WARMTH LIKE HOME UNAWARES

So today there was like... a siege on the capitol building, and conspiracy theorists are waving false flags. It's... wild. I don't really want to go into it but I feel like I should at least mention it XD

Anyway, what I really came here to say is that my one victory in SF today was as Balrog vs Dhalsim. It was really freaking hard. But because all I needed was one victory, I stuck it out...

And that's just one victory. Not the two I need to win the match.

Also watching 1993 Raw still and when Tiny Tim called Jerry Lawler "Dairy Queen" I laughed so hard XD Money Inc. has like 100 feuds going on right now. I'm still surprised Irwin is such a major character. Smoking Gunns are quickly becoming my favorite matches to watch.

Oh yeah I ran out of tags recently, so I deleted all my "charas" tags since almost all of them had like one use, and you can still find the content for them by using the various "games" tags, so I got rid of them. Freed up a lot of space. A shame you can only have 1000 tags, though. So I'm not going to create a separate tag for the different versions of Street Fighter II :P They're all going to just use the "street fighter 2" tag.

Next time I run out of tags, I'll probably start deleting other tags that just have one usage that I doubt I'll ever use again, and merge them into their parent tags.

(Also while dicking around taking a break from frustration I played around with some of SFA and SF3 -- those games look really great graphically! And the play is very fluid. But there's so many special moves... I'm so used to the simplicity of SF2 right now that it was a bit overwhelming!)

So, I've been looking for a new thing to be obsessive over. I was doing Pokemon cartoons and stuff but kind of fell out of those when I hit a depressive episode, been trying to grasp for things throughout that episode here and there. Thought I landed it with Resident Evil, but I'm too much of a stupid wimp to get through those games. Seriously it took me like 3 days to get past the Sword Key.

Other things have come and gone, and I'm also trying to break my mobile game addiction. So I wanted something that I can play or do in short bursts, since I don't have the ability to commit to hours-long sessions these days (though I can do it sometimes). That means Person 4 Golden, Story of Seasons, and Rune Factory are kinda on the backburner as well.

I had the idea to play through all the Mega Man X games again and do weapon reviews like I did for Mega Man X3, but for some reason even after installing, I just couldn't get into it. Well, I say "for some reason" but this happened during The Depression so that's probably why.

But now I'm starting to come out of depression, so I'm pushing all those failed attempts aside and looking for something fresh.

And, well, Steam decided to have a fighting games sale and I fell for it. I got me and X a copy of Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 since it's her birthday in a couple days. But then I was like I WANNA PLAY ALL THE STREET FIGHTERS and got the 30th Anniversary Collection, and for some reason was so hyped about playing it I could barely sleep last night (hello, manic episode?) so here we are. I'm feeling like TYPING UP A WHOLE THING so I must be into the idea for now, at least.

Why don't I do this on thaao.net? Well, mostly just because I'm lazy, and don't want to do all the HTML editing and picture uploading and etc. Plus I'd have to set myself up to do all that on the new computer, which I haven't gotten around to yet, and that's workkkkkkkk and I wanna play SF.

Anyway, let's talk about Street Fighter!

I've always been a strong-but-casual fan of SF; back in the ol' LiVEJOURNAL days, an M Bison icon was one of my regulars. I had the SF2 anime on DVD. But the thing is, I probably have spent more time looking at pictures and reading about Street Fighter than I've actually spent playing Street Figther. I've owned various versions of Street Fighter II' (yes, there's a fucking apostrophe in the name) on SNES and Genesis, dicking around with them now and then, and I got Street Fighter IV on 360 and tried to become good at it but gave up fairly quickly.

But yeah, I'm one of those losers who actually cares about fighting game story and characters. I just care about characters and character design in general, so when they have little bits of lore behind them, I want to gobble it up. I already know a lot about my favorite characters but the specifics on them and how they're presented in the games remains mostly unseen to me, being as I've hardly played. And then I don't know a ton about some characters at all, because they weren't really my favorites. But now is the time to change that!!

There are six main Street Fighter 'episodes,' each containing multiple games (except the first one), though for some of them, the games are just variations on the same game.

