Derp, I didn’t see this.
Ok~
Well like most people I played SF2 as a kid at a local bowling alley. Didn’t have a clue what I was doing but it was fun.
My dad / god father got me into games so I went through an NES / SNES / N64 without really going anywhere near a fighting game.Every so often my parents would take me this indoor amusement park and I’d be like in lala land. Lights all around me, bumper cars, the works. Of course I ignore all of that and make a bee line right to arcade cabinets at the end of the building. I didn’t care what was there I just wanted to play. My parents money would fly away as I enjoyed pressing buttons and just abusing the joystick. This went all the way up until high school (and a little bit of college) where we would stop by once in a blue moon to play games. My friend and I played one game in particular against each other, Xmen vs SF. Did either of us really know how the game worked? No. We had a basic knowledge at best. We could do fireballs, hurricane kicks, and supers, that was it. Our matches would go back and forth but it was so fun. We would then do the same when we held group gatherings and got to playing Super Smash Bros on the N64. There was just something about enjoying these games with other people that were so much more fun then sitting at home and playing games like Mario, Final Fantasy, whatever.
Fast forward to my getting a Dreamcast in like 2001. I had Sonic Adventure and loved it to death. I would hit up the local game store to find out more about what the Dreamcast had. Evolution, what’s that? Space Channel 5? Skies of Arcadia? Gimme gimme! It was all gravy until I saw someone bring in a game in a Japanese box and plug it into the demo unit. The manager and a few other people gathered around it too. I was a bit curious myself so I got a little closer until I was distracted by the Bust a Groove box in front of me (amazingly fun dance game). I look up from the box and notice I missed the entire title screen and now just staring a black transitional shot. What are they playing?
‘READY?’
‘FIGHT!’
Holy shit, is that Spiderman bouncing around the screen? No way, they put Cable in this game! Dude Tron from Megaman Legends?! DUDE THERE’S A TINY SERVBOT AS A CHARACTER!
It was the Japanese release of MvC2. Sure I had seen some of the other characters in other titles before but to an innocent gaming schmuck like me MvC2 looked like pure virtual cocaine. They played the game for hours and I just stood there watching the entire time (my mother managed a store in the mall at the time). Right before I left I asked them where I could play this game, and one guy just blurted out ‘New York City bro!’.
A week later I went to NYC by myself for the first time (I live half an hour away in NJ for the record). I wandered around Times Square like a moron trying to find arcades. I stumbled on like 4 of them. Trouble is that they all opened up later in the day, where as one was open 24 hours. I spent that entire month just going to this one location (Barcode) to play this game by myself every Saturday. I didn’t no anyone else who played it, the thought of using the internet to search for it was still foreign so I just took in what I could once a week for four weeks. I eventually taught myself how to air combo, how to otg, and a bunch of other things without actually knowing they had proper terms. At that point I was FIENDING to play the game wherever I could get my grubby little mitts on it. Friends want to see a movie? Go to the theater with a cabinet. Mom you want to pick up dad from work? Let me do it (another cabinet in the movie theater by him). Bowling with friends? Cabinet. I had just never played anything like this game, and what’s more I was teaching and learning it entirely on my own.
Eventually the Dreamcast was blessed with a port, which lead me to playing the game for 7 months straight, BY MYSELF. Every so often my baby sister (who was 11 at the time) would join in because she was kinda into games too but really it was me just playing the game endlessly on end. It took me ages to unlock everything anyway but I went through so many friggin team combinations and characters. Again, I had learned and taught everything on my own. The best part is that the game store had two people in the FGC who loved it just as much as I did. They had a demo unit up with the game and all the characters ready every day, and every day there’d be a line of kids, teenagers, and whoever just dying to play it. I remember playing against 10 year olds and being surprised at how good they were and then annoyed people older then myself and finding out how annoyed they were.
This all lead to me going back to those same arcades of my youth. Where I would spend $20 easily in under an hour I could now suddenly take $2 and make it last the whole day. The worst part is that I became ‘that guy’ to my old XvsSF sparring partner as I entirely decimated him the few times we ever played the game again. As I played more I started noticing that lots of the guys I played against used many of the same characters.
‘Why do they keep Magneto? People sure love Sentinel don’t they?’
What the hell did I know, right? It struck me as funny because ironically I went through every character in the game extensively (on my own remember) EXCEPT for the ones that ended up dominating the game for most of its lifespan. I didn’t have fun playing Sent, or Mags, or Storm, or Cable,but then all I was doing were basic magic series anyway. The guys at the game store in the mall would take me to tournaments, but I wouldn’t enter. I’d just watch and take it all in. I would soon stumble onto Shoryuken.com from these tournaments (check my join date), and well the rest just trickled on down past that.
I went from MvC2 to CvS1, but that didn’t last long. I then went to CvS2, which lasted close to 8 years. Arguably the game I’m best at. Whilst playing MvC2 and CvS2 I also learned how to play GG, then GGX, and so on and so forth until Accent Core. I loved Slash but disliked the chances made in Accent Core so I stopped playing there. I’d try other games too, like Soul Calibur 2, Third Strike, Super Turbo, but realistically I’d always try my damndest in CvS2.
Time would finally drop Melty Blood in my lap sometime in 2004. I found the thread for it on this site, and then made friends with someone else who played in the tri-state, none other then Sp00ky of Team Spooky (I created the logo if you were wondering :P). A friend and I would start bringing it to local CvS2 / GG tournaments, to the dismay of the people there. We’d bring it to majors too, always pushing word of it. For a year or two the NATIONAL community for Melty was no more then 10 people, with six on the west coast and four on the East. We still kept playing it though, and holding tournaments for it.
The rest I could tell you if you’re REALLY interested in, as the history of Melty is a story in and of itself, but let’s just say we’re not lazy folks and we’ve done well for ourselves.
Anyways, long story short, I don’t really like MvC3. In fact there’s some shit in that game that just infuriates me. It doesn’t feel like an evolution, or even a sequel, just a rough patch job hap harzardly thrown together with gum and string. I don’t feel any of the energy, vibe, or just vivacious nature of MvC2 in MvC3. Honestly 98% of the matches are pretty boring to watch. I tried real hard to like it and play it seriously, but no luck.
Once I stumbled onto Skullsgirls though (at Evo in 2010, and then again at ECT in 2011) that whole fucking rush came back to me. I instantly wanted to relieve playing a game and learning it on my own and just enjoy that experience all over again. God I can not, I simply CAN NOT express in a literary form how much of a wonderful bastard child of MvC2 Skullgirls is and how fucking hard I love it because of that. There’s a reason why my stick is sanwa but my buttons are all HAPP. I’m ready to put Melty on the side to attempt to become a ‘top player’ in Skullgirls so watch out.
That’s it~
