Your Experience with Fighting Games

I’ve created this thread in order for people to share how they’ve come to be fighting game players and enthusiasts, at least enough so to the point where they’d come to SRK…

Now, for myself:

My first memories of playing a fighting game come from Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition on the Sega Genesis, when I was probably around 6 or 7. I played mostly against my older sister, who I beat by using M.Bison’s slide over and over, since neither of us knew how to block low. Besides those early forays into the genre as a child, I never really played FGs all that often, since I didn’t own any of the newer consoles for a long period, and arcades were all too uncommon encounters.

Still, I enjoyed playing fighting games when I got the chance, such as mashing on the occasional Soul Calibur or MvC1 machines randomly distributed throughout the area laundromats and malls. Eventually, near the beginning of my high school years I got a PS2, and though a likely majority of that console’s time was likely spent on RPGs, fighting games got quite a decent share of time. The two in the small collection were Capcom vs SNK 2, and Guilty Gear XX. Despite not really having anyone to play with, I devoted many hours to both games finally making sense of the notations shown on the command list, and working on my ability to confirm and execute the simple BnBs I could find on GameFAQs. CvS2 was also when I first learned how to use a charge character, namely Guile. (My favorite Guilty Gear character is Bridget, btw.)

After I graduated high school was about the time news and excitement for Street Fighter IV was drumming up. I’d been to Chinatown Fair a few times, but never really went to arcades due to being broke more or less 99% of the time. When CTF got their SFIV cabinets, I went down to Chinatown to check out the new game. I played a match using Guile against an out-of-towner’s Ken, who admitted he was just spinning the stick in circles and mashing buttons, yet really wanted to see the new Street Fighter. He came from quite a long ways away, if I remember correctly. I also remember managing to hit him with Guile’s Flash Explosion, a motion that I still can’t perform consistently to this day.

Then, my time with fighting games came to a freeze when I joined the military. It was only when I was stationed in a base unit in Okinawa did I finally have a chance to settle down a bit again (and buy a PS3.) I eagerly awaited the release of Super Street Fighter IV, and bought it as soon as it came out, incidentally breaking a few orders in order to get myself to the exchange that carried it as quickly as possible. I’ve likely put several hundred hours into SSF4, with the majority of my play time taken up by Guile, who has always been one of my favorite SF characters, and whose play style came naturally to me. One thing that I found odd at the initial outset of my online play, was that for the first 100 or so matches, I found myself to be strangely good for someone with practically no experience playing other players. I began my online play with a 10+ game win-streak. Eventually, I settled into the 1500~ PP range of ranked, until sometime later when I then settled into the 2300-2500~ PP range, with a B+ Guile of around 5000 BP. For the entirety of this time I could only play against Japanese online players, which SF4’s online search does not make easy to find. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack sometimes. The last time I checked my SSF4 record, I think I had somewhere around a 57% ranked win percentage.

Then came the game that would make me stop playing Street Fighter 4 almost entirely, Marvel vs Capcom 3. Suffice to say, where in SSF4 I found myself to be a rather average player, in MvC3 I was most definitely a big fish in a small pond. I initially started that game with a desire to use Morrigan and Hsien-Ko, but they were both eventually traded out for my mains for that game, Doctor Doom and Dormammu, with the Maytag Mayor backing them up. Me and two others would play MvC3 for up to 100 matches in a session, despite that fact that sometimes I would beat them by a 50:1 ratio when I eventually got my main team together. Online was largely the same, though my playing experience was limited more or less entirely to player lobbies due to ranked matches being unbearable due to lag. I believe my W/L ratio of total online matches was something around 1000:130. The game also garnered me the majority of the hate mail that resides in my PS3s inbox.

When UMvC3 came out, I took a vacation. Literally, I went back to the States for about a month. When I returned, my only two sources of “competition” were both gone. As for now, I recently picked up KOF XIII, and am enjoying it greatly playing against my roommate, who’s not so bad at FGs himself.

How about the rest of you?

No offense but people are shoving their “I played SF at age 7 on the snes” stories all the time, even when not asked. Go to the saikyo forums and you’ll find plenty. No need to have a thread on this here.

