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!
That looks quite cool, I’m guessing you set the cab (or whatever you call it) up yourself, that is something that is beyond me I think :). Unfortunately I have not played a lot of arcade Street Fighters although i’m sure some combos would be easier.
Nice work beating M. Bison, even if you did cheat at other times :P.
PS: I agree Tuxedo Ken would be awesome.
Thanks for the comments, and for agreeing that Tuxedo Ken would be awesome 😀
The cab (yes, you got it right!) actually came with the wiring and the rest of it setup and good to go for the most part – since receiving it I’ve re-wired parts of it, modded the holding bay by installing a shelf, added an extra power supply for games that need a specific voltage, replaced the monitor chassis twice (which was scary, since a CRT monitor can store huge voltages even when powered off!), wired in some extra harnesses in parallel to cope with 6-button games and a few other things. I started out slowly and just kept going, though none of it is too complicated in the grand scheme of things. Is fun learning about it though 🙂
I think the best thing about the ending is Ken’s face: After defeating Bison, Ken must be exhausted and probably pretty smashed up after fighting his way around the world – Russell Crowe style – so his facial expression is pretty accurate. Funnily enough, his emotional state is about the same when he is marrying his schladie friend. What does that tell you about Capcom’s thoughts on Marriage in the Western world…
… Or maybe, Ken is just a little disappointed by your sneaky winning technique, or the number of credits you had to use. That would have broken the budget big time if you were at the arcade back in the day.
“100 Yen each. Maybe just one.” I don’t think so Ryo-san. 😉
– Josh-o
You get three thumbs up – 1 for the comment about Russell Crowe as Ken and how SF2:CE can somehow contain social commentary, 1 for the comment about me breaking the gaming budget on SF2, and the last one for the Shenmue reference. Pure gold 😀