I moved Grade 10 to some city school. The mullets weren't as rampant, and the 1972 Camaros and '82 corvettes were replaced with cars that were so riced up they made "The Fast & The Furious" vehicles look like your grandma's K-Car. With the beeping reverse. Supras, RX-7s, s2000s, cars that had wheels that were more expensive as my first car.
Oh, and the school was about 90% not-white (where not-white is Indian or Asian (where Asian is Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Chinese (where Chinese is all the way from hard core Honger who comes to school in a Mercedes 500 SL to the CBC who doesn't know Dim Sum from KFC's boneless wings))).
It was a slight adjustment for me.
One of these adjustments was dealing with a school that was about 50 feet from an arcade. For some reason, the kids from Hong Kong were really really really really really good at Street Fighter II. There were two big screen games set up, and two more just plain cabinets. The reigning champ would sit, slumped, with the arrogant Triad gangster air that is hard to describe, and stay there until he was bested.
At some point a dot-matrix printed Street Fighter II Bible was circulated. I kid you not. there were moves and combos and ... just.... Think Game Faqs except more obsessive and crazy.
The moves these kids did were, I daresay, things that most nerds have not seen. Here are things I"ve seen them do:
-freeze Guile (during which you cannot hit him, he's in the middle of a high kick, i think)
-mute the game (yes, by some game combo hackery)
-reboot the game (no, not by reaching on the top of the cabinet)
-turn Dhalsim invisble (this was before the SF version where Dhalsim could go invisible. He couldnt' attack, he just disappeared)
-do the infamous Invisible Throw (Guile would do a Medium throw movement, and even though the opponent was far away, they'd just fall down and take throw damage).
It was a heady time. This was, as far as I can tell, the Asian equivalent of early 80's Breaking Dance Offs. There were strange rituals, like, if you won the first game, you 'gave' the second round to the other player; that is, you played the 2nd round hard, but when the other player was almost dead, you'd just took your hands off the controls. Breaking this ritual was... frowned upon.
Anyhow, that's my story of the Super Awesome Hardcore Street Fighter II I grew up with.
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