Now consider SSBM--about six or seven people were pretty into it, with a fairly crushing skill gap. This included Alex, as the veteran tournament player, and Zenny, as someone who had completely dominated the practice rounds. Yet neither Alex nor Zenny were even in the finals; furthermore, the final few rounds of SSBM seemed to be considered by most to be the climax of the tournament.
Overall I'm not reeeally feeling the "lets pick all games we don't know, instead of a game that several of us are really into" argument. For that matter, I also doubt PoFV is a foregone conclusion, the same way SSBM 07 didn't go as predicted. I mean, back before I knew any of the PoFV mechanics (like, I never used charge or focus) I was still able to take a game off of Laggy through pure dodge hax. >_>
It's not even so much that, as there's a crushing gap between the people who play Touhou commonly and have some natural skill at it, and those that....don't, and Alex...really is that good. But it's mostly the gap, and the amount of people on one side of it.
I wouldn't say any of us have a reputation for being really good at Smash, as in tournament-level play, in general, unless I missed something. Pretty much anyone that's taken out a Touhou Lunatic is in the top 10% of players by definition; We have multiple people that are going to be there that have. (Also Yakko's unrealistically good at PoFV, IIRC he's 1cced Lunatic with Tewi.)
Add in the fact that IaMP's bomb mechanics and general playstyle is not going to be intuitive at all to people(Charging bombs, manual bombing being a terrible idea except when it isn't, how your attacks effect the opposite screen.), and I'm not sure if you can scrape up 16 people interested in vs shooters enough to get slaughtered. I could be wrong on this, but...it does seem more niche.
...'sides, someone would have to bring it and install it on a computer there, and does Meeple even have a computer that's in any reasonable position to be used for this? A laptop wouldn't realistically work, too small of a screen.
Edit:
Also I'd put a vote for MvC over KoF. MvC2 sounds like it'd be too easy for someone with any remote knowledge of it to smash the competition though, from what I've heard of it.
Edit 2:
If DLC2007 is any indication, a lot of DLers in the fighting tournament didn't remember anything about playing SF2 (even if they may have played it at some point in their lives). There were exceptions, of course, ranging from "I remember how to spam fireballs" to "holy fuck Meeple!"
So uhh...yeah, I wouldn't make too many assumptions about familiarity with SF2.
Man, that just means the DL doesn't play fighting games much, more than anything. It's hard to get much simpler for raw inputs than SF2.
(Brawl does it. And uh. I suppose some games are easier to buttonmash without knowing anything in due to their combo systems, not that you'll win against someone that does know the game. That's about it.)
SF4 is, much more importantly,
ridiculously stylish. Let's keep this in perspective, we want games that A: Are hopefully not going to be a slaughter, and B: Are going to be fun for people who don't play them and have a chance of being slaughtered by people that do.
