As many people know, Super Turbo was probably one of my better games, and had relative success with the game in tournaments. I started the game up in 2005, after watching the 2004 Evo DVDs and wondered why people were winning by just throwing fireballs. I didn’t get the concept back then and wanted to figure it out. Once I started playing people and watching more match videos I started to understand the game. I camped the Game41 website to download the latest ST matches (soon to be HSF2 matches) and learn everything based off of that. I did not enter the ST tourney at Evo2k5, as I felt that I was horribly unprepared, but played a lot of games on Cigarbob’s cabinet that he brought. 2006, I trained hard, wanting to enter the tourney but sadly could not make Evolution that year (but that was HSF2 anyways).
In 2007 was the year I got back into it hardcore. The introduction to youtube being a tool for match videos started to boom. Every match was on the net that was previously recorded and stored somewhere. I started to use kaillera to train online with friends, and went to Evolution that year. I made it pretty far with Guile and Old Guile, all the way to a game away from being out of pools even with the horrible 4 frame lag, but playing on Kaillera helped me with that so I was naturally able to adapt. I don’t remember who brought a cabinet that year, I think it was NKI, but I played a lot of matches learning even more, able to streak on the cabinet until NKI stepped on with his Hawk. Back then Hawk was considered to be the worst character, horribly unredeemable. I have never played against the character and was slaughtered and embarrassed. What was this character doing to me? When I got back home from Evo, I booted up my Dreamcast and started playing Hawk. I had to figure this character out; I did not want to lose to a trash character again. Quickly I started using Old Hawk, since I saw Toutanki and K use Old more than New; there must have been a reason for this too. I quickly discovered the power of Old Hawk, I told the people I knew around me that played ST that Old Hawk is a character that cannot be slept on, and he had to have been mid tier at least, not low. I searched the internet for Japanese BBS that had ST information and learned of the 360/DP option select.
By this time it was 2008, the final year for ST, I wanted to make a big impression, that new school players could compete with the older players. I watched as many videos as I could, played as many Japanese and top Americans on GGPO, but still felt unready with the character I have been trying to develop on my own. Brackets went up online for every game at Evolution and then a feeling of doom was cast upon me. There was no way of me getting out of this bracket. I had a bracket filled with a bunch of killers, and 2 people I played often on GGPO. My bracket consisted of Afrocole, Arturo Sanchez, NKI, Jason Wilson, and others. I decided to go with my backup character, Ryu for the whole tournament since I got more consistent wins with him online. During the tournament matches I started to panic, my first match was versus NKI using Chun, a character I had no experience with outside of watching videos. No one online played Chun back then so I had to learn my spacing on the fly. Arturo told me not to worry and just go the fuck in and do my thing, and pretty much had my back the whole match. Even if I was going to lose this match, I did not want to make this free. I started adapting and learning everything on the fly, trying not to lose. I lost the first match, but figured out what to do. 2nd set started and I fought back, with the crowd behind me getting hype most likely feeding off Arturo’s energy. Soon people from other pools started to gather to see what was going on. I win the 2nd set with the matchup information I learned the first round, and take a small breather before the 3rd round with Arturo with his usual Arturoisms and hyping me up. I had this, I played to the best of my ability, but lost the match with a poorly launched super, the only thing keeping NKI’s Chun honest, and was unable to fight back. NKI gives me the handshake of respect, apparently seemed almost frightened that he’d lose to a person that he’s never heard of. I go on into the tournament beating one person who didn’t know how to play and chose Old Sagat, and lost to Jason Wilson’s Balrog. I played a bunch of casuals with other people to level up my Old Hawk, getting compliments from players, and learning matchup experience with a character that no one really knew about.
I continued playing in 2009 with smurf accounts on GGPO playing the Japanese, going even with many of them, sometimes barely losing a lot of matches. And then the dreaded release happens: HD Remix. I picked it up on release on my friend’s Playstation 3, and was horribly disappointed. Hawk was almost unplayable. He lost everything that he needed to win versus his bad matchups, and quickly dropped HDR, and completely stopped playing ST outside a few times I played the Japanese when I was bored. It was then when I decided it was not a good idea to keep playing ST, no one from the old days continued playing on GGPO, there were no tourneys for the game until recently where people purchased Superguns and arcade boards for ST. I got back into a little bit, but the spark was not there anymore. I had no will to play, there wasn’t a point, none of the old school players started playing again, there was no chance to prove that a new school player can beat the old school on Evo stage, it was my only motivation. Nowadays there’s still a small ST scene, but after playing live ST for so long, I can’t go back to GGPO and emulators. My Old Hawk is obsolete and rusty, and there’s nothing left for me, which is the reason why I stopped playing ST.