That story was inspiring I give it 2 thumbs up.
old skool lore (LONG)
The next day the young man returned again and found the old man at the back of the bar with a cue stick in his hand, engrossed in a game of pool against some of the regulars and leaning against a Golden Tee game in the corner waiting for his shot.
“You see, boy? You see this piece of shit behind me? The only thing sadder than this waste of a perfectly good cabinet and trackball is that people actually put quarters into it. But it wasn’t always like that. We used to have good games, games worth playing and mastering. Now they make 'em so any drunk-off-his-ass college kid can feel like a hero by smacking a track ball. Ah, but where was I?”
Tony advised I switch to Guile and that’s what I did. It quickly became clear to me why Guile was so dominant. Within a week I was a far more powerful player than I ever was with Ryu, and even when the gap between the two was closed with Champion, Hyper and Super, I never played Ryu again with the kind of conviction I did with Guile.
But getting back to the World Warrior present of 1991, by this time I was actually afraid to step into a real arcade. Between the ass kickings Tony handed me regularly and the stories he told I was afraid to face reality - that I was nothing. Sure, I could now easily defeat any of the asian kids in the neighborhood, even Pele was no longer any match for me, but I still felt I needed more practice. But that was the thing about Tony. Like it or not, he dragged me kicking and screaming.
The first lesson in humility I got was at Regency Game Palace in Concord, CA. The whole drive out there (about 40 minutes for us) Tony hyped it up and I squirmed in the passenger’s seat.
Tony: “Dude, are you prepared?”
Me: “I’m ready for some Throw Down.”
Tony: “Nah, dude, I mean are you PREPARED?”
Me: “ha ha, sure dude. It’s all good.”
Tony: “Nah, dude, nothing can prepare you. I hope you’re in shape, dude, I hope you ate a full meal and got a good night’s sleep. You’re gonna be making a lot of trips to the token machine. I don’t want you to pass out from exaustion.”
Regency gave an unprecedented 11 tokens for a dollar. There was a cluster of four World Warrior machines in the center of the arcade with about 40 people playing. And they weren’t kids. They weren’t the 10-year olds I was used to at the liquor store or 7-11. In fact, no one looked younger than I was and several looked well into their 20’s. We pushed our way forward into the crowd.
I watched what I didn’t think was possible by that point. Some guy was playing Ryu against Guile. And winning. The guy playing Guile was good, in fact, at the time he was one of the best Guile players I’d seen. Better than Tony. But this Ryu player was extroardinary. He had incredible timing and put pressure on the other guy in a way I’d never seen Ryu played before. In some cases he traded hits to stay out of the corner or keep the pressure on. He didn’t seem to play by any set of rules, he had no pattern I could discern. Even though Guile was the better character he still pulled off the win.
Me: “Damn, did you see that? That fool is–”
Tony: “…on the next level. Hell yeah, he is. His name is Jay.”
Jay was probably the most dominant player at Regency. I counted the tokens till I was up - there were at least 10. But Jay gave his game to Tony and after Tony beat another Ryu player he gave me second round.
I froze up. The guy wasn’t even that good but I’d never seen people play like this. It’s like when some little kid with absolutely no skill just bangs on the buttons and seems to beat you. I was expecting a mano-a-mano test of who could work the fireball-uppercut pattern better than the other but this guy just waited for openings and tore me apart.
My thinking was just so wrong about this game. I was so used to throwing a fireball and waiting for my opponent to react so that I could answer with something. This guy examined my pattern and went from there.
Tony: "You got schooled. Step aside."
Me: “I… uh… damn…”
Tony finished the guy off. The next round I was ready. Something clicked and I was no longer a pattern player. They say competition breeds excellence and they’re right. Watching those few rounds in that dimly lit arcade with at least 10 people staring over my shoulder I immediately changed my style and focused as I never had before. It wasn’t enough, not yet anyway.
Tony: “You suck dude. That fool read you like a Dr. Seuss book.”
Yeah, I lost, but I learned more in one night than the whole year before. I saw how this game is meant to be played.
