Tag: sheng long

“What strength! But don’t forget that there are many guys like you all over the world!”

From: Street Fighter

Genre: Video Games

Who said it?: Various characters

The story behind the quote: We’ve already discussed a bunch of Street Fighter II quotes, such as Ryu’s victory quote regarding the “mysterious” Sheng Long and even M. Bison’s quote regarding Tuesday. However, these quotes came from the extremely popular 2nd entry in the series. Most people haven’t even played the original Street Fighter game. Now seems like the perfect time to take a gander at it.

The original Street Fighter game was actually a pretty amazing fighting game… for its time. While there were some games that used different characters like Yie Ar Kung Fu, you normally played as an ordinary guy with no real special skills while your opponents can do amazing things. In Street Fighter, Ryu (or Ken if you’re playing as the 2nd player), you can throw fireballs, perform spinning kicks or a devastating jumping uppercut. While the controls weren’t responsive (you’d be lucky to actually get the fireball motion to register), that was pretty different for its time and did gain a significant following.

Another big innovation would be digitized voices. Ryu and Ken would yell out “Flash Fire” or “Dragon Punch” when they did the fireball and Dragon Punch, respectively. The most memorable use of digitized speech used would have to be the entire quote spouted out by the computer opponent when you beat them. Even though the sound quality was terrible (it was pretty hard to understand it without the subtitles), it was still amazing to actually hear it.

Geek wisdom: You may think that you are the best at a certain thing but you cannot rest on your laurels. You have to constantly practice your craft in order to actually be the best. For example, you may think that you’re the best Street Fighter at your arcade, however, unless you actually go to different arcades and test your skills against new players, you’ll never improve.

Sure there’s a fear of losing, but that fear is also important since the only way you can get better is to try testing yourself against others. If you want to be the best at anything, you have to prove yourself as the best.

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“You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance!”

From: Street Fighter II

Genre: Video Games

Who said it?: Ryu

The story behind the quote: This is actually the victory quote from Ryu, one of the characters from Street Fighter II. However, it created a lot of questions and confusion, which sadly could have been avoided if Capcom was more serious with their documentation.

The quote will appear when Ryu beats his opponent. However, people who were playing the game started wondering who the heck Sheng Long is and why we won’t be able to beat Ryu unless we go through this Sheng Long guy? A lot of people (myself included) that Sheng Long was Ryu and Ken’s master. We all thought that he was some tough Karate master who trained Ryu in his fighting style and must be one tough sonoabitch.

It was a great mystery and EGM, a popular video game magazine at the time, fueled the rumor that Sheng Long was actually in the game by publishing a method to actually fight him!

The method EGM published turned out to be an April’s Fools joke.

The real story behind the quote actually comes from sloppy translation of the victory quotes. The original Japanese quote reads “You must overcome the Rising Dragon,” which is Ryu’s jumping uppercut move, AKA the Dragon Punch. The Japanese text was translated into Chinese, where “Rising Dragon” can be translated into… yep, “Sheng Long.” When it came time to translate the quote to English, the localization staff misunderstood that it was a special attack and not a person, so he (or she) transliterated the text to read the quote we all know and love.

Still, we can sort of thank this mistranslated text. Because of this error, Capcom actually created Akuma (Gouki in Japan… don’t ask why they keep on screwing up the names), who had the moves of “Sheng Long” as described from EGM’s April’s Fools joke, and Gouken, the “official” master of Ryu and Ken who look strangely like the character art from EGM’s joke.

(Whew! That was another long one!)

Geek wisdom: We have to know our limits. A lot of people try to overcome great obstacles and that’s still admirable. However, we sometimes have to realize there has to come a time to step back and actually assess if we have the ability to perform the task. I mean, an ordinary guy just can’t come up to Kobe Bryant right now and challenge him to a one-on-one basketball game and hope to dominate! There’s a certain skill level involved to even stand a slight chance of beating him!

Now, I’m not saying it can be done. It can… but there’s a lot of practice and training involved. But, until you become skilled enough, just stay back and admire the man’s skill on the court.