Look What I Did!

It was a wet summer evening. The rain which had earlier in the day turned my hair into unmanageable frizz, was pitter-pattering nicely against my window as I played Super Street Fighter IV. I was playing with Cammy. We’d been getting on well in recent weeks. No longer throwing out reckless spiral arrows, basic combos were getting pulled off perfectly almost every time and the missed ultra opportunities had become few and far between.

There had been a good mix of opponents to fight. T-Hawk, Sakura and Cody each made an appearance, there was one horrible, fireball spamming Sagat that very nearly made me cry and maybe three or four Ryus which is a pretty low number for an hour’s worth of play. Then along comes Ken.

I’ve always had a lot trouble with Kens. It’s annoying, knowing how predictable the average Ken player can be, that I still get my ass kicked. Maybe it’s the hair, maybe I have a weakness for blondes. Maybe it’s the arrogant smile that I want to despise but can’t cause it’s just so cheeky and loveable. Whatever it is, I rarely beat even a flowchart Ken, and this Ken was particularly scary, he had four times my battle points, he was obviously gonna destroy me. I had no chance against this guy. He’d probably been playing Street Fighter since he was a nipper. He had an intimidating gamertag, title and icon. He was clearly mean and nasty, more than likely built like a shed and kicked puppies in real life.

With the game set to one round only, I knew it would be over quickly. Somehow at the beginning I managed to sneak in a panicked throw. “Stay focused”, Cammy reminded me as she flipped Ken over onto the ground. So I tried. I really did. The rain and the warmth of my living room helping me to relax more so than usual. I still made mistakes, but when my health was all but gone something clicked inside my head and I managed to think and exploit the cocky bastard’s mistakes all the way to a K.O.

First thing I did afterwards was get on the phone to my best mate. “I JUST HAD THE MOST AWESOME FIGHT EVER!”, I exclaimed before the poor guy had finished saying hello. I carried on, describing the game in detail and finished up with “Dude, I have got to show you the replay”.

Watching and sharing moments of sheer win, fail or silliness with my friends has definitely become one of my favourite parts of gaming. I absolutely love that games such as SSFIV and Halo 3 allow matches to be kept and saved to my console’s hard drive. There was many a time, playing, say… Gears Of War 2, that I’d sigh and wish that it were possible to save played games and view them afterwards. So many moments of carnage and awesomeness, random grenade multi-kills and unexpected chainsawings from behind that caused a whole party of players to burst out laughing that will forever be lost.

So the next item on my list of toys to buy is going to have to be a capture card. I can cram my laptop full of hilarious clips like Walter’s Crackdown 2 mag grenade shenaningans. Then I can relive gaming memories whenever I please. I’ll be able to, in theory, show off each and every headshot I make. And one day I can prove to my grandchildren that grandma used to have ‘mad skillz’ by showing them FFA MW2 games where I score 30 kills to one death – oh yes, it has happened… once.

I’ll leave you now with a short film of one of my favourite gaming moments of all time. An ingenious, twisted idea full of Ready Uppers, dreamed up by Tony.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw9P1Y8j0mw[/youtube]