16. Bragging Rights
“In college, my buddies and I always got ‘the new fighting game’ when it came out and would put in a couple hundred hours or so on it basically messing around with it (in online or practice mode) before dropping it. But DURING that time we’d have ‘fight nights’ a couple times a week where we’d all get together at someone’s place and duke it out, loser switches controllers.
It’s not like I never won but I was always just middle of the pack and after two years of this, literally, no one would consider me to be some ‘fighting game wizard’–quite the opposite if anything.
Then, for the first time ever, the group decided to pick up a 3D fighter (instead of a 2D one): Soul Calibur (3, I think?) and unknown to anyone in our play group, I’d grinded Soul Calibur I for 10 hours a day, every day, for three or four years. Mind you, against five people who were doing the same and were just as good as me.
It honestly wasn’t even fun. After the first half hour, they were playing with 200% health while I was playing with 50%, picking random character select and I still hadn’t passed the controller once.
And thus it was tacitly agreed that we would all play 2D fighters from then on.”
