SHIRO!’s SEGA Saturn community celebrated two online tournament champions in recent months with SHIRO! Discord server members Gregori Rasputin claiming the top spot in Monday night’s Puzzle Bobble 3 tournament after mickschen took the crown in April’s Saturn Bomberman finals.
Rasputin bested 15 other Puzzle Bobblers, competing on real hardware from across the United States, in the sixth installment of the community’s online tournament series by defeating SHIRO! Show co-host Danthrax in a seesaw final match.
“This felt like a must win if I am being honest,” Rasputin said. “My friend group has been playing Bust-A-Move 4 regularly for 15 years now. We have even hosted small tournaments for the game.”
Rasputin took the first set 2-love. Danthrax threw a counter punch, taking the second set 2-1. But Rasputin fought off the surge, winning 2 games to 1 in the final set.
“I just tried to keep solid Puzzle Bobble tactics in mind,” Danthrax said about reaching second place in the tournament. “Stack some junk under a combo that I’m setting up so it’ll be a bigger play, try to keep my shooting lanes open when stacking, make fast decisions…”
In the end, Rasputin’s deep familiarity with the series proved too much to overcome.
“While (Puzzle Bobble) 3 and 4 differ greatly in how the combos function, this decade-plus of experience playing the franchise in a competitive way definitely gave me a leg up at least in how best to approach each puzzle,” he said. “I needed to show up here for the sake of the hundreds and hundreds of hours my friends and I have poured into this series.”
Rasputin said the tournament was far from a cake walk.
“Not a single match I played was a sweep, everyone showed up and leveled up as the tournament progressed,” he said.
Rasputin praised SHIRO! Online Tournament Director Double Dime for another successful event.
“Double Dime, you done did it again!” he said. “Another successful online program! Thanks bro and cannot wait for the next one (no spoilers I promise)!”
Danthrax also shared kind words for the director.
“He’s super enthusiastic about the Saturn, and the community is lucky that he stepped up to facilitate these tournaments,” he said. “He’s also way too good at soccer.”
“This was our second 16-player tournament, and just like with Saturn Bomberman, it seems having more participants really boosts excitement,” Double Dime said. “Both tournaments only took two months to complete, which is about half the time it took for the earlier ones.”
Saturn Bomberman tournament
In April, the group wrapped a months-long Saturn Bomberman tournament that saw mickschen out-bomb 15 other combatants.
“Most of the time I just tried to do my own thing,” he said. “I always tried to use the power-ups correctly.
“When I saw that my opponent hadn’t gotten any power-ups yet, but I’d already collected two or three, that’s when I wanted to get over to him as quickly as possible to attack him hard. The element of surprise!”
It was another example of experience having no substitute. Mickschen said he has been a fan of the Bomberman series for more than 30 years.
“I can still remember the first time I played Bomberman,” he said. “I had a friend in elementary school who invited me over to his house. That was the first day I went to his house, and his mother was sitting there playing a Japanese version of Bomberman on Super Famicom. I remember her saying it was the best version. … In any case, since then I’ve always found a Bomberman for myself or at a friend’s house, and I still play it in multiplayer mode to this day.”
He defeated the tournament’s Cinderella story, BlueMoon95, who valiantly climbed out of the losers’ bracket after mickschen sent him there in the semifinals, setting up the epic rematch.
“I basically just learned what I could from my opponents in real time and tried to apply some deception during battle in order to secure victory, of which still amazes me since I didn’t feel I was going to even get this far into the tournament lol.” BlueMoon95 said. “There were plenty of close calls as a result, there were nothing but skilled players that I played against, and of course, a lot of fun, challenging matches.”
Puzzle Bobble 3 and Saturn Bomberman represent the sixth and fifth SHIRO! online tournaments in the group’s history after finishing a Virtual On tournament earlier this year as well as playing Decathlete and Sega Rally Championship last year and Virtua Fighter Remix in 2022.
People interested in joining future tournaments or learning how to connect their Saturn to the Internet can visit the SHIRO! website and join the Discord server.
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