In honor of GamingGeek wanting to see Street Fighter 1 on the VCA, here is a little story about my first and only encounter of this game in the arcades:

SF II had actually been in the arcades for quite some time before I finally got a chance to play it.  The main reason was there were always huge crowds around it and I knew that even if I waited around to play it I'd have my ass kicked in seconds since I'd never played before.  Well on a vacation to San Antonio, Texas I found myself in an arcade that once again had a huge crowd around the game. . .  BUT off in a quiet corner of the arcade was Street Fighter 1.  No one was around it.  I had wondered why I'd never heard of anyone mention this game before despite the sequel being the biggest thing the arcade world had seen in a decade.  So I popped in a quarter. . .  and quickly found out why no one spoke of this piece of crap.

I'm not sure if this was just an abused arcade cabinet or if the controls were just plain awful but this game was near unplayable.  But to make matters worse this was one of the versions that didn't have buttons.  Instead it had punch pads.  For those of you unfamiliar with them punch pads are exactly what they sound like - giant pads that you have to hit for punch and kick.  

But it gets better.  One of the punch pads was gone and some metal pieces that held the pad were exposed.  So I had to play the game with just the kick pad, as the exposed pad looked very unsafe and I wasn't so dumb to think that it wouldn't cause problems if it I hit it.  As I said though the controls were just terrible so it wasn't long befoe I got very frustrated and not thinking. . .  I smacked the punch pad and shredded my hand.  Needless to say I didn't play much of anything after that.

So fuck Street Fighter 1 and it's punch pads.

gamingeek said:

Kick pad? So you literally had to kick a pad?

What?

No you hit both of them with your hand.  One controlled the punch button and the other controlled the kick button.  They were laid out like any other 2 buttons would be on a dashboard except that they were about 4 times the size and rubber (when they were actually there).

Many years later I actually played Tekken 3 in a 3-D motion environment where you actually had to jump, kick, and punch to get the characters to do it.  You want to talk unresponsive???  Yikes.

gamingeek said:

So how old were you when you shredded your hand? Did you cry?

Probably around 14. I think that's right around the time SFII hit arcades.  And no I didn't cry.  I swore up a storm and gave the machine a pretty good kick though.  Think I hurt my foot too in the process.