We played until the arcade closed at midnight. I managed to win a few games over the course of the evening but even the crappy players were a challenge for a me. We made for Dennys up the street and that became our Friday night tradition. Warez till midnight, then off to Dennys. Our own little tradition of shit-talking and post game analysis.
In the old skool days, news travelled via word-of-mouth. The internet technically existed but neither I nor the vast majority of players had any idea what it was. If you heard about a player it was in the arcades, chatting it up with other respected players. You even learned of an arcade’s very existence this way.
If you talked trash you had to have some nuts to do it because whatever you said was to a player’s face. And this was in the Bay Area. In Oakland, you better be careful who you talk trash to. Spend a day there and you’ll see what I mean.
And when it came to legendary players, well, they just didn’t get the props they rightfully deserved. We didn’t have easily accessible ranking tables that could tell you with a few mouse clicks and URLs who the best players in the country were. Even the tournaments were poorly advertised, ussually just a flyer taped to the side of the game that got ripped off within a day of it being put up. How did we know who won the tournament the day before? Either we were in it or we asked someone else who was.
We played on through the summer and I got better with Guile. We went everywhere we could find and when we weren’t in the arcades we filled the gaps at the convenience store.
Finally, I had a run-in with the famous Thomas Osaki.
A few times we went to the Underground at UCB. In the World Warrior days we actually avoided the place because truth be told, there weren’t too many good players there and a lot of the players were “cheap”. On top of that the games were usually in lousy condition. But Telegraph Ave had always been a hangout for us, all the way back to the early La Val’s days and $2 Sunday at Silverball.
There was a good crowd that day and Tony pointed out Thomas to me.
Me: "You think he can beat Jay?"
Tony: "I don’t know, dude. My guess is he probably could. I haven’t played Thomas in awhile, though. He doesn’t seem to come here much any more.
My guess is Thomas was probably going to SVGL at this point, but I don’t know for sure.
At any rate, Thomas was methodically beating player after player. There were so many guys gathered around the machine that I could only catch a little of what he was doing. It was such a hassle to get a glimpse I finally resigned to playing on another machine.
Tony: "Oh my God, did you see that?"
Me (in the middle of a game): "See what?"
Tony: "He just did Fierce-Standing-Fierce to flash kick."
Me: “Wha…?”
Okay, this sounds sort of pathetic by today’s standards, but in old-skool combo theory this was a very big deal.
Since this was World Warrior I had to pick Ryu. I knew I couldn’t win. Against any good Guile player my Ryu just didn’t stack up. But supposedly this guy was an expert Guile player.
Thomas beat me soundly in a no-nonsense sort of way. No flash, just all business. No slack in his game. No faking a sonic boom with jab. No mistakes. He never once looked at me, not when I stepped up, not when I put my quarter in, not after he beat me. I was just another duck in the shooting gallery I guess.
If I could relive those few hours knowing what I know now I would have put another quarter up and played him as much as I could. But after that one game I played the rest of the day on the other machine. Like I said before, we didn’t know who the best of the best was. We went to the arcades and just played whoever was there. We knew who the local good players were but we didn’t have any idea just how good they really were. I mean, we were comparing this guy to Jay, and I can say with certainty that Thomas would have owned Jay in a heartbeat.
But that’s how it was in those days. The world was a smaller place before the internet. The level of competition that existed in the Bay Area was extremely high, but we didn’t see it that way. We figured what was going on in the Bay Area was happening everywhere, that guys like Thomas were just a 10 minute drive away at the next arcade. And sure, the Fighting scene was a hundred times bigger throughout the world in those days, but the Bay Area was one of the true hotspots. Go anywhere from Sausalito to San Jose and there was competition. Even after I won ten straight at the arcade the night before, I’d walk into a 7-11 during my break at work for a quick game and some random guy would give me a wake up call. Almost a year of playing Street Fighter fanatically and I was still just another player. That’s how good players were back then.
How many times have you been given a wake up call playing Golden-fucking-Tee?
