Bush Mackel

I’m a big fan of video games and for me, nothing is bigger and better than Street Fighter.

Don’t know if I could really explain why, heck – I don’t know if I even KNOW why but it’s always been my favourite and it’s one of the few games where I will eagerly purchase it at full price without even checking out reviews.

This has been the case for years and started when I bought my FIRST Street Fighter, Street Fighter II on SNES from Electronics Boutique in Columbia Mall.

Where it All Began
Street Fighter II was the first game I can remember buying and I swear after tax that game was like $70. And back in those days…It was NOT a drop in the pan for 10 year old Bush. What am I saying? I would CRY if I had to pay that much for a game now! (Unless it was Street Fighter of course). Man that game taught me so much… Most importantly, it probably forced my thumbs to become the deadly weapons they are now. The Shoryuken, Hadouken… These were all new to me (and most of the world) as were the motions. Funny that today we kinda forget that D, DF, F+P wasn’t always common place. Well back then it certainly wasn’t and I spent HOURS blistering up my thumbs just trying to do a freakin’ Dragon Punch.

Street Fighter II on Super Nintendo

I Put in the Hours
But the hard work would pay off and eventually I could do every move in the game quite easily, of course with the exception of Zangief’s Spinning Pile Driver. I would go on to win many games… Killing many a foe with Ken’s kick throw – Taking their last bit of life and destroying barrels all in the same moment. Man that game was classic. Now for some reason Ken had pom pom hair but whatchya gonna do? Street Fighter II gave us “Get lost, you can’t compare with my powers”, “Attack me if you dare, I will crush you”, and my personal favourite, “”Go home and be a family man”. Of course it also gave us M. Bison throwing you from seemingly halways across the screen but you gotta take the good with the bad I guess.

Street Fighter Alpha

The Sequels
After Street Fighter II, many sequels would eventually come out with most being better than the last. Outside of Street Fighter III, my favourite would probably be the original Street Fighter Alpha. Even though the roster was smaller than it’s sequels and the gameplay a bit slower, it was just a gem. The music was FANtastic (maybe the best outside of the original SF II) the graphics were unbelievably polished, characters were awesome and the presentation was just top notch. But years after all these sequels, I eventually found Street Fighter III… In my opinion, Capcom’s crown jewel. Unfortunately amongst my friends, I’m one of the few who thinks so.

Wow. This post went someplace I didn’t really intend it to but hopefully tomorrow I’ll wrap this up when I actually review SF IV!

Let me cut to the chase – Ninja Gaiden is number 1.

I just love spreading it around that others agree that Ninja Gaiden is a REALLY hard game.

But one of the problems I have with this list is that the writers obviously didn’t do their due diligence because instead of naming specific names, they cop out and just say the whole series.

Bleh. Well in any event…

Click on the above image to check out the list and fee free to discuss.

I was and still am a BIG fan of Street Fighter III.

The problem with that game was of all the fighters you had to choose from, only a handful of them were interesting to play and compelling to learn. But if you could get past that and find a character you liked, the game was a masterpiece.

At the heart of the greatness was certainly the gameplay, moves, and most importantly the parrying.

Ohhhhh the parrying!

Parrying Was a Little Bit of Alright
I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but the parrying in Street Fighter III was so cool because it gave you the chance to never take damage (except from throws). You could parry every attack in the game – From normal moves to specials and even entire supers! Being able to do that, there was no more chip deaths, you could jump freely because you could parry Dragon Punches… And if you played someone who could ALSO parry, man oh man the chess matches you could have.

Here Comes a New Challenger
So Street Fighter IV has no parrying. Before I picked up the game yesterday I was reading a cool e-book I found at http://gootecks.com/. It’s called The 3rd Strike Players Guide to Street Fighter 4. (You had me at hello). Well anyway, it was a pretty decent read… Enough so that I picked up SFIV. But I was also worried when I read one of the passages in the book that said something to the effect of “You know you could jump in safely in SF III? Well, those days are over.” *groan* And let me tell you, I understood that all too well when every time I jumped into Zangief I kept getting Lariated and there was nothing I could do about it.

