Slow Days

You get em at work sometimes. And today is one. All I'm doing is waiting on Visual Studio 2008 installation files so I can work on a new project. Since I was talking about 2DFighter yesterday, I thought I'd briefly share about some of the games I've been playing on there.

Street Fighter Alpha 2

This was my all-time favorite game on the Sega Saturn. I never really got good at it since competition was somewhat lacking (me not being in the arcade much and all), but that didn't stop me from having a whole lot of fun. It also handled like a dream, thanks to the uber-responsive Saturn joypad. These days I have to put up with a Saitek analog pad, so it's hard to tell if I suck because of the pad or because I'm getting old.

I'll blame the pad.


Sakura: All kinds of wrong since 1996.


Breakers Revenge

This game is relatively new to me. A while back when I was messing with emulators I spent some time with it, but never bothered to figure it out. Thanks to a guy I know from S-C.com, I've decided to give it another chance. It's relatively easy to get into, has forgiving control inputs, and looked pretty good for its time. It used to be on the Neo Geo... I'm a little surprised I never saw this in Malaysia. Or maybe I did, and instantly dismissed it because of it's rather generic cast of characters. A lot of them are just remixed Capcom/SNK characters with their moves traded around. Despite the uninspired characters design, the fighting engine is solid. It might be the most fun fighting game nobody ever played.


Hey, it's Ryu! And Chun-Li! And Fei Long! And... wait... why does Blanka have boobies?


Super Street Fighter II Turbo

The grand daddy of 2D fighters. Of course, this was one of several updates to the original Street Fighter II, but this is the one that gets the most action on 2DFighter. I'm not particularly good at this game, but the beauty of SSF2T is the damage is scaled so high that I can scrubbily pull off a win from time to time. Well... that goes for any other game I guess.


This is just an excuse to embed a youtube video on my blog for the first time.


Garou: Mark Of The Wolves

And now we come to the mutant step child of SNK's flagship Fatal Fury series. Don't take the "mutant stepchild" part the wrong way... it's a great game, but it's very little like the games that preceded it. For one, Fatal Fury has always been unique for it's line-battle system, which allowed players to move in and out of different planes on the battlefield. I think of it as a really slow dodge... real FF fans would probably get on my case for saying that. Also, it throws out most of the FF cast in favor of new people, many of which have no relation to previous storylines or characters. Terry Bogard is the only guy who sticks around for this game, and he sports a completely new look.

But I digress... All that's just to say Mark of the Wolves isn't really a Fatal Fury game. It was SNK's answer to Capcom's Street Fighter III, and it was similar in that it had a deep, technical fighting engine that gave hardcore players a lot of little tricks to master. Of course, if you were to just see me play it, you wouldn't know. Like every other game on this list, I relay on stupid 2-hit comboes like crouching punch -> burning knuckle to get by. That doesn't mean I don't have fun though!


This guy's name is Kushnood Butt, which makes G:MOTW even better.

Suppose I Had A Time Machine

Ok, useless hypothesis of the day (or month... or year). Suppose I had a time machine. A fully functional, honest-to-gosh, send-you-to-any-point-in-the-past-or-future time machine. Oh, and lets make it a spatial displacement machine as well, so you also go anywhere. Though, if you think about it, aren't all time machines in fiction spatial displacement machines as well, since the earth is hurtling through the universe at some... great... speed? And at any different point in time, you really wouldn't wind up on earth if you went back or forward in time on the same exact spot? Or does time travel preserve momentum? That would be convenient. But I digress.

Suppose I had a fully functional time machine. Well, except it was missing one function: the function lets you pick when and where you want to go. And I stepped in said Time Machine, because, hey! Time Machine! Who cares, right? Except for the aforementioned possibility of winding up in the black, cold, void of space. That freaks me out. However, this Time Machine is guaranteed to put you somewhere on Earth, at such time and place as to be convenient for a completely useless hypothetical discussion.

So I step in said Time Machine, and I go back in time about, oh, 16 or 17 years I think. And I wind up in Malaysia, and the Sungei Wang shopping mall in KL. And lo and behold! I see myself with my dad, contemplating the purchase of a state-of-the-art Sega Saturn videogame console.

Why? Because it has a port of Capcom's X-Men: Children of the Atom! I see myself salivating at the thought of playing this beaitful 2D fighting game at home, on my very own television. My dad is getting ready to pull out the cash for the system and game... it wasn't cheap. The equivalent of close to $1000.

What would I do?

Why, I'd walk right over there to little me and dad, and tell them "Put your money away! That's far too much to spend on something that you're going to get to play for free on your pc, with opponents from all around the world!" Then they would look at me, realize I'm basically an older, fatter version of my younger self, and freak out. At that point, I probably should jump back through time to avoid ripping apart the time-space continuum. Nevermind that I risked it in the first place... common sense tends to set in slowly in mind-boggling situations such as these.


In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have!

So anyway, yeah, playing 2D fighters is exactly what I get to do these days, on 2dfighter.com, a aptly-named but fairly nondescript little website that offers you the ability to play a whole bunch of old-school 2D fighters on the internet, with little to no lag. Street Fighter, Fatal Fury, DarkStalkers, Art Of Fighting, KOF 98... there's lots of golden nuggets of fun waiting to be had for old-timers like me who grew up pining for our turn to play these games at the local arcade. Because it's on the internet, you can play with just about anybody in the world with an internet connection, I'd imagine. My little younger self's head would have exploded with joy at the thought. I'm pretty happy too.

If any of my old buddies out there still know how to do down, down-forward, forward, punch, I'm on there as 'greyhoundbus'. Look me up! These days I get on there for about an hour after work, if I have the time.