Crouching Fierce

I love Street Fighter. If you did not know that about me, I would be quite surprised to think that you are my friend. Wait, I more than love Street Fighter, Street Fighter is like a cherished pet that I’ve had for the last 15 years. I love Street Fighter. Chun-Li, Ryu, and Ken are like brothers and sister to me.
So, that being said, the decline in popularity of fighting games is very distressing to me. It reflects the incredible puss-ization of America’s youth. The same way kids are more prone to shooting each other than having hand-to-hand fights and taking the possibility of being humiliated publicly, kids these days don’t want to play someone in an arcade head to head. They just want to sit n their x-boxes and PS2’s and trash talk each other from the safety of their living rooms, never once risking actual humiliation, or in fact real human interaction. Kids these days suck. They don’t know what it is to gloat over another persona’s fallen digital form. They do not know the joy of a UUUUUUUUUULLLLTRAAAAAAAAAAA COOOOOMBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They don’t know that an Aerial Rave can be just as exciting as a real one. It really is sad.
Samurai Shodown, if you hit someone just right, you cut them in half when you beat them. THAT’S COOL! Of course nothing beats that Innovator of Violence, Mortal Kombat. When I was in school MK people and SF people did not get along, they were like cats and dogs. I, as you know, was a SF person, I hated MK people. They were just generally bastards and jerks. They preferred things the easy way. Street Fighter was too complicated for them. They also were those really, creepy heavy metal guys who always drew bloody pictures in their notebooks and didn’t smell quite right. But, for what it is worth, I always liked watching MK. I remember the first time I ever saw it was in the arcade at Middlesex County College. I was mesmerized, my eyes had been opened to something fantastic and wonderful. I just could not stop uttering those magical phrases in that famous guttural tone, "EXCELLENT! FINISH HIM!" I was in another state of mind. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered how terrible the gameplay was, and how hard the fatalities were to execute. Back to SF for me
Samurai Shodown came from the SNK camp of fighting games, those geniuses who brought you Fatal Fury and King of Fighters. Nobody put more effort into fighters than SNK, and that’s including CapCom. SNK is out of business now, and I think that was a major blow, but they've been bought, so at least their characters are still alive. CapCom owns the rights to many of the characters, but they seem loathe to do anything new with them. Except now, there is the news of the orgasm-inducing Street Fighter 4. Everyone is into first person shooters now. Cold impersonal games where you run around shooting people with exotic weapons. No strategy, no tact, no personality, just running and shooting. No creativity, no action… it seems incredibly boring to me. But it is more popular now than ever, certainly more popular than SF. But then there are sites like http://www.shoryuken.com/, that reaffirm my faith in humanity. The real fighters are still out there. It kind of makes me feel good to know that I am the last of a dying breed. I feel like a guy who makes guns by hand, or a blacksmith or something. Fighting games are a niche now, a psychotic subculture that worships the crouching fierce. We know chain combos like the back of our hands, and we can do Hadokens in our sleep. Most people don’t understand us, but we understand us. It’s nice to belong, it’s nice to know that no matter what I’ll always have a scar because of my first Shoryuken. I know when I’m old, there will only be a few of us out there, but even when I’m 80, I’ll still smile when I hear the words "TIGER, GENOCIDE!!!"