Battle Scares and Sore Hands

I went and bought Super Street Fighter IV when it came out last Tuesday, and playing it I am having a lot more fun than I expected to! All the characters have lots of nice upgrades, the 2 new characters (Juri and Hakan) are great, and you don’t have to unlock ANY of them. As I play different characters (or rather, friends come over and play them), new costume colors and victory speeches are unlocked. Great for me, because I always like to dress my toons in green.

Now to the “but…” ….My thumb is all blistered (gonna be a callus soon, I just know it) from playing this with a PlayStation controller. I’ve never played this game outside of the arcade setup, so I’ve had a really difficult time adjusting to making all the combinations on the PS3, since I don’t have the arcade pad. My boyfriend has also been trying to help me learn how to play the game with a controller versus joystick (I’m so happy we can play this together). When I first started playing the game, it was a blast, until I got into some of the harder levels and simply didn’t stand a chance against the CPU toons due to my inability to string combinations with the PS3 controller. I definitely don’t have fun playing games where it isn’t even a challenge any more, it’s literally having NO CHANCE at beating the stage. I’ve gotten better at it now, though, and the game has become MUCH more enjoyable again! The new challenge: beating people online! So far I’ve gotten my butt kicked 11 times. It’s okay, though. I’ll get better, then kick all their butts.

In other news, I’m playing that Super Mario 64 game for the Nintendo DS. There’s another game with odd controls, my hands are sore from adjusting to that one as well. The game is fun, I like that I can play as different characters throughout the adventure, and back when I played that game on the Nintendo 64, I can’t even count the amount of times I played it through. I remember when people would compete over how little time it took to finish the game; just a couple hours. I remember people competing over Zelda: Ocarina of Time playtime as well. Oh, those days…

Lesson learned: Grow Calluses or tape up your thumb to play Super Street Fighter IV. I also heard some people tape quarters to the joystick. I’m not trying that, though!