Street Fightin’ Fan Answers Call to Re-Enlist

While gearing up for my final piece on Wrath of the Lich King, I figured I’d go ahead and come clean about where I’ve been…and with whom: While my copies of Silent Hill: Homecoming, Left 4 Dead, Dead Space, and Gears of War 2 all gathered dust during Thanksgiving weekend, I spent way too much time catching up with a dear old friend.

I’m seven years old again, sitting in my older cousin’s well-furnished, wood-panelled basement. Sure, it looks old-fashioned, but in a timeless Napoleon Dynamite kind of way. Not that I’m really seeing anything more than vaguely brown walls and a blue shag carpet. How many little kids know anything about period design?

After 13 rambunctious matches in the Super Nintendo version of Street Fighter II, with numbers 11 and 12 cut short by the traditional late-night “snowball” fight (with my younger cousin’s plastic toy eggs serving as ammo), my friends all fall asleep. Blessed with Nighthawk syndrome and early-onset, videogame-centered OCD, I tell Mr. Sandman to bring me a dream some other time. It’s only 3:00 a.m., plus, despite having easily annihilated my older peers, I don’t yet fully understand Ryu’s Hadouken, E. Honda’s Hundred Hand Slap, or (especially) Zangief’s near-impossible 360 piledriver, so I decide to stealthily turn on the television, lower the volume, and play in the dark. I end up not sleeping at all.

“Polter schmolter,” my 1992 self tells the TV. “Unleash the spielgeist and be quick about it.”

Sixteen years later, though Street Fighter’s aesthetics have changed, I’m still learning my way around its characters’ capabilities. With the release of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, my thirst for knowledge has grown exponentially, and I repeatedly find myself glued tighter to the TV screen and controller in pursuit of competition more capable and efficient than Kasparov could imagine in his darkest Deep Blue nightmares.

I blame lead designer, MIT graduate, and former professional gamer David Sirlin. Without his talent for character balancing,  Zangief, the bear-wrestling Russian with the chest hair mural, would be far less viable at high level play, and choosing Akuma would still be considered unfair in a competitive match.

Most gamers won’t see or care about the long-awaited changes Sirlin has made; they’ll just download this $15.00 title to the console of their choice, note the upgraded graphics and remixed soundtrack (more on that in a second), and call it quits. To the Street Fighter community, that’s totally fine. The game is genuinely both for us and by us.

Even the new soundtrack is covered with players’ pawprints.. User-supported videogame audio site OverClocked ReMix (an essential resource for any composer looking to break into the business), worked with developer/publisher Capcom and twenty gamers around the world to update the title’s audio “in styles including jazz, hip-hop, reggaeton, spaghetti western, garage rock, big beat, and electronica.” Decide for yourself if the community delivered; the album is a free download on the official site. Better yet, purchase the game and see how the songs are implemented, but do so in a mode other than “Ranked Online.”  You almost surely don’t want to risk meeting my Zangief, who you’ll find (after three humiliating five-second rounds) doesn’t care for your listening habits…unless your name is Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.

This entry was posted by Kyle Stallock on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Gaming, Industry, Multimedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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