What were your thoughts the VERY first time you saw SF2 and the cast of 8 it presented?
First Impressions
I don’t exactly remember, but I thought it was great. One of my first memories was my brother playing Chun Li, losing the first round to some kid, and then coming back to win in a giant spazz-fest of a match. Another time, he waited in a sizable line and ended up playing a Honda that just beat him with a ton of torpedoes! He didn’t know how to block!
And he wasn’t the only one who didn’t know how to block. Our usual stomping grounds was an arcade right near a movie theater, so the quality of competition was really low. Even well into the CE days, it wasn’t that rare to find and opponent who didn’t know how to block. We’d sweep them over and over with this 
look until our guilty consciences compelled us at least let them stand up.
Tactics from the Stone Ages
Back then, you had to find things out by personal observation. Even just learning how to perform throws/grabs and stuff was a huge deal. One time my bro was very interested in seeing his first Dhalsim: “Yeah, this guy would just punch when they were on the ground and kick when they jumped!” Actually, that strategy doesn’t sound half-bad even today. :wgrin:
The genre was so new, and we had to build our primitive tactics up from scratch. I had a phase where I’d take Ryu or Guile, do a jumping LK, and then slam c.LP ontil they were pushed out of range, then repeat. That’s all there was to it, just repeating that over and over again. (I had copied this strategy from someone else I’d seen doing it.)
Another tactic that had its day in the sun was picking Blanka and just doing the electricity all game. No, literally, just all game long. Back then, nobody knew how to hit him out of it cleanly, so it was considered quite the cheesy gameplan.
I remember when my brother “invented” the throw: “Yeah, when they’re just sitting there, you can simply walk up and throw them!” Sounds elementary, but back then it was like an amazing, creative leap. (This was well before the whole “no throws” thing caught on.)
Sometimes a player would say to his opponent, “Wait, wait, lemme try doing one move, don’t hit me,” right before the game start. Now, usually it would just be some lame-o special move practice from a safe distance away at the beginning, but there was some running joke where the person would run up and take a free hit/throw before you were ready. (This was only done to someone you were friends with, not to strangers.)
When CE came out, there was a period when I’d just pick Claw and wall-dive into wall-dive-throw over and over again. Nobody I played knew how to counter that!
Getting Better
Now, we weren’t any good, but given our location in the middle of nowhere and the lack of practice our competition had, it was hard not to win a lot. I remember we’d share a game by trading off control of a side between rounds or, on the rare occasion when we’d play each other, throw the 2nd round so that we could squeeze a 3rd out of our token. We were some of the champions of our arcade, but there was always one guy at least as good as us: Cheeser.
Cheeser was this tallish, sorta Asian-looking guy. We were kind of friends, even though we never knew his real name. He just used to joke, “Aww, man, what is this cheese? Come on, this is cheese,” while playing. So we always called him Cheeser, and the name stuck.
One time, Cheeser took a trip to California. He got back and I asked him if he’d been winning at SF2 there. “No, there are guys there who can beat me every game.” At the time, that just mind-blowing. Cheeser was like the best player I’d ever seen, and for him to lose all the time seemed impossible. Of course, at the time, I was just a kid and didn’t realize that we were just medium-sized fish in a really small pond. I mean, I truly thought we were really awesome at the game.
Cheeser did bring back one really memorable thing from that trip: the first implementation I’d ever seen of the basic fireball trap. Nobody where we played had ever used the DP properly as anti-air, so this was brand new to me. I can remember getting knocked down in the corner and watching as he throw meaty jab fireball, fierce fireball. For the longest time, I could not grasp that it was impossible to jump between them.
Good times…
… You are saying to the store… I’d love to see him 720 a office desk!
look until our guilty consciences compelled us at least let them stand up.