Falling In Love with Samurai Showdown

Y'all messed up. No one told me that Samurai Showdown is cool as heck and kicks flippin dickity shit. 

The fighting game genre is capable of great highs, particularly in one's youth. The fun of these games is always in community. If you have a friend who's into the game as well, you both get good and your battles become one of the purest experiences you can have as a human. 

But inevitably you will get older and spend more time alone. Friends may fall out or simply drift apart as is natural in life, but either way getting good at these games, learning the characters and their moves, becomes less rewarding as it becomes more irrelevant to one's daily life. 

My fighting game days are behind me for the most part. My lifetime of skills honed in MK, SF, VF, SC, MVC2, DBZT2, KOF, KI, Tekken, Bloody Roar, and Smash get put to use far less often these days. Just one of the sad realities of adulthood i suppose. I don't visit the Hundred Acre Wood nearly as often either. 

If this infernal shutdown of earth ever ends, you might once again be able to catch me at a tourney or con and get your butt kicked, just as long as you don't try to hang out with me after. But i will forever yearn with nostalgia in the truest sense for those bygone days of endlessly pitting Guile against Ken with my high school homies. 

My point is it's very unlikely these days that i would ever be motivated to devote serious time into learning the ins and outs of any fighting game series i'm not already familiar with. Nevertheless i still love the genre and will still occasionally feel the pull to briefly explore one i haven't played, just to see it's characters, general aesthetic, and whether or not it sucks butt.

Such was the case on some recent 3:00 am night or another with just me and the cat, putting off bedtime with whatever i can, when i randomly decided to buy some Samurai Showdown games off PSN. What followed is what you see here, a chronicle of an old fighter's learning curve and this old fighter's loving curve in more or less real time.

Long story short, turns out Samurai Showdown fucking kicks ass and is totally rad. I will probably never have a reason to play it again, but it gets my seal of approval as a grouchy old school gamer who doesn't like anything new and so rarely feels joy.