윤

Fortunate enough to be in attendance at a grand opening (or re-opening) event of a classic arcade, so when the announcement was made for a Street Fighter competition, I rushed to make it to the machine to beat the crowd. The custom console had four sets of six-button controls and one of them was unoccupied, but I wasn’t up to putting my skills to the test on this live-streamed event. Shortly thereafter—so short that the game was over and I was almost immediately outside, looking at the place from a distance leaning against a railing with my companions, a fair significant other and our cheery but comparatively frumpy friend. A life-sized fighter jet painted Black and Navy was parked in front, but it was a light-weight plastic model, which stretched and bounced on an exaggerated number of wheels exposed when flipped over. My girlfriend was unhappy with disparaging remarks I had made about our third wheel, hand-written on pre-printed forms, including one about his appearance, specifically his choice of clothing in sweats. So much that it dawned on me I had lost her to him, and my mind wandered to the availability of another Filipina (?) of her caliber.

I admit I was also suckered by the Ride video, so instead of giving the YouTube any more views, I embedded a grainier Gfycat that doesn’t even play in Firefox. Unlike with Monster Hunter Rise, I did my due diligence before starting upon the certain path of material discontent with a console that’s hard enough to obtain, a new television to support it, the sound system I’d always promised and of course a couch to replace our aging one. If not for Nintendo’s almost anti-technology stance, I might be disconnected from gaming altogether, having been left unimpressed at the PS3/Blu-Ray generation. There’s definitely a leap to be made to 4K+ and SSD storage, but I’m with the commenter who asked for them to be used for first-person crashes, too, the experience needs to offer more.

The new art is fantastic and apparently there’s plenty of fan service from the earlier games (note how the screenshot is a mixture of the two), but it didn’t do much differently enough to hold my attention any longer than the originals today. IIRC even the third installment had an adventure-like stage where you could backtrack, and who knows, maybe this one does, too, but we didn’t get that far.

I was thinking, why not use the advances in technology since, that surely have more to offer than the leap in character animation Street Fighter made in the 90’s, to take the side-scroller in another direction? Computing power must be there to split the screen like above and allow players to venture off on different paths, into buildings and up stairs (where enemies could be thrown out windows into the fray below) or into sewers, then converge at a boss. Or zoom out a bit and increase the playfield to “brawler” size, have teams face off against each other like gangs, and winners progress to subsequent maps, each of which represents a city block and might very well be roguelike procedurally generated.

Streets of Rage has been our thing, the two games (never did get the third; maybe Street Fighter II had by then relegated 2P co-op to lower priority than new controllers) being loud and violent yet playable enough for a toddler to conquer—if only I had Twitched the time he started break-dancing, trying to stand on his head and everything, to the 古代 祐三 boss theme.

I Steamed (look at me incorporating all the modern lingo in a post about a twenty-year-old game) Streets of Rage III and found it far too difficult for us, but did some reading up on it to learn that wasn’t the case with the Japanese version, which also had additional content deemed unsuitable for the US, namely, Ash:

The boy underestimated the solution: either buy the latest monstrosity (from, coincidentally, one of our prospective clients, though their recent sticker-shock at our services makes any discount unreliable), or resort to Game Genie codes.

AABT-AA5L
DJBT-AADN
RYDA-A608
AJDA-AAHA

or

2JAT-BHNR
8ADA-AAG6

Apart from its Justice Lord-ish story told in two hours of cut scenes, the game itself had only as much time in the PS3 as the last Street Fighter before being sent to 남재’s welcoming arms, but the prequel series has easily laid claim to a life of its own. And next year, John Constantine joins the fray, turning this humble videogame supplement into Alan-fucking-Moore’s Twilight of the Superheroes.

Of the pocketful of stale fortune cookies from the buffet this weekend, surely this was the most intriguing message: “An upward movement initiated in time can counteract fate.” Street Fighter player, perhaps?

No, Capcom has not lost its mind. Mine, however, dreams of being at an indoor performance of Cirque de Soleil-like physical wonders, where black-clad girls curled into balls and spun in the air, then landed effortlessly on the ground. I watched from a second-floor balcony and felt a fear of heights leaning against the metal railing. Another veiled woman tried reaching below with a very long bamboo pole. It was a parade of real-life Tekken characters marking their latest tournament, but who did I spot in the crowd but Chun-Li herself. I leaped down and sat across from her, greeting her by kicking the soles of our outstretched feet together in a friendly show of strength. She was good, I warned her, but not enough to take on these “Japanese demons.” (Not sure if I was referring to Yoshimitsu, who’s not really supernatural, is he, or one of those creatures who is.) Her costume was loose-fitting and when she sat beside me, I noticed her face had the acne of a teenager’s.

Has it really been fifteen years since the last execrable movie adaptation of my favorite fighting game? Worse, the Dark Knight (whose greatness I re-watched a day earlier and I can safely attribute to more than the Blu-Ray format) came out the summer before, and the makers still put their names on it. My idea was always to go all out with the ridiculous characters—not too different from the approach Mortal Kombat took, only without any pretense of story whatsoever—opening with a Fight Club-like scene set to the Stones’ “Street Fighting Man”. Or just this:

What’s more interesting than the boob job is that she’s no longer into 巨乳. I guess it’s only true, wanting is better than having.