Fighting game enthusiast....
To be appropriate for the shoryuken wiki, this will serve as my videogame biography.
During the 90's i played a lot of street fighter 2. As a kid i was not really competitive with sf. I, with my friends and relatives, hardly went to the arcades. We just played in the comfort of our homes with the super famicom. Pure japanese action for us. We even translated the manual and game endings just to understand the character plots of sf. Yes like most little boys and little tomboy girls, I played only Ryu. It was all shoryukens and fireballs.
Mortal Kombat came and i hardly got into it since it was so gory, as featured in TIME, and parents everywhere hated it. Thats okay, by that time i had other games. The super famicom was cool in that it had a lot of fighting games that really entertained me and my brother. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters, Dragon Ball Z Super Butouden 2, Dragon Ball Z Super Butouden 3,Yuu Yuu Hakusho 2, Yuu Yuu Hakusho Final, and Yuu Yuu Hakusho: Tokubetsuhen. As in the old days, the internet was not mainstream yet, we played the games and discovered the fighting system by ourselves. The last phenomenal fighting game that bought for the famicom was Super Street Fighter 2. We practically missed out on Super Turbo since it was "the" arcade game to play. We played at home.
Since the library of our games grew, we just loved more game genre's than ever. That led us to get an N64. During the Golden eye days though, we nintendo geeks practically chose this james bond game over any other multiplayer game. Of course getting an N64 was a big fighting gamer's mistake as the N64's library was very limited. We enjoyed the N64's legendary games but we just couldn't get our fill of fighting games. After 3 years, we bought a PSX. What a joy. The Alpha series and many many more fighters welcomed us. At this time it was tekken 3 that caught my eye. We just played that game until we could not stay up anymore.
My enthusiasm turned into addiction when tekken tag came out. This was the so called "KOF 98 dream match" game of the tekken series. It featured a lot of characters that supposedly "died". Such a great line up attracted a lot of players here in the Philippines. Yes, tekken tag was the mainstream fighting game after street fighter. It was this game that brought me to the arcade scene. Great thing about this time was tekkenzaibatsu. So much people were able to know about where to get tourneys and money matches. I was opened to a new level of playing this game when i saw some guys who played seriously. Money matches make you better than anything. We watched a lot of korean tekken vidoes too. Thing is though, here in the Philippines, the great tekken players are all great turtles as well. They loved playing the game safe; the flashiest you would see them was when they did those just frame moves and expert launcher-4 punch-dash -juggles. Well the ps2 delivered a somewhat altered ttt but we still played it. We enjoyed the tekken series: tekken 4 and tekken 5 as well.
Although tekken was the only big fighting game here, i got into Virtua fighter 4 with my ps2. Loved since i saw a lot of great japanese versus korean matches on the internet. That Chibita guy with some kind of 100 match win steak really got me playing the game more, even though it was just the CPU i was beating. i just began to follow this series as a fan. 3rd strike and Cvs2 just blew me away. Unfortunately, the 2d fighting scene was not big here.
Tekken DR, what can i say. They toned down my favorite character. That's life, which is okay since i switched into a different top tier taunt character. Tekken was just getting boring so i just joined a Fraternity kicked people's asses in real life. Anyway as the internet community lulled us with so much online games, i tried most of the popular games here. Along the way i found the arcade emulators. This brought me to retro fighting games. It was only at this time that i had a new found appreciation for games like Super Turbo and the King of Fighter's series.
At present, i am looking to get an Xbox 360 to appreciate my new found glory of Street fighter. It's great that the SF game that i missed out on the most is to be revived. Although i am not big on the arcade, online will hopefully be a decent experience altogether. See you people online.