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This is my typical day when visiting KL with my parents. Morning … being dragged away by my mom to go shopping, after lunch more shopping and finally dinner. That is the time my adrenaline starts to pump. Hearing familiar sounds of arcade machines makes it even worse. I quickly gobbled up my dinner and then pester my sister’s boyfriends (who are now my brother in laws) to bring me the arcade above. Yeap that was me at the age of 10.

When I was a kid, I never fail to visit the arcade. In fact that’s all I think of when I’m in KL (other than action figures such as Batman or Ninja Turtles). Being born in a state where video game arcades were banned back then, it’s very hard to ignore the urge especially as a young gamer.

In the arcades, you have a wide selection of games which wasn’t available on consoles until later on. Even if they are available, some of the games perform very badly when ported to consoles. Like for an example X-Men vs Street Fighter. That game performed absolutely the worst on the Playstation. No tag feature, missing animation (Juggernaut gets 2 frames), lags and a lot more stuff. (Saturn version was an arcade perfect port) However games like Tekken performed better compared to their arcade counterpart. Nowadays you can easily port an arcade over the current generation consoles without breaking a sweat.

Since the age of 10, I continued to visit the arcades every end of the year until the age of 17. Every time I would play games such as Street Fighter, a bit of King of Fighters, House of the Dead series, Creep Killer, Jurassic Park and Virtual On. I wasn’t really interested in racing games back then. Prefer to bash or shoot things up LoL! My regular visits to the arcade came to a screeching halt when my bro in law bought a Sega Dreamcast. I would look forward more to playing that than the arcades.

I still visit the arcades once in a while to play House of the Dead 4, Time Crisis 4 and Initial D. But somehow, the feeling just isn’t there anymore. I don’t feel any thrills or suspense like last time. Perhaps its because I’m getting older or perhaps consoles have more appeal. But still, you can’t deny that some games … are just meant to be played in the arcades.

For the past few days, I kept thinking about the past … what I did, how my life was when the original gameboy, SNES and Genesis were dominating the console world. Growing up in the late 80’s and born into a family whose uncle and cousin are hardcore gamers, it’s no surprise that I turn out to be a gamer myself.

As a kid, I wasn’t really interested in RPG genres. Few reasons is because the sets that my uncle owned are Famicon and Sega 16bit, which are Japan sets. Second is because .. well … I’m just too freaking lazy to read those wordings appeared (LOL!). “Start” button is always my best friend cause thats how you skip through all the “boring” stuff and cut to the chase.

Nearly half of my life was dedicated to BTU (Beat-Them-Up) and VS (Versus) games, literally ranging from Golden Axe, Streets of Rage to Final Fight as well as Rushing Beat series. VS games for me at the time were Street Fighter, Street Fighter and more Street Fighter. I didn’t manage to get my hands on King of Fighters until the year 1996. Tekken was a whole lot different experience for me but I will talk about that later. For now, it’s the 16 bit era.

I played those BTU games a lot with my uncle, my cousin and sometimes my sis. Regardless of how many times we finish it, we would play it over and over again. Its pretty weird … considering that we have a lot better games nowadays but not many actually make me repeat the game like .. more than 10 times? To date the games which I replayed the most is Metal Gear Solid series and Fatal Frame series, and that is because my girlfriend loves to watch me play it (just shows how lucky I feel I am to have a girl who is interested in games as much as I do *heh*)

As the years go by, BTU games are slowly dying … in fact its pretty rare to see a game company that comes out with such genre anymore. First Person Shooters, Role Playing Game, Adventure, MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) RPG practically ruled the gaming world now. Even so, once in a while I will load up those games and replay them just for nostalgia sake. There will always be a place in my gaming world for BTU games.

Nawp I’m not into slaughtering foxes for pleasure if that’s what you are thinking. I’m referring to the virus which was injected into Solid Snake (MGS) during Shadow Moses. To be honest, I totally forgot all about FoxDie until I replayed MGS1 on ps2. FoxDie wasn’t mention at all in MGS2 since most of the main parts is focused on an idiot … I mean Raiden. However Snake did show a bit of fatigue early in the “Plant” mission. Probably the virus is slowly killing him although it’s not fatal.

After replaying MGS1, few questions keep popping out of my head. “What actually happen to FoxDie after MGS1?”. “Since Ocelot is using Liquid’s arm, wouldn’t he be infected with FoxDie?” and finally “How did Solid Snake manage to survive for so long although the virus has killed a lot of people (Darpa Chief, President Baker of Armstech, Liquid Snake). I may have overlooked some of the answers for the questions above but hopefully in MGS4, all the loose puzzles will be in place. All I know is that, in MGS4 Snake only has 6 months to survive (as mentioned by Naomi in E306 trailer). Will this be the absolute end of Solid Snake? Guess we have to wait until the game is out to find out.