Today marks the actual 25th anniversary of street fighter, so inspired by the calgary thread I thought I’d share with fellow etowners my first experience with a fighting game, sf2 on snes.
I was 10 years old when a kid I was friends with who had all the newest video games invited me over to play a new game with his buddy. When I got into the room I saw 1P Blanka fighting Vega on the CPU. I remember being utterly floored at how pretty the game was and noticing things like idle animations for the first time. My friend and his buddy were trying to see everyone’s ending and were trying to go through with Blanka with not a lot of luck. We would hand off the controller and give everyone a turn and slowly we tried to work our way up to Bison. I had read a trusty issue of Nintendo Power with a sf2 section on it, so I knew about special moves and some little stuff about the cast. Soon as it was my turn I asked if I could play someone else and they said sure as long as it wasn’t someone they beat the game with already. I took Chun Li and managed to beat Vega with him. On a streak the owner told me against Sagat, always go for the legs. Beat him on my first try. Bison whupped my ass though. Eventually we went back to Blanka and it took probably an hour before we beat it. The owner’s buddy beat Bison by just jump back fierce in the corner if I recall correctly. It was a like a safe combination that was cracked, it felt great. I remember playing Chun on the car break stage later on as well, and everyone was floored how well Lightning Legs worked in it. Hah.
Later on when Super came out, I really wanted it but never did get it. Rented it a lot though, and would always challenge the guy who introduced me to sf2. His main was Ken because he thought he was cool, and I bounced around between Ryu, Vega, Hawk, Fei Long and Dhalsim. Still to this day I feel the moves added to the cast since sf2 were “new moves” named by Nintendo Power. Like Guile’s bazooka knee command normal, Sagat’s tiger knee or Honda’s buttslam. Anyway, I never really could beat my friend’s Ken. I remember what the take was on “high level play” back then, fireball wars. Was also the first time I ever heard game trashtalk, starting shoto fireball wars and the guy says something like, “oh you wanna start this? let’s go!” I think we played a couple rounds out to timeout with only a fireball hit on one side before.
Later on I didn’t really have friends that played fighting games, except for one guy (the sf2 guy disappeared or something). Me and him sessioned Mortal Kombat 2 and UMC3 almost daily for each summer though when they came out. We were so even at MK we used to play random select without watching the screens or seeing who you picked and going from there. I was the only one with a successful Fatality that way, Scorpion’s Toasty. I remember really digging Killer Instinct for snes, but nobody else liked it. I stopped playing these games outside of rentals for a long time.
Flash forward to the ps1 era, and the MK friend of mine rented the system from a blockbuster video and we played it all weekend long on sleepovers. One of the games was X-Men Children of the Atom and we spent I think a full 10 hours trying to beat boss Magneto. Hell, we never even played each other just the cpu because we didn’t want to lose our progress. I remember I got the win with Colossus and later Wolverine. That was so much fun. Somewhere around this time I also met Killey through his older brother as we were friends, and I remember watching the siblings play Alpha 2 and I was too intimidated to try it despite being offered. I had no idea who that cast of characters was, but I thought Anime Bison was cool.
Flash forward a little later, and I met someone from this scene of sorts but I didn’t know it yet. We worked at a video store and on off nights we would hook up a ps1 to the store display tv’s and play some mvc1. So much fun.
Then sf4, but I’m worse than an '09er- I bought it in 09 but didn’t really play it besides the nostalgia until months before CC2011 and so I got into it at Super sf4, so I’m technically a '10er. Met Shiro and the guy I used to jam with at the video store at CC2011 and it got me going. Since then I tried making it out to fightnights at bps and tournies when I can, always hoping to get better and have fun but never putting in a lot of work yay scrubby Honda lol. Good times.
Fuck what a wall of text.