The series starts out with Street Fighter, of course, which only ever got its one lonesome little game. In this game, you can only play as Ryu or Ken, which function like Mario and Luigi. You can even only play Ken if you're Player 2, there's no actually selecting him.

Then we get to Street Fighter II, which blew up and got a slew of versions here and there, as well as spawning manga and anime and etc. The different versions of this game, though, are minor tweaks and updates, mostly just adding playable characters to the roster. With this game, we also got the ability to play as an entire cast of characters with their own playstyle.

After SF2, we have Street Fighter Alpha, which had three games. As far as I understand, each game has its own story, and I even think Alpha 2 completely retcons Alpha 1. And then Alpha 3 builds on it...? I don't really know; most of what I know of this series are individual character arcs but not exactly where they fit into all these many games. But yeah, Alpha was created as a prequel to Street Fighter II, featuring some major characters from it with a new cast of supporting characters.

Then we have Street Fighter III, which is kind of the odd series of the bunch. It also got a few games like Alpha and I think they have their own stories as well. We dump Ryu for a new hero Alex, as well as new villains (no more Bison for me :( ) and I know very little about these games overall.

After that, we enter the more modern era with Street Fighter IV. At this point the game had a couple extra versions (Super Street Fighter IV and Ultra Street Fighter IV), but they're basically replacements of the game before. The main game is the same other than the new content that was added.

Similarly, we have Street Fighter V, which had its new content released in 'episodes,' with the final episode 5 still unreleased. The newest 'version' of the game, Street Fighter V Champion, combines all the content of episodes 1-4.

So there are a LOT of versions and editions of these games. I own the 30th Anniversary Collection, which includes all the arcade-released versions of SF1, 2, and 3. And then I own the most recent versions of SF4 and SF5, so I basically have all the content... that was released in arcades. With II, Alpha, and III, there were also tons of home console ports of the various editions and episodes, which had exclusive content, characters, and stories. I don't know what I'm going to do about these yet. I am probably going to emulate at least the PSP version of Alpha 3 because Eagle. But other than that, I don't know if I'm willing to dive into ALL THESE DIFFERENT VERSIONS. There's already like 7 versions of SF2 on the Anniversary Collection alone. We'll see when I get there. As with most things, I'll probably fizzle out on this whole idea not very long into it. But planning all this stuff is part of the fun, right?

Now, how will I decide which character to play as in all these games?

Bwahahaha, the answer is ALL OF THEM.

Yes, my goal is to play through every character's story in every Street Fighter game. It sounds like a huge thing, but it doesn't take that long to play through one little sweep of a character (I mean, these were meant to be played in one arcade sitting), so playing a whole game shouldn't be much bigger than playing, say, one Mega Man game. Except for later titles where there's like a million characters (I think SF4 has like 40 characters...?!)

In the first game, you can only play as Ryu, so I'm going to just play with him there, of course. But after that we get lots and lots of characters. In SF2, the stories/gameplay are the same between versions, so I'm not going to play each character in every version, as it's literally the exact same thing again, maybe with some MINOR tweaks in some versions. So with each version of that, I'm just going to play the new content in each game.

Similarly, with SF4 and 5, each new version basically replaced the old version, so instead of playing each version, I'm just going to play the most recent version of each.

Then with Alpha and 3, I'm not 100% sure how those are going to go because I'm not sure how much changes between each one, but from my understand, each episode of those games is a completely separate game as far as stories go, so I might be playing the whole roster on each of those. There's only 3 of each of those, though.

And lastly, I'll mention that I'm not going to be cruel to myself and force myself to play on hardest difficulty or anything, even though I like doing that in every game I play. But I have to be nice to myself sometimes, and I know I'll just get frustrated and quit early if I try to play these games on hard difficulty, because I'm not that great at them. The main point of doing this is to experience the various gameplay styles and see all the little character stories and interactions, which is NOT something a hard difficulty enhances in any way.

And that's my Street Fighter series playthrough introduction post :P Now that I've spent like an hour writing this, I can actually START PLAYING, and hopefully my next post will be about the original Street Fighter...!