I met Puppy online yesterday, and mentioned the CD with fighting games I promised him. He did not remember it anymore. Oh, bah to that. I had a debt and I was going to pay. I said I had dozens of Neo Geo and CPS1 and 2 games that would probably work a lot better than PC ports of games, seeing as about half the PC games I tried did not work here, or worked insatisfactorily. He had to leave, and said he would call in about half an hour. "Okay," I said, "I will have it all sorted out by then, hopefully it will be ready to burn.".
It took me another hour to have all things sorted out, really, and the collections completed. King of Fighters 94 to 2000, Samurai Shodown I to IV, The Last Blade 1 and 2 (because they were both so beautiful), Far East of Eden (also very beautiful); Street Fighter and many variations; X-Men Vs Street Fighter, X-Men: Children of the Atom. Plus three PC games (all freeware, mind you).
No call from him in the entire time. I went on with my business, up to the point where I assume it is another stance of our endless "I will call you soon" and never do. Just then, he called. And off I went.
I was surprised to see he had enough free space to hold all the games. Everything copied, I made the three PC games work to a bearable extent - some very slow, some with wrong display. But from homemade freeware games, what can one expect? Then I set up Kawaks. Launched King of Fighters 98. Pahu janai. It took longer to load than it does in Olympus, my sister's computer, which has half its MHz and is one generation older - were the Intel and AMD differences so big a few years back? With some effort, I made the graphics look passable. No oil painting as in Asgaard, but no silly overpixelation or scanlines either. And at a more or less reasonable speed. "Any sexy girls in this one?" he asked. So I picked three sexy girls from the impressive selection screen (which got a "Whoa! That's a lot!" out of him).
Neo Geo settings acceptable, I tried some CPS1. Street Fighter, the very original. It looked okay, one or two little adjustments here and there and it looked just like the original. Finally, it was time to see how CPS2 handled. And that was very, very bad. I had to tweak the whole video and sound config all over again for it to be pleasant to look at and playable. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo worked without much pain. Great, so I went to check if the new settings were good for Neo Geo. Tried launching KoF2k. It started loading. Loaded all the ROMs. Deinterleaved the CPU ROMs. Finally, it began to deal with the graphics ROMs. At this point, he asked me if I had seen "The Ring". He had a dozen doubts, and I had a dozen explanations to give, for the third time in the last week. In fact, I no longer remembered what was important, so I am sure many things went unanswered. Thanks to Valis for explaining most of it to me.
We talked about the movie. Then about other movies. Then about fears. And about what God looks like. And about dreams. And he mocked me about women. And he complained about women that want a stable relationship. I went on nodding, eventually looking at the Kawaks window. No change, in spite of the eternally lit HD light. "Maybe if I close ICQ?" "Yes, please. And... Is this WinAmp3, the hogger? Get rid of it, too. And close the two Internet Explorer windows." All closed, we went on waiting. Minutes go by, nothing. Ctrl+Alt+Del. Half the things we closed were "not responding". Forced them close. The result was a higher pitch sound from the HD. More time went by, Ctrl+Alt+Del again, Winkawaks, End task. Too much. Restart, load KoF98.
It looked stupid and was very slow. So I reset all the configurations that were lost at the forced end of the program, making them something between what worked with Neo Geo and what worked with CPS2. KoF98 looked alright. We were talking about the kinds of games I had brought at the time, so I showed him The Last Blade. He agreed it was beautiful, "Fix the config for this one, -that- is what I will play.". The Last Blade and Samurai Shodown - after a certain version - have modes for each character: Power and Speed, mainly. I told him I preferred Speed, because I liked the skill needed to play in that mode, I preferred games like that. So I loaded KoF98 again and showed him some combos and sequences and defences for Yuri, King and Mary, all relatively quick characters, nothing brutal, all cute, lots of skill required, perfect timing needed for each attack, et al.
Either way, I needed to see how CPS2 looked like again, since I changed the config. It was stupid again, so I tweaked a bit, nothing to big as to not mess up Neo Geo again. I had X-Men Vs Street Fighter running, because I hate Street Fighter Alpha and because I had already shown him Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. I made it work and look good, he finally asked me to give it a try. I was using Chun-Li and Rogue, but had lost, so I reset it and handed him the control.
He immediately chose Juggernaut and Wolverine. I noticed Juggernaut occupied half the screen. I noticed how he played. The gigantic thing just did the same thing on the screen over and over, when the enemy approched he got hit. Simple. After beating the first one, he got Wolverine. I looked at his hands this time. He just used a light punch non-stop to charge up, then kept hammering three buttons together and randomly pressing the movement keys. Lots of flashing on the screen. Huge attacks, big lights. He kept mashing the same three keys as if that was the only thing to do. I imagined doing that in King of Fighters. Then there was the big "ka-boom!", and Wolverine had won.
. . . . .
Really...
There are two aspects to extract from this comparison.
First, the games themselves. In KoF, I picked three varied characters, three completely different styles of gameplay. Poor Yuri is considered a bad character, but I like her, so I learned how to play with her, it just takes patience and no desire to take the world apart in a 99 hit combo; King needs all the perfect positioning and perfect button pressing; Mary takes a lot of practice, and a whole lot of good timing. Now his Juggernaut and Wolverine need a constant pressing of three attack buttons with random pushing of the direction buttons. And that - that very "that", yes, the random mashing of buttons - led him to a nearly perfect victory. Therefore, I say I played a game, and he was breaking his keyboard while lights flashed on the screen.
Second, the characters. Yuri, bad character, cute: I like her, I use her. King, elegant, I use her. Mary, somehow both cute and sexy (very rare combination), I use her. Normal people, no monstrosities, no major powers, no iron ball in a chain, no control over fire or electricity, no huge fame among gamers. He got the biggest character, and the most famous character. Because the first was the biggest, and the second was the most famous (and his claws are great brute force).
. . . . .
Maybe my testosterone is below recommended levels? I prefer to believe in Delenn's words, when the Inquisitor questions her.
"So you say you are right!", teases the Inquisitor.
"Yes!", she affirms.
"What if the world says Delenn is wrong?"
"Then the world is wrong!"
And the hundreds of guys playing Iori and Chang and Wolverine are all wrong.
Delenn is from Babylon 5, mind you. The Inquisitor only appears in one episode.
Anyway, as everything was set up to a playable level, and I was getting ready to return home, he mentioned how hooked he was and how he was probably going to skip most of his schoolwork just to play all those games I put there.
"Imagine how many classes were skipped, how many exams were done poorly, how many breakthroughs never happened, because of these games, because the little boy just -had- to go to the arcade shop and try to beat Sagat just one more time."
"Indeed, indeed."
"And now you just ruined my academical life, too, you know. Over twenty games... Do you have any idea what you just did? The hole you threw me into? I will fail this year in school and have to quit my job and break up with my girlfriend."
"It was on your request."
"You're right. Thanks a lot."
And I went home, back to Yuri, King and Mary.
Posted by Etienne at March 10, 2003 07:58 PM