Most of this past week, I’ve essentially been cemented to my couch with my eyes blearily fixed on my TV screen and my thumbs twitching chaotically.  The reason; Street Fighter IV.  I’m in love with the game, and can’t get enough online head-to-head action.  With my mind fixated on the World Warriors, my thoughts return to the only time that a Street Fighter product has ever let me down.

It was 1990; just 3 years after the arcade release of the original Street Fighter.  No, not Street Fighter II – Street Fighter; the mostly single-player fighting game starring Ryu, Ken, Sagat, Adon, and a slew of other Street Fighter characters that have been forgotten or ignored for the better part of two decades.  Despite the game’s relative obscurity, I was a huge fan, and spent many handfuls of quarters and many lost Saturdays in front of it, trying to defeat opponents like Mike, Joe, Eagle, and my favorite, Geki, the claw-wielding ninja.  I mostly played the single-player campaign, trying to dethrone the mighty Sagat and become the world’s greatest martial artist, but when an opponent stepped up, I was always happy to oblige, if only for the opportunity to play as Ken, who acted as player 2’s Vs character, and was, at the time, my favorite character.  Over the years, Ken has been supplanted by cooler characters like Cammy, Ibuki, and Fei Long, but at the time, the blonde-haired California bad-ass was my man.

That’s why I was so excited the first time I laid eyes on Capcom’s first Street Fighter game for consoles, Street Fighter 2010.  While the box-art seemed to bear no resemblance to the fighting game I so loved, the back of the package assured me that the main character was, in fact, Ken.  Of course, Ken was now in a ridiculous silver bodysuit, and had lost his long hair, instead sporting a buzz-cut, but if you squinted just right in a foggy room with the lights off, you could tell that Ken had cybernetically enhanced himself, and was now fighting off some sort of alien invasion.  After much begging and pleading, I convinced my parents to buy it for me, and went home happy.

Of course, once I GOT home, the happiness quickly ended.  Instead of the (at the tim) tight, responsive controls of the arcade classic, I was faced with a buggy mess of a game with no connection to the Street Fighter universe, save for a mention in the game manual,  (I later found out that in Japan, there is no connection to the SF universe at all, and that his name was changed from Kevin to Ken just to sway American audiences).  Platforming sections of the game were brutally difficult, mostly due to the awful, unresponsive controls, and the combat areas didn’t fare much better.  Needless to say, I was as disappointed as a young gamer could be.

In hindsight, I feel like a bit of a fool for not recognizing what the game was; a cheap cash-in on the Street Fighter name, which wasn’t really that much of a name at the time.  I was young, though, and the gaming world didn’t have anywhere near the level of constant information that we see now, so I guess I can excuse my actions in begging for the game.  What I can’t defend, however, is actually playing through that whole, awful game.  And I did, too.  I fought every crappy boss monster, picked up every stupid, useless upgrade, and beat that terrible game. 

I’m not proud of it, but it happened.

The next year, Capcom went ahead and shook the foundations of the gaming world by releasing Street Fighter II in arcades, and later, on home consoles.  It couldn’t wash the taste of SF 2010 out of my mouth, but finally, I had the Street Fighting action I wanted so desparately.

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