The most FUN you've had playing video games?
Nov 2, 2022 18:52:03 GMT -5
Post by windfisch on Nov 2, 2022 18:52:03 GMT -5
Reading windfisch 's post about Street Fighter II in the SNES thread jogged another memory. I used to go with my mom while she ran errands and did grocery shopping. The local Wal-Mart had a small game room at the front of the store. It had maybe 5-6 games but they were well kept and frequently rotated in and out. At least for the first half of the 90s. It was the closest thing we had to a real arcade in town. Mom would always give me a handful of quarters while she was in the checkout lane.
Anyway, one time I remember playing Street Fighter II: Champion Edition there. I had already played the SNES version of World Warrior to death. I wasn't particularly good at the game but I found out I could cheese people pretty easily with Blanka. 8 year old me walks up, and puts a quarter in and smokes the older kid who was playing by doing the classic jumping roundhouse>sweep combo then using the electricity every time they got up from a knockdown. I ended up dominating the machine this way and before long, a line of high schoolers had formed at the machine hoping to take me on. My win streak kept going and I felt wildly powerful. It was a rush I had never felt from a video game before. My high was extinguished however when my mom got tired of waiting and dragged me away from the machine. I was proud to say I was undefeated at least...
Glad to be of service. Great anecdote!
So you used to be *that* kid, huh? I think the first time I played SF II there was one guy who seemingly had the game figured out slightly better than anyone else (I think he was the only one who could pull off Hadoukens). He never got beat until it was my turn. Now I chose Guile, because a gaming magazine had ranked him the highest. And charge moves somehow felt less intimidating than quarter circles. I barely knew what I was doing, occasionally letting my guard down to try a Sonic Boom or a Flash Kick. I mostly used normals, which in Guile's case tend to be rather effective, like his crouched strong kick adding a bit of a surprise to less experienced opponents with an automatic second kick. In short, I somehow won two rounds and earned applause and pats on the shoulder. For a brief moment I was someone to be feared. I beat the former champion, so I had to be even better, right? Well, I knew that wasn't true and soon it became apparent. I might've beaten the next couple kids, but sadly that didn't last long. Fifteen seconds of fame...
Back then playing versus mode in stores was as close as you could get to the arcade experience in Germany. I think arcade games were considered a form of gambling (outraged at the time, nowadays I must admit that there is some truth to that, there are lots of similar underlying mechanics to get people hooked) so the only places you'd find the occasional arcade machine were off-limits to kids, like some sleazy gamblig hall or smoke-filled bar.
Incidentally it was also Street Fighter that first came to mind, when reading the topic. More precisely, it was SFIII Third Strike on the Dreamcast in the early 2000s. Now at this point in my life quarter circles had become second nature to me. I was well trained, playing SFII Turbo on the 3DO (I kid you not) and Killer Instinct Gold on the N64 (that controller was actually well-suited for 2d fighting games). Those were great games, no doubt. But Third Strike, man, that game was on another level. This was the reason I got the Dreamcast for and I played it over and over with my siblings and a few selected friends who actually got it. It seems to be an acquired taste, sadly and trying to introduce newbies to it tends to be a futile endeavour. So only at family gatherings like Christmas I get to feel that rush again (edit: and there I am proving my above point about gambling...). No fighting game will ever top it, it's the perfect symbiosis of style and substance.