Earlier this year I checked off an achievement I have wanted to do for a very long time: One credit clear (1CC) Street Fighter 2 World Warrior with Blanka. SF2:WW has been a seminal game in my life and I come back to it, and its many sequels, very often. One of my earliest arcade memories is attending a dog track while on vacation as a kid and spending most of the time watching an older kid defeat M. Bison with Blanka on a outdoor SF2:WW machine. I do not believe it was a 1CC (not that I thought that was even feasible as a kid) and would go one to credit-feed my way through the game plenty of times myself. But a 1CC is the ultimate goal; to put in one credit and ride it all the way through to the end. Now several decades later I can say I’ve achieved that and it felt pretty good. I don’t believe this is considered too difficult of a task, especially for experienced fighting game players, but World Warrior has a pretty stubborn a.i. and the damage calculations can be totally mind boggling and wipe you out very suddenly. After a few weeks of intermittent attempts and I finally got the rhythm down and basic combo I could exploit the entire opposition. The only opponent to give me fits was Claw (Vega/Balrog) and that was mostly due to impatience on my part. Claw would lock into a routine of evasion and wall jumping attacks and eventually I would make foolish attack and be punished. With repeated attempts (after restarting from square 1 each time) I finally found a way to sneak in with a poke to break his pattern and then punish. Sagat and Dictator (M.Bison/Vega) afterward pale in comparison and I molly whopped them in the eventual 1CC run. Very satisfying. The next step would be to crank the difficulty up to 8 stars, but I expect that to be extremely obnoxious. Maybe in another 30 years.
