Finishing Final Fight on my Astro City! :)

It’s obviously a week for awesome arcade gamage 😀 My brother-in-law Hamez is currently staying with us while he’s back here visiting from interstate, and last night after some subtle suggestions from yours truly, we jumped onto the arcade cab for some awesomeness. This time it was Capcom’s seminal scrolling beat’em’up Final Fight 🙂

While I remember playing this one at the arcades, I have probably clocked up more hours playing the amazing Mega CD port back in the 16-bit era. Because of the difficulty and the continues/lives system, I never managed to finish the game beffore, so it was nice to be able to finish the arcade version and see the ending to the game 🙂 We were actually doing pretty well as far as continues go at the start of the game, but by the time we got to the end, the Free Play setting really came in handy 😀

Anywho, I only started taking pics when we got to the end of the last level – the gallery’s below in all its wonky glory since I was trying to play and take photos at the same time 😛 For those interested, I’m taking up the 2P slot as Guy, whilst Hamez spent the latter half of the game playing as Haggar, doing the grab-jump-piledrive technique over and over again. Because it’s awesome 🙂

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 🙂 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 😉

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 😉

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 😀

In the meantime, enjoy the pics and commentary!