As a couple of other people go at it I sashay down the aisle lookin' for another fix, past a row of Persona 4: Arena machines totally packed, the bank of cursory Astro City machines loaded up with old mahjong games and Bomberman, to the other couple fighters in this place that I know—the first available one being a Street Fighter Zero 3. I got this stick in my hand as Cammy for some reason, cannon drilling my way into a Sagat sitting on the other side from me, and I feel that weird pull of muscle memory, of nostalgia, the days I spent in my tiny bedroom in high school, a five buck clearance stick and a burned copy of Alpha 3 for my mod-cart disc-swap spring-lid PS1. And yet here I am, somehow in an arcade in Japan, surrounded by noise, covered in smoke. I can feel it in my hair. The guy comes by with an ashtray since I am missing one, sets it down, and I wonder if it would be appropriate to smoke, just to resonate, and how I can still remember these moves.
It's been on my mind lately, especially as I've been playing on the coin rush of New Super Mario Bros. 2, the idea of my own "finite memory" limits for the various gaming skills I acquired back during those days. I can roll through stuff like Battletoads and Ninja Gaiden, but sometimes newer games are real tricky for me even on normal difficulties. It is kind of disturbing how much more adept I feel at NSMB2 than I did at 3D Land, while my contemporaries chide me for having trouble in such a simple game, and then I go on ahead and coin rush NSMB 2 for score over and over, taking the punishment with glee.
And I can't help but wonder too if that's something I did to myself or if it's just a product of my age, that maybe now the best years of memory, of impulse and instinct, really are behind me. I mean sure, I "grew up" with Mario 64, but I was thirteen, fourteen when I got into that whole 3D thing, and the stuff I really remember, really really, was from when I was like ten, eleven, chewing up Marios and spitting them out, shoryukenning across the screen, doin' my aerial blocks.
I like to believe I'm a disciple of the You're Never Too Old For Anything school, cause it makes me more optimistic towards life, but deep inside there I think I'm pretty sure that those things we are Never Too Old for are things that grow out of the seeds we planted, consciously or unconsciously, in our youth. Maybe people who discover they have "hidden talents" in their mid-40s or something actually had it in them all along.
I take a look at the people around me and the things they're doing, and there's always a couple older guys creepin' around here, and I wonder when did they get into the scene? Were the two older-lookin' guys standing around watching Street Fighter IV the same kids that are sitting behind me playing Persona with a couple other friends, like back in the Street Fighter II days? I'm kinda stricken for a moment by one of those moments that at the time you feel holds the key to understanding life itself, introspective and beautiful, but in retrospect seem obvious and cheap. Of course these guys see things differently. And yet, I can't know how different things really are.
My problem is in how I see spaces. I'm (in)famously terrible at navigating 3D games. Metroid Prime was virtually impossible for me, I never knew where I was or where I was going. Friends who watch me try and play stuff like Skyrim give up in frustration after trying to explain where the hell I have and have not been. Maybe it is no surprise that in "3D space," also known as "real life," I am also an atrocious navigator. I get lost in hallways. Is this cause I spent most of my childhood in an open, rural area, peppered only with distinctive landmarks and well outside the influence of cities? Sometimes I am sure of it. I am only who I have been, I can become only who I have laid the foundation to become.
And yet here in Kobe, with its winding back alleys and side-streets, stores stacked seven floors high, under-the-tracks bazaars and crossover subway maps, I begin to believe that an old dog can learn new tricks as I mentally connect the dots, put the pieces I know together with the pieces I don't, realize I can get to there from here, under the street, out the other exit, through the store and out the back. Maybe it's kind of the same thing as these games I play, how sometimes I'll link it all up and bust out a super not just for Cammy, but maybe in Persona 4: Arena, grinding out the motions, doing the things I think I know but just a little differently. Up on the third floor I guess I could be anywhere, even though I know what's around me and what's waiting outside.