That was the one and only time I played Thomas. We never saw him again at the Underground. Sorry if my experience is a bit of a let-down, but that’s how it happened. We never considered the possibility that one day this fabulous era of competition would end. We didn’t really know what we had until years later when we realized it was gone…
- j
Great story. You truly described the old days:)
Please continue!
You should definitely copy and paste your articles to file! Save them for posterity!
Keep writing!
Yeah, man! Keep going! I bet a story about when SF Alpha first came out might be cool.
Your a really good writer. Im sure you’ll be a good gamemaster in Shadowrun.
old skool lore (LONG)
More time passed and fall turned to winter, which in the Bay Area means absolutely nothing. And like the unchanging weather I was an unwavering Street Fighter addict as always.
By this time, however, Guile and Dhalsim were considered practically unbeatable in the hands of skilled players and that combined with the game being out for over year caused the competition to start tapering off. I didn’t care too much though - I was happily doing invisible throw, handcuffs, statue and all the other glitches we had discovered.
But one day it all came back with a vengeance. I rode with my friend Adrian in his 65 mustang out to the Red Robin at Bayfair.
In the pre-web days you got game information from the magazines like Gamepro and EGM. I used to laugh when there was any mention of things like the handcuffs or the game reset glitches. The magazines were afraid to print how they were done but they were well known to all of us. One even warned that these glitches could “damage the game” and one version of World Warrior featured a neutered version of Guile to prevent people from doing them.
I still remember when EGM played an April Fools joke wherein they explained that Sheng Long really did exist. This was always a big mystery to us. Who the hell is this Sheng Long guy anyway? Most speculated that it was the Dragon Punch, but we all wanted to believe he was some hidden character. Every once in awhile some kid would make a wild claim that his friend’s friend’s sister’s boyfriend had gotten to Sheng Long. You know how those stories go. We never took them seriously.
Supposedly to get to him you had to beat every single fighter perfect. They even had screenshots of him on Bison’s stage with a flaming uppercut. I made this my mission for a few days until I wised up. I was so pissed off at EGM for all the quarters I’d wasted trying to accomplish this that I never bought another issue.
But we rarely bought the magazines anyway. Another old ritual of ours’ was going to Barnes and Noble in Jack London Square. We gathered up a stack of game magazines and then marched up to the cafe, ordered a cup of coffee and then spent a couple hours reading while the sun went down on the Bay. When we were done, we put them back on the rack and left.
There was one I did buy, though, and I still have it. It was called “Video Games and Computer Entertainment” and it had the first screenshots of Champion Edition we’d seen.
As Adrian and I pulled into Bayfair’s parking lot I was skeptical. Adrian had “heard” that Champion Edition was there, but Adrian wasn’t nearly as hardcore as I was, and the friend he heard it from was some scrub from Alameda.
Anyway, as we walked in, there were at least 30 kids jammed into the little game area they had and there it was, Champion Edition. In fact, there were so many kids jammed into that room that finally the staff put a divider and a “door man” in front of the entrance to the game area. About an hour after we arrived they announced that only patrons of the restaurant could stay - everyone else had to leave.
Being kicked out of 7-11s or super markets for crowd control reasons was a common thing back in those days. On one occasion at a 7-11 the guy told me “last game” and I said “fine”. Then he went into a back room and cut the power right in the middle of my game. Disgusted I got in line behind about six or seven people to get my quarter back and after finally getting to the front he told me “no refunds.” Then he smiled like a jackass and turned away on some Clerk-esque power trip. I don’t reccommend you do what I did next. I reached into a box of candy bars at the counter, grabbed the biggest handful I could and waved it at him. “This ought to cover it, asshole,” and I walked out.
So I was used to being kicked out wherever I went. It was one of the prices we paid to play back then. But I got two games in, one with Ken and one with Guile. I couldn’t resist playing Ken the moment I saw that huge sweeping uppercut of his. It seemed impossible to daze your opponent but the combos and the overall flow of the game just seemed better than ever.
A week later Tony and I were out at Regency around noon time and he was playing Ken against a lousy Bison player. This is one of the all-time funniest Street Fighter moments I can remember.
