Several years ago, I wrote the below piece and pitched it various outlets for 3S's 15th anniversary. It was never picked up, and that kind of bothered me. Not that I think that this is a chunk of unrefined genius or something (there are lots of problems to edit), but maybe this was too much of a part of me and I couldn't let it go. I hung on to it, and today, USGamer.net posted a more timely birthday celebration to 3S I wrote that has bits and pieces of what was originally there. This is probably self serving, but I thought you might like to read how it was and maybe glean a little bit more what this game means to me. I hope you enjoy it.
Note: This is a unaltered and very, very rough draft.
If I can pull it off, she’ll never read this. She’ll never
know.
It will die with me like the mounting lies of a terrible man
shackled by his own misdeeds, at least for now. In time, I might be able to
solve this for myself as it is a ruin of my own making. But that could be years
away, and this Urien just got off the ground to meet the business end of a
punch to the face. Another punch comes, and then the screen freezes with a
flash of light while this nobody Ken combos into a fury of spinning kicks as a
vomit of profanity quietly spews from my mouth. There should have been some
defense, here. There should have been a parry followed by an embarrassing chain
reaction that only an assured ass-kicking will bring. But not this time. I am
playing 3rd Strike. I am playing it on a brand new 4K television. There is
input lag. I’ll never tell my wife, because that’s what love is.
Our relationship is complicated, this Street Fighter game
and me. It is the second revision of a fighting game that, by the time it was
released, met with shrugs from the general populace that had since moved away
from the franchise’s arcade salad days. By 2000 when it hit the Dreamcast in
the US, we had already seen how Final our Fantasies could be with polygons and
tried to decode the batshit zaniness of Tekken genealogy four times over. But
the Street Fighter III series of games always held an oddly sinister air about
them, as if they seemed to be made for an older crowd than mine even though I
could legally drink when I finally got my hands on them. Ralph Bakshi making
anime, but really loony anime. I
bootlegged it on Dreamcast and then received it as a gift for my PlayStation 2,
but I was too busy aggressively shitting my time down a sewer of dozens of
subpar JRPGs to really get to know 3rd Strike; I’d play it, but never with the
monastic devotion it demanded. But it was with me through my entire adult life
looming behind me; a presence forever lingering over my shoulder.
Somehow, against every law of nature, Capcom made Street
Fighter IV and fighting games were back in the collective nerd gestalt. In
2011, realizing that they needed to keep making money on these things, the publisher
finally updated 3rd Strike for consoles. Ok, I told it, let’s finally get to
know each other. Third Strike took off its glasses and let its hair down. Six
years, several joysticks, and hundreds of thousands of matches won and lost by
a wakeup parry timing later, it whispered back “what took you so long” like a
goddamn Cameron Crowe movie.
To be sure, mine is not a name that will be spoken at
tournaments in hushed, reverent tones. I will never fly to Japan to prove my
mettle; never go down in history with glorious displays of showman-like
comeback gusto (maybe!). I am no chump by most means, but I’m also not willing
to live a life of lies. But, by God, I play it enough that I may as well have
programmed Third Strike myself. A weekly meetup at a local bar with friends.
Another evening at home online as my wife and baby sleep. I study YouTube
matches several years-old during bored lunch breaks and discuss the game with
friends routinely. I play a lot of video games, but Third Strike and I, we got
a thing going on. It’s a devotion, and a respect, and a pursuit.
That’s what love is.
Our first joint purchase was an Olevia television. It was
made via the coitus of two government stimulus checks prospected on sharing a
living space –taboo to my family at that point as there were no rings on any
fingers. But we saw our nascent lives together built on promise, much like the
television industry of 2008 saw in high definition viewing. Though I can
promise you that this paragraph did not intend the television set in question
to be a metaphor, in fairness, I need to tell you that the Olevia gave us
almost ten solid years of reliable use. It is old and breaking, but still
welcome in the the genial rest home of a spare bedroom. Olevia as a company no
longer exists –my marriage, thankfully, outlasting it—but its gift to the world
will live hallowed within our house.
To be honest, though, it was sheer stupid luck and a really
good deal on a television that the Olevia was as perfect for fighting games as
an HD setup could be, as this fantastically beautiful new 4K job currently
living in my family room can attest. You see, as HD televisions became the
norm, the horrid side effect of the time between a user’s signal, the moments it
is encoded into the console, and the milliseconds this takes to be decoded by
the television for display means there is an incremental time delay we call
input lag. Basically, if I hit a button, I expect the character on-screen to
react instantaneously (or as near to it as possible). By their construction,
older cathode-tube televisions never had this problem, but without getting to
be a bore about it, it’s a problem of HD sets that manufacturers either choose
not to fix or never bothered to care about.
To the average person, or one that may have begun playing
games in the HD era, it’s infinitesimal; a frame of animation lost here and
there. For games that demand a certain precision, though, this is a problem.
