Hello Friends!
Welcome to the latest Geeky Brummie Esports Roundup! This week Cities: Skylines gets competitive, an all UK-trio top Warzone; a new CSGO tournament is announced and Tenstar asks you to help name their mascot. If you have some esports news to share then fire me an email over at mat@geekybrummie.com.
Red Bull Gaming Announce Competative Cities: Skylines Event
Reducing carbon emissions is now a competitive sport.
What I love about Esports is just how diverse it can be. Cities: Skylines is a popular city building sim – think of it as the game SimCity should have been, but isn’t, because EA did EA things. While there is a big speedrunning scene around it, it is a single-player game so there hasn’t been an esports element to the game before.
Well, that’s all changed now with Red Bull and Paradox Interactive announcing the first major competitive Cities: Skyline event, Red Bull Metropolis.
The competition will take place on Saturday 21st August and will involve time-limited challenges for several leading UK and Ireland –Biffa, Quill, RTGame, and Spiffing Brit. Each creator will have to complete five 30-minute challenges. Tasks include reducing traffic by building an effective bike network to saving the city from a meteor falling from space. Red Bull, Paradox Interactive, and the Cities: Skylines community have joined forces to design these challenges.
Points are awarded based on a number of in-game factors, as well as creativity, integration, and realism. Points are tallied and players will be placed on a league table. The top two scoring players will compete in the sixth and final challenge to determine the Red Bull Metropolis champion.
I am hyped for this event. It gives the community an exciting new way to engage with the game. Creating a competitive component out of games like Cities: Skylines demonstrates how fluid esports can really be. I also like the trailer and not even just because the music slaps.
I just hope to see more single player games get the same treatment – competative Subnautica, anyone? Red Bull Metropolis takes place on Saturday 21st August and will be broadcast live on Twitch and YouTube .
UK Trio Win Warzone World Esports Series
It’s coming home (in CoD, at least).
An all UK-trio have won the latest World Series of Call of Duty: Warzone. The trio consisted of Luminosity streamer WarsZ, Quadrant streamer Fifakill and London Royal Ravens streamer Jukeyz.
The team pulled out some insane plays throughout the tournament. One instance in game 6 was a clutch firefight with a rival trio lead by KayzahR. Jukeyz’s squad outplayed the competition earning them top spot, taking home $50,000, or around $16,666 each.
The trio formed part of Team Recrent who is one of five team captains known in the CoD scene. Recrent, alongside Gotaga, Angelika, Emzy, and Moonryde drafted teams of 10 trios (or 30 total players per team) in total. Each captain’s team scored based on the aggregate point total of its 10 trio squads.
The winning UK trio was part of Team Recrent in the Twitch Rivals World Series of Warzone. Team Recrent finished with the most kills overall in the tournament at 437, ahead of second-place Team Gotaga who had 412.
You can see the final standings here, or head over to Twitch to watch the adrenaline-fueled final on play back.
Red Bull Esports Announce Futuristic CSGO Tournament
It seems Red Bull gives you a lot of things.
Red Bull is everywhere in esports right now. The sporting giant has announced the return of Red Bull Flick,it’s global 2v2 CSGO esports tournament. With the announcement comes the news of the UK qualifiers for the tournament. Two will take place online, and a third in person at the Pixel Bar in Leeds.
Esports News UK reports that the tournament promises a ‘futuristic narrative’ and new Red Bull custom-designed maps. Duos will fight for capture points around the new maps to beat other participants around the world. The maps include Digital Archives, Control Room, City Palace, Sky Platform and Orbital Station WI-NG:5.
Winners of the qualifier rounds will attend a bootcamp experience held at London’s Red Bull Gaming Sphere before the UK final in September.
That’s not all, however. Red Bull will transform the Gaming Sphere venue into an immersive world mirroring the in-game environments in CSGO. This brings an extra level of immersion while finalists battle it out to be crowned UK champion.
Red Bull Flick Esports Invitational
While there isn’t a prize pool, the winner of the Red Bull Flick UK final will get the opportunity to challenge their CSGO idols in the official pro-am competition, the Red Bull Flick Invitational, Helsinki, in November. That features its own €50,000 prize pool.
Again, hats off to Red Bull. CSGO is a big export for UK esports, so it’s nice they’ve recognised that through the investment they’re putting into the UK tournament. I’m pleased to see they’ve partnered with Pixel Bar, who pulled out all the stops during the lockdown with their office esports leagues. The voice over in the announcement trailer (below) is a bit questionable, it makes it sound like one of those poorly translated ads for a mobile game – the music, however, slaps once more.
For more information or to sign up, click here.
Name TENSTAR’s Mascot
Help a robot in an existential crisis find a name.
West Midlands based esports organisaton, TENSTAR, are asking you to help name their robot mascot. In what is one of the cutest blog updates I’ve ever read, they explain that their normally docile service robot has started showing signs of sentience.
TENSTAR go on to report that the robot has now gone from curiously sentient to facing a full on existensial crisis, prompting the team to reach out to it’s fans to ask them to help give the robot a name. To join in simply comment on the Twitter post below by Friday 13th August. You can also go one step further by liking my suggestion (I cheated and put two, one being from my personal handle).
TENSTAR are a relatively new organisation to esports who aim to be fun and inclusive. Recently, they announced their all-female new Nova roster for the upcoming VALORANT Huntress Trials.
Similarly, they recently launched their School Space Programme (T.S.S.P) which aims to support education and the wellbeing of children. First by visiting Wolston St Margaret’s Primary in Warwickshire to deliver a STEM workshop, and then by sponsoring the first ever team kits for Wrekin Lions FC U11 Football team.
That’s it for my latest esports update! There won’t be one next week due to me geeking it up in Edinburgh but business will resume as usual from 23rd August.
Leave a Reply