Today afternoon I had a plan, list of things to do while hana (hanaya..) spent her long dreadful day at school battling dull discussions and a hopeless lab partner. The list include tidying the house a bit, organize desk, play some XBLA titles, and other games.

I have also been installing several demos and full games to warm up the new 8800GT, I’m loving it so far, and the fact that it gave me over 10K score in 3DMark2006 and a solid framerate playing Crysis only makes me adore it the more. So I got Spore, Hellgate: London demo, Crysis demo, Redneck Rampage which I got from the beta of Good Old Games.com lining up waiting for me to double click their icon. On the other hand my 360 was urging me to spend my remaining Microsoft points on the full versions of Geometry Wars 2, Bionic Commando Rearmed and Samurai Showdown II. All was good and ready until I came across this website called ArcadeFly.com, you type in your address and it locates the nearest arcade locations from you, as well as some limited information on what kind of games they have.

The “meh” part of the search was that all three of the closest arcades from home were no strange places for me, but the “WTF??!” part was that all three places were one of the 27 locations in the whole North America (according to ArcadeFly) that offers the long-waited game on my list — Street Fighter IV.

I needed a second source to confirm this, few seconds later I found this list of arcades in NA that have SFIV installed, yup those three locations were on there too. Few more seconds later I was holding my car keys and shutting off my monitor and TV, off I went to experience the epicness of hi-def classic VS fighting.

And there it is, when I got there I saw two cabinets of SFIV at the centre part of the arcade. And it is only 75 cents per play!! The down side is no official cabinet and 16:9 HDTV, just the generic white cabinets with 4:3.. but eh, I was thrilled enough by the fact that a SFIV cabinet is located less than 10 minutes drive for me.

I played only one game, even though no one else seemed to be interested in joining. My first ever game of SFIV I managed to get to the final dude, Seth I believe was his name. The graphics are good, way to keep the 2D elements while incorporating some unique art styles into a game that otherwise would just be a VS Powerstone. SFIV has the humors of Powerstone though, when Seth KO-ed my Ryu with his ridiculous Ultra combo finish, Ryu ended up splatting on the fourth wall and comically sliding down eventually.

Another thing was the great balancing of the game, it was my first time playing and I didn’t feel that I was being completely cornered by any particular opponent (Vega was my 3rd fight, what’s up with that?) except for the Seth dude, god I hate the lazy let-him-use-the-moves-of-all-fighters-type boss design.