ManekiNeko
Active Member
...Too far bro.
It's time to play "This is Chapstick's life" (the role of Chapstick will be played by James Powers. Trust me, I can easily see him being this way. By the way, I promised @Argentus I'd show him too.
When Street Fighter II came out I had a friend named Billy. Billy was a friend in the same way that Saudi Arabia is a "friend" to the U.S. -- he introduced me to the game, I played it, he jumped in and clobbered me inside of 20 seconds. I didn't want to spend another 50 cents, fuck that, I'm a poor high school student. If I got five bucks, I can play a game that I can last 20-30 minutes per credit, or I can play Street Fighter, have my "friend" jump in and leave me penniless inside of ten minutes. Hmmm... tough call.
I was eventually impressed by MK 3's graphics so I played some Mortal Kombat from 1995 through 1996. That year I met a guy in college named James. James had a 1.95 GPA in college, smelled like a slaughterhouse all the time, weighed about 400 lbs. and guess what he loved? Fighting games, comedies and Star Wars. He could quote you entire episodes of The Simpsons, lines, characters, everything. It was like a religion to him.
In March of 1997, I quit playing the games because James played so many of them it turned me off. It was literally his entire goal in life (also to watch comedies and Star Wars). James eventually even sacrificed going to college, he became a complete bum for the point of playing a game like Street Fighter. He also had a fetish for decapitating women and during 1997 it went from Mortal Kombat to other avenues of fantasy worlds. Yes, he dropped out of college for Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Primal Rage.
(This is your life, Chapstick, or at least it will be, I'm sure.)
Literally he would go from Tekken to Virtua Fighter to Street Fighter to King of Fighters to blah blah blah... and I realized these games were pretty much cut from the same cloth. Plus, I couldn't actually play them because James would hog the machines and he played them so much he was excellent at them, and me being a poor college student that wanted to make something of his life rather than just smell bad and play these games all day didn't want to devote my life to it, and didn't want to spend countless amounts of money trying to get THAT good. He even compared the genre to a martial art, and as someone who took a REAL martial art and would come home after 2 hours of working out and sweating profusely all over, I can tell you, button mashing is NOWHERE NEAR a martial art, and neither is "rotate the joystick in a Q shape 27 times to complete this move".
But there was something he said in March of 1997 that made me decide he had fallen into a trap he would never get out of. "Time has no meaning when you're playing Street Fighter". Yep, that's right. Forget work, forget college, forget a social life, forget trying to get a girlfriend. Forget it all. Just keep playing those games. Provided he's still alive today, I bet he's still playing them and watching reruns of The Simpsons. He was even going to give me a ride to college one day, nope, spent the entire day playing Street Fighter. He could spend as long as 15 hours a day playing them.
Why did I come back? After seeing the idea of the game Girlfight, I was impressed that the fighting game genre had lasted so long. Quite honestly, I thought the entire genre would have swallowed itself whole around the turn of the millennium given how homogenous most of the games are.
Now being fooled by games that were absolutely sucky in the past, I read the reviews for Girlfight and they all said basically the same thing. sex appeal in a game is something I'm totally down for, but most of the critics compared it to Dead or Alive 5 and they all said that if you wanted a sexy fighting game to play that, with the only other possible choice being Skullgirls.
So I looked at a lot of introspective and realized that my 16 1/2+ year hiatus from the games wasn't really the fault of the fighting games, it was the fault of a man who was a complete failure, James. So I took a chance and left my comfort zone and decided to try one. I downloaded the demo of Skullgirls and read the reviews again, and I found out that the boss was a meat grinder. Yep, didn't want to get my ass kicked 900,000 times. So I downloaded Core Fighters and I realized that yes, the game was sexy enough but also there was a good game under it all. Not holy fuck amazing but pretty damn good. I would later pick up the full game on sale for $30, and I had Amazon credit from selling my books last quarter so it came out to about $4.
That was last December and I'm still feeling the ropes as it were but I did read a lot about the game and the controversy and tried to catch up pretty much from Dimensions on forward. I could actually play the game and actually get decent, not great but not bad when I picked up the controller. I even initially skipped the Easy level and went from Rookie to Normal. I was impressed. I could actually play this game without having to be a smelly, disgusting bum.
