Probably my final thing for today.

I'm gonna talk about my arcade habit. What games do I play? I never had a Nintendo SNES 16 or even the earlier Playstation. My parents decided that it would be to overly distracting for lil' me. Why? 'cause I was young and impressionable and I happened to LOVE technology. Used to remember dismembering (haha! remember rhymes with dismember) my grandad's pocket watch. That was an antique too.

Anyway. I grew up around Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The best arcade back then, when I was like form 2~4, was in Sungai Wang way in downtown KL. My friends all called it the airport arcade... I never understood why. But, it was really rowdy with people smoking and gangsters looking real tough and what not. I was a nerd mind you, and a devout CHRISTIAN nerd at that. So I almost walked away but I saw Street Fighter for the first time.

From then onwards I've played all incarnations of Street Fighter including the wierd 'hacked' taiwan version. Ryu and Ken could shoot millions of hadoukens when they did their shoryuken... WTF!?! My favourite in the series has to be Street Fighter EX 3 Alpha Plus and ofcourse Street Fighter 3: Third Impact. I never did get into King of Fighters (KoF) though, even if was really big here in Melbourne. I did go through a short period with the Soul Edge ~ Soul Calibur series, but that was short-lived.

The beauty will ever lie with the series of games that is TEKKEN. The Tekken series started out life as a poor 3D versus fighter that no one was really interested in. I found the pace of the first two games in the series to be too slow. Then they did the fan appreciation version of Tekken TAG Tournament. You choose 2 characters and you could switch out between the both of them. The speed was improved and it had a really strategic combat system with paries, grabs, throws, breaks and cancels.

I remember the earlier days in university where me and a few close buds would crash in one apartment and we'd play Tekken 4 and eat pizza (or was it KFC). Short hellos and longer salutations to my brother Sugianto, Thomas, Frek and whoever else I had the honour of challenging (win or loss). Highlights would be the attack reversal system and the really cheap Lee Chaolan f+1, 2, f+1, 2, ad infinitum.

I really had fun kicking Ling Xiaoyu around in her cute school girl outfit. Poor Thomas really thought she was his girlfriend. I did teach Sugianto the finer aspects of the traditional karate Jin Kazama with the combo flows, throws and tech hits. The student did supercede his master... haha. But my Hwoarang was really sneaky with the endLESS ways of chaining his kick combos together. Overall, the best style of characters are the fast power hitters like Paul Pheonix with his *deathfist (tm)* and Bryan Fury with his *mach ANYTHING!* and the real sneaky *snake EDGE*.

Mishima style Karate arts.
Jin Kazama, Kazuya Mishima and grandfather Heihachi Mishima.

TaeKwonDo, korean defensive martial style.
Hwoarang.

Fast forward about a year and we have the greatest incarnation of TEKKEN. Tekken 5 is about the same as Tekken 4. Same system sans a few improvements and character balances. Did I mention 3 new characters? I'd really love to play the game but the closest machine here in Melbourne is far our in the suburb of BoxHill. Can't wait until the Playstation 2 copy arrives.

Thanks for listening...