Everyone picked up on Bison’s zig-zagging psycho crusher tactic that did stupid amounts of damage before you recovered from block delay and this guy was relying on it to win the match. So Tony, who knew a thing or two about playing against “cheap” players just gave him what he had coming. After his defeat the guy whipped out his soap box and started crying foul about how he was cheated.
Tony pointedly underlined the “Champion Edition” logo on the marquee of the machine with his finger and said, “You see what this says? It says CHAMPION EDITION, dude. You see that game over there?” He pointed to the lonely World Warrior machine in the corner now suffering from total neglect. “That’s where you need to go… back to Remedial Edition… to learn the basics.”
Champion Edition was a worthy successor to World Warrior and the Street Fighter competition scene was back in full swing. But unfortunately, it wouldn’t last.
Now some people say the end of the “golden age” of Street Fighter happened when Alpha came out. In a way, they’re right. But in a lot of ways it happened during Champion Edition. It happened because of the “kits”.
You may have heard of Street Fighter: Rainbow Edition, or Street Fighter: Black Belt Edition. Those were hacked rom sets of Champion Edition. There were literally dozens of them. They started out tame - the first one I ever saw allowed you to do moves in the air and projectiles could go super slow (so slow you could walk past them after you threw them) or super fast.
They were a lot of fun at first. You could throw a fireball, cross-up your opponent and combo him so that he was hit in the back by it during the combo. The computer AI would react in all sorts of wierd ways to these set ups. But we quickly realized a problem with them: competition was a joke. Take Zangeif for example. All you had to do was keep jumping and spinning and you could go off the screen. You could literally go up several screens this way. And then all you had to do was line yourself up vertically with your opponent and do a SPD. Sure, it was funny watching a guy get a SPD from seven screens up but after that, Zangief just had to spin up a few screens out of reach and wait for time to run out.
There was another problem. Every week a new kit came out. Sometimes we got two or three in a week. And each one was more ridiculous than the last. Some sped up as you played, others had zig-zagging or curving fireballs. Others allowed multiple projectiles on the screen or zero delay charge moves (imagine sending 10 super slow sonic booms at your opponent). Others allowed you to switch characters mid-round. Throw ten sonic booms, switch to Ken and do a super fast spin kick across the screen, switch to Zangief and do a super high jump into SPD while your opponent is tied up in block delay. On wakeup your opponent was in a sea of sonic booms and totally powerless. In short, they were all fun for awhile but serious competition became impossible.
When the kits hit, Street Fighter began to dissapear from the 7-11s and the super markets. Now it was the more hardcore players that remained. The damage was done though. Capcom’s answer was Hyper Fighting.
Once again I was up in Reno and my ussually cheap parents decided to splurge. We stayed at what was then called the Bally’s and they had Hyper Fighting. I played it and honestly didn’t really care for it because it played a lot like some of the early kits. You could do some moves in the air, it was sped up, etc. In fact, it seemed boring compared to the kits. No more crazy combos, no more total ownage of the computer, and no more insane setups using five different characters.
It did bring back the competition though. It only took a couple trips out to Regency to figure that out.
This is when arcades started to change pretty radically. Street Fighter 2: WW had brought the industry back from the dead and other fighting series (MK, SS, AoF) had kept the ball rolling but as the genre’s popularity began to center around the more hardcore gamers the profits began to dry up overall.
Regency was the classic example of this. First off, they changed the name. It became “Playland”.
“Regency Game Palace” - home of hardcore players.
“Playland” - home of… stuffed animals?
Sad but true. They installed a bevy of ticket games and one of those big, plastic playgrounds. It was no longer dimly lit and mysterious, with the competitive atmosphere of a pool hall from “The Color of Money”. Now it was screaming flourescent lights and day-glo Barneys plastered all over the walls.
By this time we checked into one of the oldest of the old skool homesteads: Gametown USA. This was an arcade of about 15 games and half a dozen pinball machines on College Ave. It was a shithole with virtually zero competition. However, I’d finally worked my way up to something approaching Tony’s level and the competition was all about us. At the same time we made some good friends there. We still hit the other arcades looking for competition but somewhere along the line we realized the train had started to slow down. And as for me, I had other things to think about.
