No place for a Street Fighter man
Street Fighter IV
The first computer my family owned was an Apple IIGS. At the time we were all wholly in agreement that it was, in fact, the shit. My parents loved working on it, and my sisters and I loved playing the video games. There was one called Word Munchers where you had a little monster guy that would just munch the shit out of adjectives or nouns. I was a ninja at that game. We also played Oregon Trail, the classic where you put in your family member’s names for the characters, pack up, head West, and then watch everyone die of dysentery or drown because they fucked up fording the river. Again.
There was also an Apple IIGS game called Zork I. There were no graphics on Zork. It was a black screen with lines of old-school green text, complete with blinking cursor. From what I can remember, the titular Zork was a little troll or goblin or something, and as you typed in commands to control him, he bounced around a magical fantasyland encountering new creatures and situations to react to. I spent hours playing that game, yet every time I bring it up no one has ever heard of it. It’s like I’m the only Zork fan. Of course, it’s entirely possible that some corpulent geek perv hacked into my family’s computer system and was engaging in one of the most elaborate mind-fucks of all time with the seven-year-old on the other end of the Apple IIGS. But even if that were the case, I don’t care. I loved that game. I loved all those games, even the primitive ones that, at the time, were at the very forefront of technology.
Of course, at the time Zack Morris’ cell phone was the size of a Foreman Grill, and that was also considered the forefront of technology. To quote my man Biggie: Things done changed. Nowadays they got phones so fancy you can download free applications that instantly repel hobos via an excruciating, high-pitched whistle audible only to them. And the video games? Forget about it.
While I’m all about the fancy phones, I gracefully bowed out of the video-game game after Super Street Fighter II Turbo hit the screen in ’94. That was, hands-down, the best video game I’ve ever played. And even though I was a prodigy at it, capable of beating the game with any character, I hung up my hat and decided it was time to stop playing video games and start getting rejected by girls. But when word trickled into What’s So Funny? World Headquarters that the new Street Fighter IV straight dropped on the streets, your boy had to go take a peek.
Enter the Extra Fresh League. My buddy Chris is a member of the EFL, and he had been telling me about this group for awhile—strange tales of mass gatherings of video-game heads who got together and wilded the fuck out in tournaments, like in that weird movie with Fred Savage and his retarded brother. Every time Chris told me about the EFL, I’d be like, “Chris, quit salting my game. Do you not see how many women there are here to be rejected by?” But when Chris informed me that he and the oh-so Fresh boys were getting together for a Street Fighter IV tournament last weekend, I dutifully marched myself to Starz FilmCenter Saturday to watch the boys compete big-screen-style. Not only did I want to see these guys do their thing, I wanted to get a peek at the game.
I will say this about the Extra Fresh League: They are, in fact, pretty fresh. I could write that a few of them possess the sickly, awkward pallor one would expect of gamers, but What’s So Funny has never been about pointing fingers. It’s about bringing people together through Christ. And this is just not the place. What was undeniable during the tournament Saturday was the skill. Neophytes were unceremoniously smoked and dispatched, a healthy amount of good-natured shit-talking heaped upon their shoulders. The speed some of these guys fought with was unreal.
And as for Street Fighter IV itself? Pretty damn dope. The graphics are great. There are four new characters, including a Mexican wrestler named El Fuerte. And if the Extra Fresh League is any indication, the game ought to be a smash hit. Personally, though, it was hard to muster any real enthusiasm for the game. Yeah, it was cool to see the whole gang again—E. Honda, Ryu, Chun-Li. They’re like old friends, only now they’re all 3-D-looking. But the contestants at Starz this weekend didn’t even have the original Super NES controller, and homey don’t play that. I was forced to face the fact that my Street Fighter days are behind me. After all, I’m on to bigger, more important things. Like getting shot down by women. And I no longer masturbate to Chun-Li.
