 2025

Referral links will not be offered this time around either.

Jinx is being added to the playable roster this time around as well as ranked matches to take part in.

There’s too many changes to go over here, but they are adding two new Fuses to pick from that’ll shake up how the game can be played.

Sidekick Fuse makes it so the point and assist characters can not switch places, but the point fighter gets a health and defensive boost as well as starting with one bar of Super meter and some unique abilities.

Juggernaut Fuse removes the assist aspect entirely and puts all the focus on the point character with added health and defense plus access to Fury Break from the start, Eject, self-Double Down Supers and more.

Now onto Juggernaut fuse!

“Juggernaut Fuse allows you to focus on one champion at a time by removing your assist abilities entirely. You also won’t be able to switch champs, except at the very beginning of each round.”

In addition, your point champ gets some powerful buffs to… pic.twitter.com/xjduB2hSV6

— 2XKO INTEL (@2XKOintel) March 27, 2025

Pulse Fuse has also been removed and replaced with Pulse Combo that provides access to autocombos that can be toggled on or off in the character select.

Fury Fuse has been taken out too and replaced with Fury Break that can be activated once one of your characters has been knocked out for an offensive and defensive boost for a limited time.

That’s just a taste of what’s been done to 2XKO now with controls, visual clarity, and more getting updated.

Foreseen Yasuo
God-King Darius
Guardian of the Sands Ekko
Dynasty Ahri
and… pic.twitter.com/BDLLcFuS0T

— 2XKO INTEL (@2XKOintel) March 27, 2025

Ahri, Braum, Darius, Ekko, Illaoi, Jinx and Yasuo will be selectable in Alpha Lab 2.

You can find all of the information in the 2XKO Alpha Lab 2 FAQ and in-depth breakdown that you should check out for much more on what’s included and different now.

Players can register on the 2XKO website, though as mentioned above, those who were in the first test do not need to apply again.