Initial Thoughts
Um, I dunno. I only have about an hour or so of SF IV experience under my belt and admittedly, coming from Street Fighter III, the transition is PAINFUL. At first I was going to say that you don’t have the trickness coming from cool movesets like you see in Alex and Dudley (SFIII) but after seeing some vids on the net, I’m very optimistic that with another hour into the game that I will be proven wrong. So I guess, WE’LL SEE.

It looks like I’m slowly tightening the gap between the times I decide to do 12 of 12s ha ha.

Sorry I’m so late getting this up, but in the States yesterday it was President’s Day which meant that THIS guy didn’t have to go to work. Yeah I know… “Well if you had the day off, why didn’t you post it YESTERDAY?”

I was still fooling around with the innards of my 360!! Oh, I didn’t tell you guys about that? Well expect a rant on THAT subject sometime this week.

This weekend was remarkably unproductive, not to say that I really had a hit list of things I wanted to accomplish or anything…

But ONE of the things I DID want to do was really doing some damage to my gamerscore and I think I ended up getting oh… 10 or 20pts this weekend. Ha ha… BUT, I did set the foundation.

Though honestly I’m not sure if I’m even going to get around to those games this week because of work and web design.

Long story Short
I’m not sure if it’s apparent on here (’cause I’m hardly posting anything these days) but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this blog, LSO, and my web design stuff I’m desperately trying to get off the ground… The web design stuff is hitting and missing right now but I really want to keep at it because I believe that I can make it work. For everything else, I knew that I needed to do something different because I’m not particular happy with this blog or LSO. The reason why I’m not happy with THIS blog is because the design/layout of it just isn’t working for me. But that’s a relatively quick fix. The LSO stuff is a bigger thing.

LSO Can Work!
If you guys aren’t familiar with one of my bigger projects, Learn Stuff Online was intended to be a huge content site whose primary source of revenue was AdSense. And as most of you know, AdSense is really a numbers game so when I started LSO, I had friends of mine come onto the project with me and start writing content. Unfortunately, all of them turned out to be horrible writers or horribly unproductive so LSO kind of fell by the way side.

But I always knew it could work.

My AdSense Account
So I’m checking out my AdSense account the other day for LSO, and I noticed that I’m close to payout! Turns out that basically my 24 pages on there are doing like $5 of revenue a month! I know that’s like nothing, but they’re being hit for n00b keywords and still doing KINDA decent numbers (AdSense) wise. So last night I finally made a decision about LSO. I had already integrated Wordpress into a new test domain for LSO (for affiliate marketing) and I now wanted it everywhere on the site. I tried this once before (installing Wordpress mu) and I never could get it working but last night I tried again and after MUCH effort, I managed to get it done!

Going Forward
Here’s what I’m thinking: I’ve learned so much from blogging over this past two years or whatever. (I think it’s my anniversary or something!) I think I can leverage that power with AdSense and SEO and finally get Learn Stuff Online up and running generating income. I made a mistake before of trying to do too much too fast (running multiple sub domains at once), but if I can get one sub domain up and running and making money, then I SHOULD be able to bring in a copy writer to keep it going and move onto the next! See where I’m going with this?

OK – More to come on the Mu install later! But I hope you’re as excited about this as I am!

I’ll make this one really quick.

I was not rooting for the Steelers in the Super Bowl today… I always tend to root for the underdog if the Skins aren’t in it, and the Cards def fit the bill today.

They got off to a slow start but picked things up before halftime (minus interception) and played a FANTASTIC second half with Warner’s numbers dwarfing Big Egg Head Rothlesbugger.

Heck, even Darnell Dockett of the Cards graduated my high school…

AND proudly displays my city as his hometown. But that’s not why I’m here.

Are you ready for it?

IN THE BIGGEST GAME OF THE YEAR, WHEN IT’S ALL ON THE LINE AND THERE IS STILL TIME LEFT ON THE CLOCK AND THERE’S A 15 YRD PENALTY ON THE FIELD, HOW DO YOU NOT REVIEW THE LAST PLAY WHICH YOU RULE A FUMBLE!? I’M NOT EVEN REALLY A CARDINALS FAN, BUT SERIOUSLY.

NFL OFFICIALS – HOW DARE YOU

My Driver, Kurt Warner