It would seem that I've had the best of luck when it comes to SF4. It all began at Fight Club, where my addiction began, leading me later to SDCC and the Sneaker Pimps concert to play more. I am under a small minority of people who have actually had the chance to play SF4, among hundreds of thousands of SF fans across america. My luck strangly enough continues, with Super Arcade in Walnut, Ca receiveing the very first SF4 arcade cabinet in the US, an easily drivable 40 miles away from my home.

This is a completly different beast however. The machines are not the usual Viewlix cabinets we're used to seeing at all the prior events. The owner of Super Arcade purchased just the SF4 arcade boards($12,000), and put them into smaller japanese non HD arcade cabinets.

This took some getting used too. The game presented in HD is much different than the SD cabinets we're playing on. Of course, it's not as graphically impressive...but it's still pretty. What took me for surprise is the zoomed out old-school Street Fighter 2 view on SD machines, and not the super zoomed in HD characters. You can clearly see the difference, and it took awhile to adjust and flesh out the game again. Here's another shot of the cabinet...

Ghetto? Sorta. Could it be better? Yes. But there is absolutly ZERO room to complain. I'm playing SF4, in a jam packed arcade with loads of people months before the game comes out. Awesome. Due to it's popularity all over the internet, the place has been jam packed with people for two days straight. It's original cost of .50¢ per play is now .75¢, and the crowd remains.

With many people ariving just to see the new SF4 in action, I was aproached by several hundreds of people wanting to understand the new focus attack system. Since the game is publicly avaliable now, I really wanted to flesh out the focus attack even more, too see what it can do. I've already made a previous blog entry concerning this, so how about I just show you with some videos from Super Arcade...

The remainder of the videos can be seen here, http://ca.youtube.com/user/Miles923. The best thing about this whole experience is that Street Fighter feels alive again, and everyone wants in on the action. I'm a long time 3rd Strike player, but bringging back SF to its roots was the perfect way to bring in a bigger audience. The oppritunity to show people new examples of the focus attack, and new aspects of SF4 is one of the best parts of the arcade scene. Theres a unity between all these people surrounding one arcade machine in the middle of California, wanting to learn more and get better. I met up with alot of folks from the shoryuken.com community(who have some beastly Abel/Dhalsim players), and hope to run into anyone reading this as well!

I'm the guy with the blond pony-tail hair playing Ken. If I continue to have the luck that I had last night, then I might be able to beat my 49 win streak...

Snaped a pic some 5 mins before the arcade manager cut the power!

Take care fellow street fighters,

see you in the arcades!

-max

Me and my friend Bojack decided a few weeks back to do some original colored drawings with all the hype of SF4 around and about. Our plan is to pump out unique drawings of all the new SF4 characters. He drew a wicked C.Viper first, and I've now just finished my first....Rufus!

I have already begun sketching my next character, El Fuerte! I will do a speed-painting'esque video to go along, for those that would like to see the entire process of drawing a street fighter.

Until next week...

-max