This is my first article, and I pondered for the longest time what to do it on. I finally decided.....



Of all the nostalgic things from my childhood, Street Fighter has a high place in my heart. From trying to figure out how to do moves, to being beat by my older brother constantly, this series has given me lots of fond memories.

This article in not about the best/worst games or anything like that, just my memories with the ones I've played. So I'm going to cover what Street Fighter meant to me growing up in the 90's, and what it means to me now.

With me being born in the early 90's I didn't have a lot of the more retro systems. The first system I had was the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), which to this day is my favorite system. My brother and I had almost all the SNES classics, the Mario games, Link to the Past, Donkey Kong Country, Chrono Trigger, you know the classics. But one game in particular would bring my older brother and I together, and turn me into to a fighting game lover. The name of that game is.....





My brother and I played this game all the time. And, as most younger brothers do, I lost all the time. But it meant a lot to me that we could play together, since he was in 7th or 8th grade and I was in elementary, he rarely wanted to spend time with me. When he wasn't home I would play arcade mode and try to get better, with little results. Once I figured out how to do moves instead of just punching and button tapping, it was uphill from there.

The first move I learned, as did most people, was the Hadouken, Ryu and Ken's signature move. I learned it by watching my brother do it, all I knew was you had to slide from down, to towards your opponent and punch. And from there I was off to discovering other moves.





With me learning new moves I could actually beat my brother now and then. Once I was able to actually win, I fell in love with the series. My brother mostly used Ken and Guile, but not me, Ryu was my main man. Back then I liked him just becuase his moves were easy, I thought he looked cool, and he was almost identical to Ken (who my brother used) This would lead to me always using Ryu, except for the occasional time when I like to mix it up.

I'm not a huge fan of charge characters, especially back then, but nowadays I will used Guile and Vega from time to time. For those of you reading who do not know what a charge character is, its when instead of sliding directions and hitting a punch or kick to do a attack, you hold one direction for a couple of seconds(to charge), and then press another direction with a punch or a kick.

For example, You do Ryu's Hadouken by sliding the d-pad or joy stick from down to towards your opponent and hitting a punch button. But to do Guile's Sonic Boom you have to hold away from your opponent for a couple of seconds and then press towards them and a punch.

Now that I explained how I got into the series, lets talk about the things I though made Street Fighter 2 Turbo so great.

Some things I really like about the game were the colors, music and the stages. I really like Ryu, Ken, Guile and Vega's stages. And the music, who could forget that, it was a upbeat SNES symphony that fit perfectly.




Things I wish they would have put into future games is the mini-game stages in between fights. The car smashing stage was my favorite, but I also like the brick wall and the barrels. The little scenes after each match with your opponents face bloodied and your characters saying were awesome. They should have also incorporated the boxes and barrels that you could through your opponents through into future games. Those were really cool.