The old man finished his drink with a seeming finality and the boy figured the story was over. But the old man gestured for the waitress.
“One more and let me close out.”
Such goodness…:eek:
Only one more? Noooooooo…this is the only reason i come to this site anymore! :lol:
The hacked versions of SF was the main reason I stopped going to the arcade back then, funny you mention. You think Spiral’s Wall of Swords is crazy, you should see Guile’s. sonicsonicsonicsonicsonicsonicsonicsonicsonicsonicsonic boom. Good stuff, jcasetnl, post of the year honors here.
I remember the old days of pacific ave bowl in stockton. Me and zeke, or any of the rest of the “old” crew would walk from edison, over to the alley to battle. Even if all we could do was scrape up fifty cents for two games. We knew that was all it would take to keep on the machine for another 5 hours or so…depending on how many scrubs came in…which back then, was pleanty. I remember we use to throw a round on purpose, just to keep them going back over to the change machine.
Saturday nights were the best. We use to gamble on the machine, and had people that came from other towns just to do the same. Man, back then…you played your heart out, cause you knew if you lost…there was 12-15 quarters up that you would have to wait for…at least there was wrestling, and U.N. Squadron to hold ya over.
Anyone remember playing “poor man” style? If you and a buddy were the only one there…you would battle against each other until one almost lost…then you kept blocking fireballs or whatever, until you each had the same ammount of energy for a tie. It use to let you go 10 rounds before shutting down. Capcom got smart though, cause in champion edition, they cut that ish down to like 4.
Those were the days…Never has another single video game caused so many people to drop outta school and take their ged/proficiency esam…I know hella, and we all took it on the same day.
Oh my God… such chills and goosebumps… best thread ever??..
sure… I love it…
---->>Ok Im an old man… when I walked into the arcade (dono the name it was in Houston though, seedy, seedy, seedy mall by a Fiesta grocery store… maybe some H-town Heros can help here) there were like 10 dudes around this machine (the mall was about to close…) I was like WTF?? so I looked up and WAM!! Street Fighter 2… ** TWO!!! ** You see as far as I knew I was the only person in the world that had ever played Street Fighter much less knew how to throw a fireball (thank god for the grandparents, a Turbo Duo, and Fighting Street)… anyway… They were taking turns fighting “The Last Guy” (it was Sagat) I was like “How do you know it was the last guy?” (some big Hispanic dude) “He was the Boss of the first one…” (man I was impressed now… These guys KNEW!!) But like I said the mall was about to close, and I was leaving town in the morning… I wanted to play! So I asked if I could jump in, and the guy said “when I’m about to die” (sound familiar? 
) So he was about to, and I did… Here it was… some girl vs my Ken… don’ remember much of the actual match but I remember I won third round… OK here comes Sagat (the Fagat, for he was cheap as hell in SF1) Killed him with Shoryuken and let me tell you peaple went CRAZY!! (And I’ve been hooked since then… I mean I LOVED the game before that but I’ve been an addict since) Then came Bison and of course that cheap fucker killed me (“Man I hate Fucking Bison!!..” became a fave saying of mine and my Homie Doc would ALWAYS say… "you sick fattie… why do you wanna fuck him anyways? 
)
OK thats enough… many similar stories to those above… ooohh OK OK OK first Standing Fierce xx F.Shoryuken with Ken in CE… aaaahhhh… the big uppercut = DEATH!!! POW<POWPOWPOW!!!
later dudes–
---->>Ben
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I’ve been looking and asking for stuff like this for quite a while on both this webpage and shinakuma. I suppose I didn’t ask the right questions so props to the starter of this thread for showing me wording is crucial.
And thanks to jcasetnl for making this one of the finest threads ever. Just wondering if you know anything about Tomo?
Or if there’s other bards out there with their fancy tales, throw down. There’s a glass of JD waiting for you too.
madd skillz!
I would like to shake jcasetnl’s hand.
This stuff makes me want to cry. My true love, SF, in full glory, all thanks to the vivid memories of jcasetnl.
