On Friday I decided to head over to my favorite arcade, the Shibuya Game Kaikan, and play some Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting Anniversay Edition. Over on Shoryuken.com they call this one AE (Anniversary Edition) but I wonder what it is called in the states: there already was a Hyper Fighting over there.

Anyway, I got to the game kaikan at about 8pm, after a nice Little Spoon (my favorite Curry chain in Japan) dinner. Now, I love Super Street Fighter II Turbo, and I really like AE as well, since you get to play older versions of characters against the new ones. It’s a fun game. Unfortunately, the past 8 years in New York didn’t do much for my head-to-head skills. I probably only played ten or twenty games the whole 8 years in New York, despite having a ST machine available at the Chinatown Fair. So I tend to get my ass kicked. I probably win about 10% of my matches at the game kaikan.

I’m posting this a few days late, so I can’t really comment on how I did. I think I won once with my T. Hawk, who I’m trying to get into playing shape. I’m trying to learn how to option select the crouching jab into piledriver, but I’m still not very good at that yet. I probably lost 15 times at least though, so I don’t think an analysis of my play would be ver interesting.

I did, however, chat with a nice salaryman who plays a throw-happy grape Dhalsim. He’s pretty good, but not great because I can hang with him to some extent. He was happy to chat with a white guy about SF2 though, so we spent quite a while talking strategy and commenting on the other players there. Two really stood out: a ST Zangief using the held-button black color, and a massive E. Honda who was nearly unstoppable. The Zangief was really good, and I thought that at least initially I could take him with my crappy Ryu, but that wasn’t the case. His play was pretty limited, in that he didn’t show much variation, but was very good at what he did. He would SPD at very, very long range. Whiff a roundhouse, receive a SPD. He also used the hopping punch from out of range to get into range and SPD. I’ve seen that before, but he was just really effective at using it. He knew the ranges really well, stayed far enough away to use the Lariat, invite a roundhouse or forward, the SPD you. I didn’t think he was anything special, but he ran up a pretty good win streak, so I changed my mind as the evening went on.

The E. Honda was another story. He was just massive. I hadn’t seen many E. Honda’s there before, so this was pretty interesting to me. He used Honda’s charge butt-drop move often, and used it to cross-over, then would tick into the command throw. He used the command throw really well, much more frequently than I had ever seen it used before. He would get at least two a round it seemed like. He also used Honda’s super to get four hits off consistently, which is something that I wouldn’t be able to do. He didn’t ues the super often though, and of course was a master of the jumping fierce to wiggle over fireballs and such. Anyway, it was an impressive display.