Why The Hell Do I To This To Myself? Or, Post Holiday Gaming Apocalypse

Thank fucking God. The holidays are over. My savings account survives another year: scarred, wounded, but not defeated. Victoria.

The holidays are a financial apocalypse for me, and every year it only gets worse. On top of gifts for loved ones and friends, I end up spending way too much of what I choose to call 'disposable income' on all the triple A games that an irrational and confused games industry hoards for months and months, ignoring the obvious fact that, hey, people play games in June too, before gleefully releasing them in a frantic stampede in the months of November and December. That I continue to obediently buy them all raises the possibility that I too and irrational and confused, but let's not discuss that right now. I need all the credibility I can muster.

After the dust settled on my annual financial doomsday this year, I ended up with a soul-crushing stack of new games. I felt their quiet insistence that I play them as I put them away on the shelf, untouched shrink wrap tormenting me. Free time is at a premium for me, always: when would I get a chance to play the games I had been given or purchased? When would I be able to validate both my idiot compulsions and the good intentions of friends and family? Compounding the issue is my addiction to Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and Persona 4: both time sinks of incredible density and power. Even when I have the time to play, those two games are always my first and second choice.

This year? Much sooner than usual. For once, the games industry has done me a solid(albeit accidentally). There is literally nothing coming out that I want until Street Fighter 4 in February. That is nearly unprecedented, and leaves me almost two months to play catch up and knock out some of my back log. All of which is very handy, because I had begun to experience what I like to call 'collector's depression'. Anyone who seriously plays and collects games knows what I mean, but we'll define it just in case anyone rational ever reads this.

'Collectors Depression: If a collection of games grows at a faster pace than a collector can play those games, then eventually playing the games stops being fun and becomes a job, leading to that collector temporarily abandoning the hobby and taking up knitting, crochet, or religion'.

So thanks, Games Industry. You've coincidentally helped in keeping me out of fashion, for which you deserve a medal; especially considering my taste in clothes and questionable manual dexterity. I'm already a man of the cloth, so obviously you weren't much help in the past, but hey. It's the holidays, and I am a reverend for some reason. All is forgiven. We'll move on so no one thinks too hard about this paragraph, and the ugly truths contained within.

The games residing in my immediate backlog are, in no order, Folklore, Lair, Far Cry 2, Gradius Collection, Siren: New Translation, and Suikoden. It's not as bad as some years, but still a mighty and powerful stack of software to wade through. Interestingly, I realized as I was putting them away that none of the games I mentioned are new at all. In fact, Suikoden is a download for the PS3. I have no real desire to play Resistance 2 or Gears of War 2, the huge platform exclusive shooters for the PS3 and 360 respectively, and I'd already bought and fell in love with Little Big Planet long before the Christmas season. Prince of Persia? No thanks. I've already beaten Fallout 3. Tomb Raider? No, sir. Legendary? Are you kidding?

The powers that be have granted me a respite, and I intend to use it. Collecting games is fun and sometimes profitable, but often leads to a 'less gaming, more collecting' mindset that I intend to avoid. One of my new years resolutions is to not buy any game until Street Fighter comes out: that gives me a month and a half to cleanse my backlog and shore up the holiday related bills in preparation for next year's assault on my money. Why would I do this? Why alter years of habit and subject myself to Lair on purpose? Because I realized something else over the holidays as I was talking to my friend Randy at work. This guy never has more than three or four games at a time. He buys them, plays them, sells them, and buys some more: lean and mean gaming at it's finest. His philosophy? Games are for playing first, collecting second. He told me, "I've beaten every game I've played, unless it was so bad that even achievements couldn't make me continue". A quick glance at his gamer score affirms this mighty declaration. I was impressed, because I have nearly five hundred games for more than fifteen systems, and I've beaten probably a quarter of them. That doesn't seem like a very good ratio. I figure I've got some catching up to do.

So. What did I realize with the able assistance of Randy? Resolution number two: play the stupid goddamn things. I didn't get into this hobby because I love having all my free space taken up by plastic and cardboard. I got into it because I love to play video games. I should spend more time doing that, instead of adding yet more crap to the collection.

I'll start with Lair, because it's the shortest game on the stack. We'll see how dedicated to this premise I really am when someone invites me to play Street Fighter.

Playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Online: Or How I Learned To Stop Worying And Love Being Beaten

I usually avoid playing games online. I do this for three reasons. First, I suck at competitive shooters and fighting games(though I love them so!), and if I'm going to lose to someone, then I want to be able to punch them in the gut until they learn not to toy with my emotions like that. Second, if I want to be called an impressive list of racial epithets by a twelve year old in a trailer smoking a joint, I'll go to any number of trailer parks I know of. Or Idaho. The third reason is more complex, and we'll get to it in a minute. The point is, I have seldom ventured into online gaming, and I've often gone on record as a genuine 'hater'. Lately though, all my usual gaming friends are busy with school, work, kids, and the usual 'non-gaming crap' that gets in the way of productive free time, and I've been in a fighting game mood. I was up against the wall. I had no choice.