Unfortunately I wasn’t around for the old school days. I got into SF at A2. When exactly did the crowds die out? I will blow whatever machine that caused the death.
I still want to cry
My only wish is that I was alive back then. That is just so great.
But perhaps more importantly to me than living back than would be to have the same boom happen all over again.
I hope to someday pass along a story jcasetnl’s to my own kids.
I still want to cry.
old skool lore (LONG)
Weird SF moment: I remember hearing about SF2 from my brother…I must have been in 3rd grade or so, I don’t know…yeah, that sounds about right. Anyhow, I remember knowing exactly what Blanka’s character art for the VS screen after he loses, before actually ever seeing him. Not a picture, not anything. And I don’t mean I had that deja vu feeling when I saw Blanka…it was like precognition. Weird.
Also, I remember making some weird association with Predator 2…since the thing in the mask with the claw (Vega) was fighting the rasta dude with the skulls around his neck (Sim). So I thought about how if it were Predator 2 it would be Sim trying to avenge that one dude who got killed and got his head torn off.
Entirely too young to be seeing those movies…
Damn, such memories about rediscovering the SF2 games on my own later…actually drawing the six buttons and a joystick on a piece of paper so I could get better acquainted with the buttons (there were so many!!)…reading that old SF2:WW guide by GamePro…trying to do that jump short, crouch rapid fire short combo with Ryu vs the CPU and getting killed…sweet…
Damn. You just made my night.
:lol:
You write well.
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I would say things really died out when super turbo came out. I remember there was still much excitement when super came…but after that I think street fighter was hard to get into if you were a newbie. The computer on there would often kill off people in the first match.
This is a great thread that brings up a lot of old memories especially for those people who were around for the Street Fighter I and WW days.
This might sound drastic but I think for many of the older players here who experienced the boom years of SF and the revival of the arcade… such games actually shaped the way we grew up.
I know for myself Fridays meant going to the local arcade on my bike or in my friend’s car just to test our mettle against one another. More importantly I have never remembered feeling as passionate about a game as I have with street fighter. My brother and I played it constantly and have gotten into screaming matches and ‘cold -shoulder’ syndrome over the game. I remember when we didn’t know better and the word cheap still existed in our vocabulary – getting thrown was the ultimate disgrace and it got so bad at one point that if you threw in one of the arcaded I played at it was EXPECTED that you allow your opponent a free throw (man… I’ve even seen people almost come to real life blows over such a thing – that’s how heated and passionate people were about this game).
Other memories I have are of SF2 coming out for the SNES. Man, when a kid on my block (about grade 7 I guess) was the first to get that cartridge seemingly every kid in the neighbourhood flocked into house (even me who was several years older). We really didn’t even know him… we just knew that he got the cartridge on the first day it was out and so we had to go to this guy’s house!! It was nuts… his parents promptly threw us out into the street after 20 minutes of playing because some people seemed to get so agitated by the competition.
I also remmeber when that April Fool’s joke came out in EGM. Man, my friends and I spent an entire evening trying to get Sheng Long to come out. What a waste… Strangely enough I remmeber that even Japanese mags were plagiarizing EGM and they were baffled on that side of the ocean as why it wasn’t working (EGM printed this themselves the following month as they saw it as just desserts for having their stuff copied without prior consent).
Interestingly, I bought both GamePro guides that outlined the SF games in ‘detail’ (well, in retrospect both guides sucked but they were just awesome to look at and read during lunch because we couldn’t very well leave the school and head for the mall – too far for us). In those guides there was actually a printed interview with Tomo Ohira (the guy Gamepro claimed to be the best – but I know this is a heated / touchy area as ALOT of people claim Thomas or maybe even M. Watson was the best in the old school days). If only I knew how to upload scanned material I would post it here if people were interested.
Ahhh… I’m just rambling … forgive a washed up, worn-out old-schooler for remembering who he was and who he thought he could be…
Back before the internet made the world into a truly global village, I think more Street Fighter players were susceptible to the illussion that they could become ‘the GREATEST’ if only they practiced enough, spent enough money/time/blood/sweat and tears on this game. If anything, the internet and Shoryken.com has shown me that all those hopes were just grand delusions wrapped up by pipe dreams.
