I’m sure most of you are familiar with Rod “Slasher” Breslau, who has done a ton of work over the years covering the global competitive gaming scene in every genre. Gamespot recently brought him on board to help expand their coverage of the scene, from fighting games to Starcraft and everything in-between. Today, they began a new series of articles dubbed “This Week in eSports,” which is set to round up all the major news every week so even casual fans can keep up with the hectic pace these events seem to set.

This initial article is quite long due to Slasher playing catch up, and features pieces on two very recent fighting game events. Shadowloo Showdown and Season’s Beatings: Summer Slam combined to make last weekend a busy and entertaining couple of days. If you weren’t looking to compromise your sleep schedule to stay on top of things, have no fear, for Slasher has done a great job compiling the major moments of both into one convenient package. We’ve included a short excerpt below, but be sure to head over to Gamespot to dive into the full thing.

Not only were there at least 15 Japanese competitors, but there were also players from the USA, South Korea, China, the United Kingdom, France, Taiwan, Singapore, and Kuwait. On hand were American superstars Evil Geniuses’ Justin Wong, Complexity’s Ryan “Filipino Champ” Ramirez, Always Godlike’s Kyohei “MarlinPie” Lehr, Korea’s EVO Top 3 finisher Chung-gon “Poongko” Lee, China’s KOF kings Xiaohai and Dakou, the UK’s Prodigal Son Ryan Hart, Taiwan’s fan favorite Bruce ”GamerBee” Hsiang, France’s Olivier “Luffy” Hay, and hometown heroes Jonny “Humanbomb” Cheng and Michael “ToXY” Guida. “There were a dozen legit contenders to win the whole thing,” fighting game commentator David Graham, known to most as ultradavid, told me after the event. “This was the deepest AE2012 tournament to date.”

After two days of grueling competition, Japan’s best Akuma player, Hiroyuki “Eita” Nagata, crowned himself Shadowloo Showdown AE2012 Champion by taking out Banbaban’s Cammy in the grand finals, holding off Banbaban after he forced a second set coming from the losers bracket. Eita had performed well in international events, taking out Daigo on European tours, but this was his first major title victory. This was also Banbaban’s breakout performance, while Shungoku Neurosis’ Bison took third, showing off more of the amazing stuff we got a glimpse of at last year’s Canada Cup. Tokido and GamerBee played well, as Déjà_vu struck Justin Wong with GamerBee’s Adon and eliminated him from the event in the last round of the last match, preventing him from earning a top eight finish, and marking a repeat performance of GamerBee’s EVO 2010 win. With Justin Wong’s loss, no North American players finished in the top eight for AE2012. EVO Champion Fuudo did not perform as well as expected, and Poongko dropped out of the top 16.

Source: Gamespot, images courtesy of Soltography