So it was with great trepidation and more than a little shame that I bought Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, plugged in my fighting stick, and plunged headfirst into the world of competitive fighting games online. Now that I've played the game against some truly excellent folk, and have seen firsthand just how deep and rewarding that learning a system can be by being repeatedly brutalized by people I don't know, I think I finally understand what I've been missing all this time; not just in fighting games, but in competitive gaming in general.

I thought I was going to do pretty well when I first loaded the game. I've been a devotee of fighting games for nearly a decade now, but I made one fatal mistake: I never took them seriously. They were games to play with friends on the couch to while away a few hours in between having incredible sex with beautiful strangers and fighting crime in my pajamas, or something to play between meatier, more story-oriented games. A sort of digital palate cleanser if you will: a binary sorbet. I willingly reduced the entire genre to a sort of high-level casual game, which I'm sure completely kills whatever hardcore credibility I had with a certain segment of the gaming population. They're probably pulling out their list of racial epithets as we speak. I'm not particularly worried about it because not only am I having incredible sex right now, but I'm doing so in my pajamas, if you catch my drift. In any case, pajamas and sex have nothing to do with winning games online, which I learned to my initial shock and horror. In fact, it could be argued that pajamas and sex are actually detrimental to winning online games, but that's an entirely different post.

Street Fighter II is actually a religion for some people, and if the community at large is any indication, then genuine tax-exempt status can't be far away. Ever since it's release into arcades in the early nineties, it's been a pillar of the gaming community, something that many games have borrowed from. It founded the current fighting game genre as it stands all on it's own, and countless imitators rushed into the arcades in it's wake did nothing to diminish it's impact or popularity. It's one of those rare games that even non-gamers are aware of, like Super Mario Bros., Doom, and Pac-Man. There were many iterations of Street Fighter II released over the years in between the original arcade game(1991) and the true Street Fighter III(1997); tiny, tiny incremental adjustments to a system that became more and more complex with each release. The final version of Street Fighter II, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, is still considered one of the finest and most balanced fighting games ever made by the fighting games community, and they're still playing it fervently today. HD Remix is a high-definition remake of that game, and the same group of fanatical players have embraced it enthusiastically, making it one of the best selling and most popular download titles ever released. That's fourteen years of devotion to a game. I probably should have seen my beatings coming, in retrospect.

The game launched and I chose to play a 'friendly quick match', which was only half true in that I lost in less than thirty seconds. "An error", I said to myself. "An aberration. Let's try that again". I chose to play another round. I lost again. And again. I lost fifteen matches in a row. Fifteen. And then I lost another twenty. And then another ten in 'ranked' matches. And for some reason, I didn't give up. In fact, I loved every minute of it.

Because you see, as I listened to the in-game announcer say "You Lose!!" for the fiftieth(but not final!) time, I realized that by playing the game casually I had stunted my skills badly. There's a reason that fighting game devotees lament the death of the arcade, or more accurately the arcade scene, in the US; the surest way to improve at something competitive is to play people better than you. Anything else is just 'casual fun'. Which I'm pretty sure is against their religion or something, considering the humiliations I've endured lately. But despite the setbacks, something interesting happened: instead of giving up and playing something else, I actually felt my resolve harden. And when I finally won a two out of three match it felt like I'd conquered Asia. Naked. With only a rock. It felt almost as good as incredible sex with beautiful strangers, in pajamas or out. And lemme tell you folks: that's a pretty good feeling.

I bought the game on the PS3, because the 360 D-pad is completely worthless and I already owned a stick for Sony's current-gen console. For Christmas, I received a stick for my 360, and I bought the game again. Yeah. I'm hooked, and with Street Fighter IV coming out in February, I don't see an end in sight. I've gotten a taste of victory, and I want more.

Which brings us to the third reason I always avoided playing games online. It might be reductive and overly Freudian, but as I was getting stomped for the umpteenth time, I realized that I've always thought of games as 'something I can beat'. Life is full of bullshit that you can't control, no matter who you are or what you do. You can't control the economy, or what professor you end up with for a difficult class, or even whether your car will start in the morning. Games were always something that I knew I could bend to my will: after all, games are far simpler systems than the complex and ineffable webs that govern everything from our government down to our relationships with our friends, lovers and co-workers. I might have to fire someone today, or I might have forgotten a paper was due this week, or a good friend might be getting divorced and needs somewhere to stay and someone to lean on, but I can rock the ever-loving shit out of Fallout 3. It's an artificial constant. Like everyone else, I hate losing. Only now, I'm seeing it's long term value. If you don't lose, you don't learn. And if you don't learn, you don't improve. And then all you are is a coward.

Of course, that isn't going to stop me from putting a serious hurt on my friend this weekend. He says he used to play Street Fighter II on the Super Nintendo, and he says he used to be 'pretty good'. He says he thinks he played 'the white guy'. He wants to play me in order to 'show me who's boss'.

Hey, I've taken my beatings. I think it's only fair that I pay it back.

Don't judge me.