[This Article should have been titled: "Growing Old Gamer: an Editorial on How We Used to Walk a Mile Uphill In the Snow To Play Our Video Games When I was Your Age"
it turned into more of an editorial than about Super Street Fighter IV, but it's related never the less]

I’ve put some time into Super Street Fighter IV, enough to know that I’m terrible at it… no seriously, I lose fights against the AI on easy… My thumbs are sore from a couple hours on the D-Pad, I don’t recall a game related thumb injury like this since the NES days, it’s really quite tender… In any case, it’s abundantly clear how precise this game is in terms of hit boxes, and timing, it’s very easy to see how the people who invest the time in this game can really stand above the rest. And I can understand why they would, this is a fun game, and it looks great. Loads of Character choice, certainly something to suit most play styles.

However…

When I think about playing Street Fighter though, it gets pretty nostalgic… I definitely recall long nights of winner stays, pass the controller and some serious animosity towards the friend who was just too good, and the phenomenon of the losers banding together and routing for the underdog every time the controller changes hands, and the roar of a crowd when someone managed to crumble the king’s 30+ win streak.  I’m sure any gamer growing up in that era would have similar memories… good times for sure. I don’t play games like that anymore… not that I wouldn’t like to, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve moved away from most of my gamer friends, and the guys on the couch “playin’ vids” simply doesn’t happen anymore.  Although it didn’t occur to me at the time I think I was so excited for this game partially because I thought some way, some how, I’d get some of that back. Unfortunately that’s not the case.

So play with friends online you say, legitimate argument, but one of the beauty of the pass the controller model is that you only need one copy of the game and you can play with all of your friends. This is the first Street Fighter game I’ve owned, not one of my friends picked this up, I’m not surprised by this, perhaps they realized what I am now realizing sooner… There is next to no interest in playing this game alone, and even less interest in playing random matches with strangers, definitely not to the point of getting good enough to ‘dethrone’ one of them, let alone good enough to make a noteworthy effort on the leaderboards.

I had pretty much the same feeling about Tekken, although I was much more objective in that post than I have been in this one. I think what this ultimately boils down to is that I may never play another fighting game, I most certainly won’t be buying one.

In a totally unrelated note, I’ve been thinking about getting into producing some video content for this site, and as such I’ve been toying with some title treatments for intros to such productions, it’s not really ‘gaming related’, so I’v been posting them elsewhere, feel pretty to hop over and take a peak if you’re interested. Feedback is most certainly welcome.