Yeah, the “SF2 on SNES/Genesis” story is so common that it doesn’t even need to be told. Besides, real men started with Tekken 2 on PS1.

well i was going to go on with my sf2 on snes story but if yall are going to be that discouraging…

fuck it, i’ll state it anyway.
lets see…the first somewhat of a fighter that i played was black belt on the sega master system. i don’t think it was a 2 player, and i don’t think you could choose multiple characters but it was a fighter in every other sense.
then i played SF1 in a bodega and at a local laundrymat…loved it. amazed by it. enthralled by it. but no 2 player options and no multiple character selections. just ryu and ken.
then i went to puerto rico during summer vacation and every mall there had an arcade section, and sf2 was just released and there was a 15 man line behind both 1p and 2p joysticks. and it was the same at every mall i went to that summer in pr.
then i got back to new york and the first thing i did was seek out sf2 cabs.
then high school started up again and i remember that i’d get 3 bucks, or 3.50 for lunch every day and i would by the barest minimum of food(just enough nutrition) to then have like 6 quarters left up so i could play those sf2 cabs after school.
which i did every day.
played with people every day. lost thousands of quarters. learned alot.
started smoking since everyone smoked at this one place i habitated most often which was a little pool room in the back of a shady as hell video rental store.
back in those days you could smoke indoors. the drug dealers would place their stogie over the start button. many a start buttons on sf2 cabs had the stain of cigs on the upper part of the button.
ummm.
then it came out on snes. no need to starve anymore in saving up quarters.
played it till i got nauseous.
then i went to college and my roomate had of course sf2 and he was great at it too. like everyone else during that time. then we saved up and bought SF2:CE…he put in 40 bucks, i put in 40 bucks, we also played MK cab that was in the lobby of our dorm. we also had FF on the genesis. but we barely played FF or SS since the cabs were much rarer to come across.
then i dropped out of college, mostly didn’t play anything for 2 years. then i played alittle of the different fighters of the time like samurai shodown 2 or 3, fatal fury, sf2 different versions of it. then i stopped playing video games all together from 97 to 2002.
missed the whole n64/psx era entirely.
then i got a ps2(still have it!still works) for dbz bud 1.
terrible game.
but for me stunning polygon graphics. for the time.
but had a strong distaste for any 2D sprite fighter since all those years playing them in the early and mid 90s. just sorta turned off by them.
little by little i gradually had my love affair for 2D sprite fighters awakened.
i think it was guilty gear that started it all again.
then arcana heart.
then sf3. but i didn’t like sf3 that much. sold it soon after.
and then kofxi, then mvc2 and cvsnk2.
then i went bat shit nuts over fighters again and tried to buy up every 2D sprite fighter ever released on the ps2…which is a ton, lol.
& here i am with kof 2k2um toeguki version on my tv right now as i type this obnoxious reply to OP.

Started playing seriously with Hyper SF2. Then I moved onto Alpha 2/3 and MvC2. When SF4 came out I played it and didn’t like it so I kept playing sf2 and alpha 2/3. Now I play those two and KoF 13.

Used to give handjobs for quarters when Street Fighter 2 dropped. Still doing it just for fun.

I first play KOF98 when I was a newbie, my basic reaction was “Fuck this clunky shit, imma play some MK Trilogy bitch!” Then I threw the game in a corner. Fast forward 4 years later when I abandoned MK (as a whole) and bought a wii.

The amount of time I spent playing fighting took a huge nosedive and I suddenly had the urge to play TvC after trying it out at a friend’s house. From then on, I repurchased a ps2 and began collecting fighting games. I eventually got a hold of Melty Blood and found my main game and pretty much ignored every other game in existence while I learned how to use some Melty Characters. Street Fighter 4 was coming out. While I was estatic to hear of the revival of the fighting game scene, I didn’t like the game very much and it fell off my radar (I also had a feeling that Capcom would keep remaking SF4 anyways and decided to wait for the best version.) After playing through almost every fighting game in existence (not really), I stuck to a select few that would take too long to list here. To this day I still play KOFXIII, MBAACC, GGXXAC+, and I am currently trying to learn Daraku Tenshi, Jojo’s, Vampire Savior, and Blazblue.

Final Word: Fighting Games are now my favorite genre of video gaming. Even without having played super turbo at the age of 7.

Fatal Fury on Sega Genesis.

Terry Bogard for life.

MvC1 at an arcade randomly when I was 12 <3

In high school I played SF2:WW at the local arcade. (I am relatively old). Also crappy western FGs like “Body Blows” and MK.
Then HF, CE. Mostly arcade although I played the Amiga version of SF2. (Hah, remember when arcade-perfect was just a distant fantasy?)
Then KOF94 came out and I pretty much switched to KOF from there, until 99 and that whole strikers business.
Then VF1 came out and I played VF for a while until VF3.

Then arcades died and I quite FGs. There was a brief flirtation with 3S and MBAC.
Then people at work got hype over SF4 and forced me to play, although I hated every moment :stuck_out_tongue:
I was hype for KOF12, then it stabbed me in the back, pissed over my body and set me on fire. In a huff I decided to try BlazBlue and was really impressed. BB got me back into FGs. Then CS came out and Taokaka became high-execution so I switched to Lambda. Then CS2 came out and Lambda became harder to play, and I realised BB is only going to get more combo-heavy with every sequel, not less.

Then KOF13 came out and it was good, so now I am playing that.

