Evolution Championship Series THIS WEEKEND!

For those of you who care at all about fighting games, you already know what this weekend is. But if you don't, this is going to be an amazingly important weekend. For those of us in the Fighting Game Community, this weekend is the Super Bowl; the World Series; the World Cup. Words cannot describe how exciting this coming weekend is going to be for us. Its hard to even describe what is going to happen. But I can try.

This weekend is the Evolution Championship Series. This weekend is going to be the world's largest fighting game tournament. Players from all over the world, from Japan to France to Taiwan to Mexico to England to Korea to Canada are all going to converge to the same place; Las Vegas, Nevada. This weekend The Rio Hotel and Casino will be overflowing with gamers the world over, all for one purpose, all for one cause. That cause? To compete.

Five games, five tournaments over a three day period. Thousands upon thousands of people will be competing for the title of "worlds best". Players will be competing in one of five games. BlazBlue: Continuum Shift II, Tekken 6, Mortal Kombat 9, Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition, and Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Winners of any of these tournaments will receive a hefty sum of money, and the ability to brag for at least a year that they are the best player in the world. And even if they never win again, they can say that they beat some of (if not most of) the world's best fighting game players. Such as Justin Wong, Daigo Umehara, Gamerbee, Infiltration, Mike Ross, Ricky Ortiz, Ryan Hart and many, many, many more.

This year is shaping up to be the biggest year yet, with more competitors then ever before, exclusive videos that may not be seen to the public for a long time after the event, and for the first time ever: community panels! A list of these panels can be found here, via Shoryuken. And that completely ignores the fact that developers such as Capcom and Namco bring beta versions of yet-to-be-released games for the competitors to play, such as Street Fighter x Tekken, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and Tekken Tag Tournament 2! Along with this also brings lesser-known titles such as Skull Girls that are still in development.

And those of you not going to be there don't have to worry, because the entire event is going to be streamed free to you! You can see it all go down on Team Sp00ky's or Team iPlayWinner's justin.tv channels! And if you don't feel like tuning in all weekend, but want to see the best of the best play eachother, you only have to wait until Sunday, where you can watch the top 8 competitors in each game duke it out to see who is best! And if you have a Playstation 3, you can even watch the whole thing via Playstation Home! They put up a nice post about it on their own blog, with a full schedule of what they plan on showing.

And if that isn't enough, here is the official trailer for Evo 2011:

And as a special treat, I'll show you one of the most exciting moments from last year's tournament!