Finishing Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition on my Astro City!

I was doing some stuff on the PC I have setup in the back room yesterday, and since it was pretty mundane and took a while, I thought I’d have a crack at playing something on my Sega Astro City cab between processing tasks. Since Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition was in there, I thought I might as well give it a crack, and ended up finishing it! I’ve never done that on an arcade version of the game before (probably because I always ran out of credits or I was too busy playing vs another person), so it was pretty cool ๐Ÿ™‚ I mean, the ending was pretty lame, but in a fun kind of way (if that makes sense!).

Funnily enough, I didn’t have much in the way of problems in beating the four bosses (Bison excepted – took a few goes to get that one), but got stuck on Honda and… possibly Guile. I’m hardly the world’s best player at the game, but I’m not too shabby either – with Honda, I couldn’t jump in to attack because he always got me with his standing fierce chopping strike thingo and was having trouble mixing up distances to avoid a few basic traps, and while I got close to beating Guile, always seemed to loose it towards the end.

So I cheated by queuing up the problem characters as player 2, beat them, then continued in single player mode – after you beat the character as 2P, you don’t have to beat them in the actual game itself. That’s a handy hint I remember from when I used to play it at the arcades, though I was normally so cheap I wouldn’t pay for someone else, just hoped that another player would drop by and pick a character I had trouble beating ๐Ÿ˜‰

Anywho, enjoy the shaky cam photos below – I was trying to snap photos as fast as possible without dying or missing anything, hence the wonky shots of the ending dialogue… though to be honest, I don’t think there’s too much there worth writing home about ๐Ÿ˜‰

Oh, and I reckon I need to pick up a fresh spring for the Sanwa stick on player 2 on the Astro City, it’s feeling a bit too loose and isn’t as tight as P1’s. The clips for the P2 start button are also wonky, so I might need to grab some fresh quick-connects and rewire them. I have to get some proper Sanwa-standard quick-connects for the extra Neo Geo wiring on my JAMMA harness anyways (I’m using some generic quick-connects on them at the moment, and they often come off in-game :P), so it might be convenient to grab a handful of those, some fresh springs and snag a new PSU and degausing wand at the same time if budget alows for it. Will add it to the “to-get” list ๐Ÿ˜€

In the meantime, enjoy the pics and commentary!

C64 ECP gaming session!

So I had an hour to kill the other night and thought I’d get out the C64 and the 1541 and have a proper crack at the ECP games pack I got when I snagged the C64 earlier on this year.

I started out by giving Black Knight a whirl (I died lots :P), then moved onto Road Duels (awesome fun!), flipped the disk and fired up Metron (I forgot how to blow up the pac-man space ship thingies :P), changed disks and gave Alien Kill a whirl (the aliens look like bugs :P), didn’t have much luck with the other two games on Side A of that disk, so I flipped it and jumped onto P.R.O.B.E (couldn’t get past the second screen :P) and finished up with Not More Martians!

Since I was on a roll, I also fired up GeOS to see if any of it was familiar, as I remember messing around with the word processor on it and watching my older brother use it for school work and stuff (we had a dot-matrix printer that attached to the C64 — I remember we had heaps of trouble getting the thing to print to it, but on the up-side, it had a standard LPT port so it continued to live on when we migrated to our 386DX-40 many years later). Anywho, booted it up, and it resembled the interface from Windows 3.1, and I reckon I remember seeing an early Mac OS years and years ago and it looked similar to that too! Either that or I’m going crazy ๐Ÿ˜› Having a pretty good understanding of how modern OS’ work from a user point of view, it’s interesting to go back and see how the C64 could be operated with a GUI, despite the fact I only used to use it from the command line. Oh, and geoPaint was cool ๐Ÿ™‚

Once all that was up, I figured I needed to end the session on a much more fun note, so I grabbed the tape drive and fired up International Karate for a quick round.

Was another awesome trip down memory lane ๐Ÿ™‚ For those enjoying the C64 stuff, I’ve still got a couple of posts to finish up before I move on to some other stuff ๐Ÿ˜€ I’ve been listening to some C64-related podcasts of late I want to link back to (I’m secretly hoping there’s an awesome repository of awesome SID-related podcasts I’ve yet to uncover besides the great C64 Takeaway and… a few other ones I can’t remember – they’re in my iTunes somewhere :P), probably some other random stuff too ๐Ÿ˜‰

Oh yeah, images:

Gaming sessions – 14 June 2009

Another short post – finally worked out how to get a few tricks with the C64’s cassette deck working and gave The Great Giana Sisters a go to test it out.

Gaming sessions – 10 April 2009

This one’s another brief entry – played a bit of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker on the Sega Mega Drive. Again, Sega’s programmers made the FM synth on that little black box do some amazing things, and even if the game’s a bit silly, it’s good fun. Will do an expanded write-up on this game in the future methinks.

Gaming sessions – 1 March 2009

This will be known as the Sega Saturn/Samurai Shodown 4 edition ๐Ÿ™‚

Lotsa screen shots from SS4, note that I’ve paused it almost every time because I was trying to get through the levels as fast as possible to get the special boss endings ๐Ÿ™‚ SS4 was the first Samurai Shodown game I invested a fair whack of time in, and aside from the fact that it was a stunning Saturn conversion (of course ๐Ÿ˜‰ ), it proved to be a complex game that demanded a different approach to your typical 2D fighter.

Oh, and Rimururu is tottemo-kawaii as well ๐Ÿ˜€

Next up is a screen-cap montage from the joygasmic intro from the super-awesome-win Treasure masterpiece, Guradian Heroes. I didn’t play the game, I just felt like watching the intro ๐Ÿ˜‰

Finally we have Sonic 3D on the Saturn showcasing the best part about the game – the special stages. Whilst the Saturn never got a decent Sonic game, Traveler’s Tales’ Sonic 3D was a nice-looking port of the original Mega Drive game with great music and awesome special stages.