I bought CvS2 for Playstation 2 and thought it was neat. Then I raged at Kaillera a bunch trying to play KOF and went to play VF4 arcade at a dude’s house on a lark. The damage was irreversible.

The fighting video game I remember playing was some version, unsure which, of Street Fighter 2 at a pizza place near my house. Every time my family took me there I was more excited about playing the game than eating the pizza. Then one day when we arrived I ran straight to the SF2 machine and it wasn’t there. It had been replaced with a different machine with a game called Qbert. Since I wasn’t even 5 years old yet, having my precious street fighter 2 being replaced by a game like Qbert literally me to tears.

There was a large gap between the loss of SF2 and my next fighting game. I was probably around the age of 9 when I got a hold of Eternal Champions and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers for the Sega Genesis. My siblings and I would play these games together for hours. I used to get my butt whooped by my older sister in both these games. During this time period my family would occasionally go to a place that had another game, Primal Rage, which my siblings and I loved. Eventually though, I got better than my siblings at these games and nobody wanted to play against me anymore. Since I had no more opponents I lost interest in the games.

A few years went by without much attention to fighters. I got a dreamcast when I was 13, the first games I got on it were the 2 Power Stone games and MvC2. I played these games a few times with friends but didn’t play them with a competitive mind set like I did with games against my siblings when I was younger.

Fast forward to 2006, I play some games of super smash bros melee against some of my friends who had been planning to go to a tournament for it. I bought the game at 6:17 pm PST on February 16th 2006 and got to practicing everything I could. I started to think that I could crush just about anyone after a few months of playing against a small group of friends and practicing alone. We enter the tournament and to my surprise there was a player whose name I recognized from matches online. The guy’s name was Ken Hoang. The tournament was double elimination. My friends and I get crushed during our first rounds. I think that only one of my friends even won a match during the tournament. My first opponent beat me with 3 out of 4 stock left after both matches. Later in the day, I saw him play against Ken Hoang. Ken didn’t lose a single stock to him. It was then I realized that I was terrible at the game. This was the moment that led me to being even more competitive than I used to be against my siblings, but now it was against an large community. I continued to play the game for a long time and went to plenty of tournament. Eventually Super Smash Bros Brawl came out and I played that for about a month before I dropped it. I would continue to play melee regularly until 2010.

I started playing Third Strike, MvC2, CvS2, Blood Roar Primal Fury, and Sonic the Fighters with a fair sized group of people during the time I was into melee. As time went on I seemed to start enjoying the more obscure games more which ended up being disappointing. I’ve started to like games that do not have much competition but its the competition that really keeps the games exciting to me. This has caused me to stop playing fighters as much as I did from 2006-2010. I did have a lot of fun at the end of 2011 due to a small community of Power Stone players in San Diego. It seems like this chapter of my fighting game life might die due to my obscure tastes.

Ok, feel this deserves a real response.

I used to live in a slightly shitty neighborhood in San Jose, so if I wanted to do anything off my street my mom used to only let me leave if I was with my friend’s brother. Well back in 91 or 92 ( just remember I was in first grade) the only reason he would take us with him is if he went to this corner store. Like every other corner store, they had arcade games but this time I noticed like 8 people gathered around this one cabinet. I was too small to see what was going on, but the atmosphere was already drawing me in. People being loud and excited over whatever the hell was going on, threats being made, a game being taken this seriously was new to me so I tried my hardest to see what the hell it was. After a while, my friend’s brother told me what it was and I wanted so badly to play but I could not that day as I had nothing for money.

When I got home I purposely told ask my mom to go to the corner store with me to get something with the real intent of her giving me some money to play games. We go there and it is still busy as all hell, and my mom being my mom straight up asks them if I can play next (something I was way to nervous to ask), which they stated I had to wait. Once it ws finally my turn, everyone was telling me who to pick and I ended up choosing Blanka. Now thanks to my mom, I got a damn turn. But thanks to my mom, these guys were not as loud and crass as they were earlier. Anyway, I thorougly got stomped, but I remember specifically that I almost won one round due to bullshit mashing and the guys picked up a bit taunting their friend. This was when it all began.

From 92 onward, I went to arcades before and after school. I spent any and all money at the arcades. I headed out to Golf Land or Nickel City each weekend. I made the mistake of getting street fighter for my SNES and hating it because it was nothing like the arcades. Around 2001 or so I stopped. The only games I liked were MVC2 and CVS2. I was then introduced to GG due to lack of other games and fell in love with it. Up until 2006, MVC2, CVS2 and Guilty Gear games ruled my life. I stopped playing for a while after that, bought Street Fighter IV and hated it and resumed not playing fighting games. Then thanks to MVC2 being rereleased I kind of fell back into it.

Anyway so yeah, basically thank you golden age of arcades, online + voice chat does not compare.