Gaming Memories 05: Breaking Vega

Gaming Memories 05: Breaking Vega

That man is a monster.  The name of the monster(outside of Japan) is Vega and he's one of the original sub-bosses in Street Fighter II.  In the original Street Fighter II you had to defeat the 7 opponents and then there were 4 bosses to the game.  My cousins and my sister's boyfriend were able to get through the first 7 pretty easily.  The boxer, named Balrog, was tough, but not impossible.  He was very weak against projectiles and Ryu was my main character at the time.  But then we all hit the wall that was Vega, which is kind of ironic, seeing as a Wall had a lot to do with it.

You see, on Vega's stage had a cage wall.   At first you might not think anything of it.  Vega is super fast, and extraordinarily strong for his speed.  This is overcome by a good defensive play style, blocking and taking your time to whittle away at his life bar.  This works... until he starts using his wall.  It was TOTALLY unfair.  No one else could interact with this wall, and no other stage had anything like this, it was full on unfair and I thought really cheap by the developers(but memorable).  Vega would climb on this wall and be completely immune to attacks for while he is on it.  Then, he would jump from the wall, grab you and slam you against the ground for an incredible amount of damage... then many times he would jump right back on the wall and do it again!  For a long while this was our block for finishing the game.  Could we have lowered the difficulty?  Hell no, not an option.
Finally I came up with a plan.  I put Ryu on the bench and I switched to playing Guile.  Guile had a special ability that only he and Chun Li shared, and I was no good with Chun Li.  I played a long time, learning Guile's moves, overcoming his painfully slow sweep kicks, and got good enough to finally meet Vega with Guile.  After a few games I was able to get Vega down in life enough to start his wall climbing bullshit.  I waited and waited, and as soon as he jumped toward me, I would jump back and press the grab buttons and catch him in the air to perform a back breaker.  It worked!  Vega was not able to reliably grab me, and eventually I was able to defeat him.  Yep, the first ending many of the people I know had ever saw was Guile, not Ryu.  Eventually we were able to get good enough to beat Vega other ways, but for a while we would switch to Guile, beat Vega, then lose against Sagat and change to the person we wanted to see the ending of.  We saw all the endings and we owed it all to Guile.