But … what I wouldn’t give to have that same spark, that same feeling of invincibility we always thought we were on the brink of achieving in those early years.
You might be surprised at what machine you will want to destroy then…
Who was it who said “You kill what you love…”?
The demise of Street Fighter from the ‘Golden Age’ in the early 90s was (IMHO)brought about (ironically) by Street Fighter itself or, more specifically, CAPCOM. As jcasetnl (sp?) pointed out (and I tend to agree) the numerous clones that came after the original WW without too many discernible changes (except to the hardcore) I think really took away from the SF scene. The leap from SF2:WW to SF2:CE was no where near as huge as the leap from SF1 to SF2. All the upgrades without any true revolution (just an incremental evolution) I don’t think could draw the mass audience as much as the original WW did.
Please don’t take this the wrong way. I’m not saying that the SFs after WW sucked (I loved them all… well except maybe Alpha 1) it’s just that Capcom really rode this pony for all it was worth (witness the the strange transition from Super to ST – the stage of evolution with the fewest noticeable changes [although one fo the changes being HUGE – the addition of a super meter]).
Also I think that maybe the fact that fighters became more and more technical alienated the mass audience. What we love as ‘hardcore’ fans (anyone who reads SRK regularly) is the intricacies and depth of this game. Ironically, I think it’s this same depth that prevents the casual passerby to really get into SF. As everyone here knows SF is much harder to just ‘casually play’ (unless you’re a complete scrub just hammering away at the buttons) than other games (gun games, shooters, driving sims, etc.
Ahhh… I don’t think i made any sense… it’s late… I don’t feel like editing. Good night
I totally agree with a lot of the posts made here; JCasetnl has a wonderful way of describing stories of the old school Street Fighter days. If anyone wants to read more of his work, click on the following links below. A lot of it is funny beyond belief, yet true :lol:
All this talk of Thomas Osaki
Tales of Smackdown
Thomas Osaki
Again, I highly recommend this. Enjoy.
I will actually take the time to read this today…*such long posts:p *
While I am here;
Everything here “died” when the Super series came out. There’s little to no question about it. Almost everyone (including myself) thought Super SF sucked ass compared to the previous editions and the original SF2. The new characters just weren’t interesting (Bruce Lee. Another big-stupid character. A bikini broad with no ass. some black jamaican dude. Yay.:rolleyes: ) Also, the game was slower than SF2 Turbo/Hyper/whatever. It just was not acceptable…it was like a backwards evolutionary step. You don’t give us insanely fast-paced action, and then go back to slow fighting…that’s just not cool. And something about the graphics just wasn’t great either. Even when this shit came out on SNES…nobody I knew cared; we were still playing SF2: Hyper Fighting(or Turbo? whatever) with the Game Genie to make it into the illegal “Crazy Edition”.
At least in the arcades here, the SF2 crowds was split into this:
- people who thought Super series sucked (majority)
- people who just got tired of any kind of SF (disappointed by lack of any “Oh My GOD!” changes…many of these types would become hardcore 3d fighting fans, and looked down on 2d fighting as a thing of the past.)
- people who began to tire of videogames of all kinds. (the wierdos who actually “grew up”.:lol:.)
Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say Super series slowed it down considerably…SF: Alpha 1 was the final nail in the coffin…it was the last straw that killed everything.
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IMO, both Super SF2 and the constant comparisons with Mortal Kombat served as the nail in the coffin. All the problems with Super have been mentioned before, so no need to go further there. In addition, MK2 was released right around the same time as Super and in the opinions of many, was a better game overall. The whole issue with Joe Lieberman gave MK the mainstream buzz that Street Fighter never attained, as did their respective movies; while the SF movie was of course awful on every level, the MK movie was at worst enjoyable.
Of course, Alpha 1 very well could have been one of the nails in the coffin…it was a horrible game, and that time was when the 3-D fighters emerged.
Josh the FunkDOC