For Third Strike, which demands frame-specific precision, however, it’s almost
a deal breaker. The 4K television was an assumed, inevitable purchase after we
bought our house a few years ago; something larger for the family room because
we had the space and beautiful beyond measure because I’m a snob. But we’re
talking two people with a baby and a mortgage. If science and human nature had
taught us anything, it was that only a buffoon spends their shekels on a
television outside of the right Black Friday deal, so patience was key. But we
could wait no longer; the Olevia was drifting quickly into a peaceful grave of
busted screen pixels. You also get an extra 5% off with your Target card. We
bought a new television.
But I didn’t do my homework. Some 4Ks on the market are
optimized for low input lag. The second I entered the character select screen,
though, I knew what I was in for. I could feel
it. When errant Aegis Reflectors don’t trigger after a Chariot Tackle and
Denjin Hadokens refuse to spring to life after a carefully timed Shoryuken, I
can (finally) no longer blame the booze sitting next to me for botched matches
and losses that we can charitably call unearned. This was a flaw eight years in
the making from one TV to the next, and as I hoisted the Olevia in its
monstrosity into the solitude of this spare bedroom, feverishly concocting how
I might still use it at night without waking my family as the primary mode for
Third Strike consumption, I concluded that I just didn’t know what I had until
it was gone. I can’t fit it into my tiny, storage-only basement, and the loud
clicks and slaps of buttons and sticks does not a comfortable sleeping
environment make on the second floor of my home. I stared at the Olevia, and it
looked back at me; weathered, a veteran of a now drifted age. It was time to
retire, and time for me to let go.
That’s what love is.
As love affairs go, the Olevia Era was action-packed. We
weren’t quite engaged before its purchase (when the Target card was opened, now
that I think about it), but that wasn’t far off. It nestled into the one-bedroom
apartment we eventually shared for more years that I want to admit in perfect
fashion; its 42” size a monolith. Connecting it for the first time to my
PlayStation 3 with a then-very expensive HDMI cable –a term I had never heard
before this—nearly brought a tear to my eye while watching the intro to
Assassin’s Creed. It was a time of optimism and promise, of unknown excitement
and rebirth. But that first Assassin’s Creed was shitty.
We played Rock Band with my friends and out-of-town family
whenever we could after our wedding a year later, the Olevia’s speakers
beginning to crackle at the loud tone that late night apartment parties could
bestow (often stumbling drunk while channeling our inner RJD). It was one of
the few video games she would often play with me, because that’s just the sort
of experience Rock Band was. My wife liked things streamlined, and not the war
of wills that Third Strike becomes at mid- or high-level.
We fell asleep in front of the Olevia after chemotherapy,
stuffing food in my mouth as quickly as possible before further sickness
prevented me from eating for days at a time. I would push her out of the house
to see her family on weekends, her reluctance to leave often amused me while I
sat in silence forcing myself to break Demon’s Souls over my knee. The truth
was that I often didn’t want her to see me that way, weak and hollow. Plus, she
needed time on her own, and even cancer can’t force two people to be in the
same space at all times.
We slept on the foldout couch for a month; movie after movie
after terrible comedy after terrible action movie. I had to make sure she
didn’t move too much in bed after the mastectomy, and we decided that we’d cut
out the middle man and just stay in front of the Olevia since that’s where she’d
spend the majority of her recovery. You can only tell someone how beautiful and
perfect they are during their worst moments before it sounds callous and
disingenuous to them, but she, at least, never let on if that was the case.
We literally threw the couch down a stairwell after bed bugs
infested the apartment building. Having been forced to sleep on it for months
while our bedroom became a demilitarized quarantine zone, we found a house as
soon as possible, and in an act of enraged, satisfying defiance, made sure that
no human would use the infernal sitting implement ever again. The Olevia and
PlayStation were lovingly packed (and dutifully doused with various bug killing
chemicals) for their new home.
We had our timing down: I go to bed at midnight, she got up
around 2:00am for feeding, and then I’d be up again between 4:00 and 5:00 while
she slept, my baby hearing the early morning cries of “Snake?! SNAKE?!” before
drifting back into a nap. At least my baby’s earliest memories won’t have to be
incessant, pretentious rambling about ripped jeans in this one, I would think
to myself. All of that side info is on optional cassette tapes. I listened to them
anyway.
She never complained, only accepted. Often, it was just a
matter of overcoming and moving on. Burn within you, now, the image of a man
trying to cram a brand new, giant television into his car; for it was Cyber
Monday and a decision was made. The store was crawling with slack-jawed idiots
on a similar mission, and no employees were available to help him find out the
hard way that his trunk was too small. Recoil in horror as he nearly injures
himself to stuff it within the back seat after a long, frequently bloody battle
with the baby chair. Cheer at his triumph as he comes home to his wife and
child with a brand new 4K television, one that will replace and old and trusty
friend. Light a candle’s vigil in sadness for Third Strike, a love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name,
and how I can never let on that things will never be the same. As a supportive
wife whom is, yes, beautiful and perfect, she would feel guilty; she knows what
fireballs and parries and dragon punches mean to me. It’s too late to take the
TV back now, so I’ll do the best I can, copious bullshit and inane losses along
for the ride. She doesn’t need to know. I can never tell her.
That’s what love is.
John Learned is a
freelance writer that wrote something you just read. He tweets sometimes
(@john_learned) and is slowly, lovingly annotating Symphony of the Night on
YouTube.
