Jun 22
Remember when I said that I would try to write a more meaningful post last night? Yeah… that didnt happen. Instead I went to JK Sweet and ate ice cream for about an hour. Then Lukas and I went to Blockbuster and walked around and around for another hour. Good times. It occurred to me in the store how randomly different we are at times. Example: I read the boxes of movies like Osama and City of God, Lukas reads the boxes of Ninja Attax! and Gangster Samurai. We compromised by getting Dog Day Afternoon. Well, its not so much a compromise as a movie we both wanted to see really badly. We only managed to watch half of it, though, because after getting back to the apartment I spent another full hour discussing games with Senthil. And by 'discussing' we of course mean 'getting into a verbal prison brawl' about why Killer Instinct is a terrific game and how much better it is than, say, Street Fighter Ultra Turbo Delux (or any other of the two dozen shitty followups to Street Fighter 2). Apparantly my complete and expert understanding of which games do and do not bite ass has bought me a death sentence. And not one of those 'haha, im going to kill you' death sentences. The kind of threat where people mutter it through their gritted teeth and type it to you in bold AND italics. If there was a way to send an IM written in blood… yeah, that's pretty much where I'm at.
To be honest though, there really were so many fighting games that I played back in the day. Even thinking about playing Streets of Rage makes me happy. In all fairness I wasn't an arcade kinda guy. I played exclusively console games for most of my life. The only arcade game that I remember loving to play was X-Men: Children of the Atom. Basically Street Fighter with Xmen characters. They brought it to console a few years later, but the console version bit the proverbial shit. Maybe that is just how arcade junkies feel about console fighters in general. As a console whore, the generations of fighters i played almost define their own segments of my life. Street Fighter – Killer Instinct – Tekken – Soul Calibur – Smash Bros. I can show the same evolution for pretty much any genre, as can any real gamer worth his salt. I can't really think of anything else (aside from school, obviously) that I can point to as a clear marker for a particular time period in my life. “Yeah, that was back in my Goldeneye days.” referring to 97-98. Are there any games that are actually good enough to affect today's kids like that? Counterstrike is huge i suppose, despite how much I hate it. Too bad they pick such an awful game to center their lives upon. I always get a chill when I overhear something to the effect of “Oh yeah! Back in 1.6 I would totally…” Those little bitches. Its time to move onto a better game!
Like Killer Instinct.