The End

Well, it's been fun. With more than a year and a half since my last post it has become clear that my enthusiasm for this blog is long dead. Much has happened to me and the scene since then but there has been no real compulsion to blog about any of it. Consider this the final retrospective.

For better or worse this waning interest has not extended to my passion for fighting games; if anything, I am more enamored of them now than when I began STSD. Along with my co-blogger I even traveled to Las Vegas to participate in EVO and I can't wait to go back, no matter how fiscally irresponsible it would be. I have sunk hundreds of hours into Street Fighter IV and improved considerably but can't shake the feeling that my goal of being competent is even further away than when I started. This probably merits some examination but that's not going to happen here. Suffice to say that no matter how I good I become at fighting games, I will always feel like a scrub.

For a while following the release of SFIV it appeared as though the sudden popularity might prove a fad, but the genre has seen a real resurgence. Now, more than three years after its release in arcades, the scene is stronger than it has been since the heyday of SFII. The huge roster of releases coming down the pipe next year demonstrates the industry's belief in its health, or at least short-term profitability. This glut may eventually doom the community to another ten year dry spell, or an unsustainable splintering of fan-bases, or some other unforeseen decline. However, at the moment, the future of our hobby is looking brighter than anyone could have dreamed a few short years ago; I for one am looking forward to getting bodied for years to come.