I bring Jason and Randy into my internal debate on whether I should buy an Arcade1Up Street Fighter II arcade cabinet. We then talk about their arcade lineup, which has some other surprisingly good machines in it!
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There are no shortage of reasons for not owning an arcade machine. They’re expensive. They take up a lot of space. Unless you’re hacking it to run MAME and taking away the “purity” of the original game, their functions are pretty limited. They’re a pain to maintain. The list goes on.
But if I were to ever own an arcade machine…just one…it would be a Street Fighter II cabinet. One of the most symbolic machines in all of arcade culture, I have vivid memories of that game blowing my mind when I first saw it and spent too many quarters playing it over the years. Best of all, it’s still a great game worth playing today.
Arcade 1Up caught my eye when they announced a few months back that they were releasing new Street Fighter II machines. Having now stumbled across them at my local Walmart, my mind is in a tizzy trying to figure out if this is the time to finally make a lifelong dream of mine come true. In order to sort my feelings out, I’m going to write out both sides of the argument and see where I land at the end.
In anticipation of Mario Tennis Aces on the Switch, I take a trip back in time to remember why I didn’t like Mario Power Tennis on the Gamecube. It’s too wacky for my tastes, but to each their own!
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Taking place just north of the border was Niagara Falls Comic Con. While Steff and I are no strangers to the Falls, it was our first time heading down there for the convention. Arriving just before opening on Saturday, thousands were lined up around the building, anxious to get in. Though we in Toronto are spoiled with a number of conventions of our own, I was really glad to have gone out of town for this one.
I hate the concept of free-to-play games. As someone who has grown up mostly buying boxed copies of video games at the store, I greatly dislike the idea of being given a game for free and then constantly harassed to pay later in exchange for cosmetic items or other things that directly impact my enjoyment of the experience. The fact that these games are wholly designed to maximize profits rather than to fully-realize a great gameplay experience is something I find rather gross.
Having said that, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. Video games have always been influenced by the business model behind them. Even if you go back to the arcade days where the monetization of the medium began, there was a business model driving that experience, too.
Fighting games may have their roots in the arcade, but I almost never play fighting games on an arcade machine. In my part of the world, the arcade scene is very much dead. Within a 60km radius from downtown, I can think of only five actual arcades in existence. There are also movie theatres that have a handful of arcade games, but the vast majority of them don’t have fighting games.
With that said, I was caught off guard the other day when Steff and I went out to see The Ides of March. The movie theatre we went to had a Street Fighter IV machine and a Marvel vs. Capcom 2 machine. I was pretty excited to play both of these games as they were originally designed to be played, but disappointment set in rather quickly when I got my hands on the controls.
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The other night, I was playing Marvel vs. Capcom 3 online. I was running with my main team of Wolverine/Storm/Sentinel when something went awry: nothing happened when I hit the Sentinel button. Sure enough, my right trigger button on my Mad Catz TE had died.
It’s scary to me to think about how old this game is. Though this game will forever be linked to my childhood, I’m sure that this game is alien to 95% of gamers who weren’t born in the mid-80s or earlier. This game lived and died in the early 90s as a 4-player or 6-player arcade cabinet and was never legally available anywhere else…until now.
If you’ve played this game during the hey day of the arcades, I do not need to sell you on it. You know enough to judge whether or not you’re ready to spend money on this experience again. For everyone else, here’s what you’ve missed out on (or what you’ll get if you decide to pick this up).
Street Fighter Alpha is a landmark game in my life as a fighting game player. This was the first fighting game that I completely missed in its prime during my 14 year run without fighting games. I didn’t plan on missing out on this game; I actively purchased video game magazines to read Street Fighter Alpha coverage. However, it came out during a time when I wasn’t going to the arcade and I didn’t own a system that could run Alpha at home, so I never played more than 20 minutes of it at someones house years after the fact.
This was the first game I picked up on Playstation Network after buying my Playstation 3. Even though I have other fighting games to attend to, I really wanted to go back and give this one a fair shake to see what I’ve missed out on after all these years.
In Third Person 