The 3rd Strike Retrospective

Hi there.

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.