Street Fighter gameplay communication across time, space & dimensions

Who needs a headset mic to communicate?

Last night I had a spare hour or so and started my “battle for justice” on SF2′ Hyper Fighting on XBox Live.. the full details of which are another story! 😉

Anyway, I played a bunch of matches, some great, some really poor, but I got really into it and addicted.. During the night I got matched up against a guy I’d played only a few minutes earlier, which is pretty unusual. He was low rated and I’d beaten him easily the time before – I think he’d played Chun Li. Of course I selected Guile, in blue, as always! But this time he went for Dhalsim. We began to fight, but it became clear he didn’t really know what he was doing with Dhalsim either.. so it was obvious from a few moves in it would be an easy win for me. But a strange thing happened in the 2nd round when he was low on health and was about to lose, and had hardly damaged me. I thought I’d try for a ‘comedy’ upside-down-kick move with Guile (close & fwd/back and HK.. or ‘Roundhouse’ if you prefer!), which is a very cool looking move, but unfortunately reasonably useless other than in tricks and mindgames.

I moved in and could close on him without much danger as he was such a novice. But as Guile flipped upside down to ‘float’ in the air in that special way that he does during this move.. he went for a crouching punch with Dhalsim – but of course his arms extended and went underneath me. So both our moves whiffed in a very silly-looking fashion. Standing right next to each other, here was Guile, floating upside down sending his leg & foot over the top of Dhalsim’s head, while Dhalsim ducked down and sent his arm through Guile’s outstretched arm, without any contact being registered by the game whatsoever. I think I paused for a moment – although I can’t be sure I really did pause, as a moment can feel like an eternity when you are really focused in a Street Fight. Then I did the move again… and to my huge amusement – so did he! Perfect timing from both of us to get the “double whiff” once again.

We had no voice comms on, nothing was said or heard, but you could just ‘see’ the communication as we both mentally changed the game – and it was “on”. We both of course, did the moves again, and again. I think we must have been done this silly ‘whiff’ dance at least 8-10 times over before one of us got the timing wrong and his character was hit and KO’d. It really brought a smile to my face and made me chuckle – and got me to think about how we just ‘communicated’ on this strange level of humour, instead of actually fighting, in the midst of this fighting game, purely through the medium of the gameplay. It is something that would naturally occur with someone sitting next to you in the room playing – in fact it felt a lot like that was what had happened. I checked his gamercard of course, and it turns out he is from Portugal – I’ve sent the guy a friend request. 🙂

I had a ton of really good and memorable matches, but this actually turned out to be the most memorable and fun bit of the whole night.

I don’t think it will become as legendary in my mind as the time I won a match by using a Dan taunt, but it could be close. 🙂