The Justice Space

Yesterday my dad and I went whitewater rafting at the US National Whitewater Center.  The center has class II to class IV rapids on a man-made river.  I had gone once before (a few months ago) with my team from work.  Last time everyone in our raft managed to stay in the raft for the entire trip.  This time it didn’t quite work out that way.  Of the seven passengers on the raft, five of us all fell out at once (including me and my dad)!   So we had the pleasure of floating through a good chunk of the rapids outside of the boat!  That was an experience, and I’m rather sore today.  Even with the unexpected “swim”, we had a great time, and I hope to do it again!

My wife and I recently had some friends over to play Dance Dance Revolution (DDR).  We started out playing DDR, but by the end of  the day we were playing Street Fighter II (SF2).  This got me thinking about these two games.  For many years SF2 was my all-time favorite game.  When it showed up in arcades in 1991, it quickly displaced any other games of interest for me, and I found myself spending many quarters in 2-player competitive games.   I played every version of Street Fighter in the arcades, and I purchased nearly every version for my Super NES and Sega Genesis.  Years later I purchased a Street Fighter II: Champion Edition arcade machine, which now stands in my house as a testament to my seemingly timeless devotion to SF2. 

It wasn’t until I began playing DDR that I found a new favorite game. Unlike my experience with SF2, I was a late comer to the DDR party.  I began playing in 2006, and my first DDR game was DDR: Mario Mix.  I thought I was a pretty good DDR player until I moved onto DDR: Ultramix, and I then realized that Mario Mix is an unusually easy DDR game!  Since then I’ve found that I’ve stopped playing all other video games in favor of various versions of DDR.  It is a totally different experience from traditional video games, and I’m hooked!  My wife plays too, and it is the first video game where we can compete on fairly equal footing (literally as well as figuratively, I suppose).  SF2 was never a hit with my wife, so DDR is a breakthrough!  Many of our friends had a good laugh when they first envisioned us playing DDR, but once we got them to play it themselves, many of them changed their minds.

Back in the day I was actually a pretty good SF2 player, while I’m only an average DDR player.  However that doesn’t matter, because DDR is just as much fun to me now as SF2 was back in the 90s! 

Footnote:
To be completely honest, the original version of Street Fighter II wasn’t my favorite game for long.  Street Fighter II: Champion Edition became my favorite soon after released, followed by Street Fighter II: Turbo, and so on.  This culminated in the über SF2 game: Street Fighter Alpha 3.  But in my mind, they are all just variations of SF2.