The first arcade game I truly fell in love with was Marvel vs Capcom 1 when I was 11 years old. Seeing Megaman and Spiderman in the same game blew my mind away and all I did was think about how I was going to get good at the game. My local arcade was actually a videogame store in the city of Rowland Heights, CA called “Game Store” and it was incredibly cheap because it was one of the few places where the game was only a quarter since most arcades were either going out of business or raising their prices (at gameworks marvel vs capcom cost 75 cents to play).

I think the true benefit of the arcade experience for me as a kid was being better than older people (teenagers or adults) at something. It gave me such incredible satisfaction knowing I was better and I could beat people.

After my local game store closed down, I started going to SHGL. I wasn’t a regular and would only go once in a blue moon. What I really noticed different from my previous arcade is that the top players put an insane amount of dedication and lived to play every game out there from SF, KOF, Tekken, and Marvel. This is very different from videogame culture today (at least in my eyes) because people seem to only hold onto being good at one game and one game only.

The end of my arcade game experience came when Marvel vs Capcom 2 came out. The game didn’t live up to my expectations because it felt like a copy and paste mashup of previous marvel games. Also i didn’t like how assists didn’t have limitations and the background music was just awful jazzercise music. I remember the tourney scene being incredibly huge for that game… but that didn’t do much for me at least.

I’m going to write two more articles along these lines – one for video capturing and one for editing. Although not everyone has a capture card and i don’t mind cell phone videos if they show something interesting, but i’ll figure out a way to mention that somehow.

Btw i posted your video yesterday. Tell us some stories!