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.