Power Up 2012 is now over!

The top 8 for Soulcalibur V has concluded, however you can find the results and a battle log of the top 8 action after the break.

The 8th edition of Stunfest is currently taking place in Rennes, France. The solo tournament for Soulcalibur V has concluded, but on Sunday, the finals for the 3 on 3 tournament will be streamed beginning at 3PM CET (GMT +1) / 9AM EDT.

After the break, you can check the results from the solo tournament along with the stream archives for the top 32 that have taken place today.

On Wednesday, MLG shared some some details on their next two upcoming events for fighting games. The first event which is the Spring Arena, will take place in their studio in New York City on April 28th and is an expansion on their Winter Arena event for Starcraft 2. At this event, the top 8 placers in Soulcalibur V and Mortal Kombat at MLG Columbus are being flown to New York to compete in a $3400 prize pool for each respective game.

The second upcoming event which is the Spring Championship, takes place on June 8-10th in Anaheim, California and will feature SCV, MK, and KOFXIII. Spectator passes are already available for sale where as competitor passes go on sale May 1st.

Earlier this week, Namco Bandai brought us the SC5 World Championships in which 8 players from around the world competed for a cool $10,000 ! If you watched the event live (which I unfortunately couldn't), you would have seen that Hori USA was running a special promotion for their Soulcalibur 5 Arcade Sticks.

Well Namco Bandai and Hori USA just informed me that this special promo will be extended until next week! The normal price for this stick, which is probably the best arcade stick Hori has ever made will run you a total of $150. Well using the coupon codes in the images below, you can save some money and get one of these sticks at a steal of $100!

With the focus of our last episode being MLG, we wanted to get some NCR love before PowerUp this weekend (which will undoubtedly be the subject of our next episode). So, who better to come on the show and expand our vocabularies than your favorite editorialist (or editor, I suppose) and philosophizer?

Hates was kind enough to grace us with his voice and kindly attitude, as well as discuss NCR, SCV, and, of course, random other stuff. As always, links and whatnot after the video, and feel free to get in contact with us if you have any questions; we're always around.

The time is almost upon us! Tonight, starting at 7pm Pacific (10pm Eastern), eight of the world's best SOULCALIBUR V players will be squaring off for over $10,000 in prizes. Be sure to check it out live, courtesy of Team Spooky.

I wrote a little while ago about some big-picture stuff regarding throws, and the responses to that column got me thinking about some of the other things that really piss people off, like ring outs, time outs, backdashing, turtling, spamming the same moves over and over, and so on.

As I thought about these things, I got all tingly inside. Human misery is such sweet, sweet nectar, after all. Of course, you don’t need to be a soulless minion of evil to appreciate the finer points of playing dirty. In fact, it’s something to which we should all aspire.