1-Up!

 Are you aware that you can purchase a huge almost-real-sized arcade cabinet for your house? Normally these are sold for hundreds of dollars, but if you were lucky, you could have gotten one on clearance for much much less. Such a thing happened for us, except we were not the lucky ones to find it, but luckily someone far away picked one up for us. And then... BOOM! Pandemic! Nobody could travel anywhere. So it wasn't until our recent trip down to Virginia that we were finally able to pick this thing up and drag it back home.

The box says two-person lift! But it wasn't that bad and had very comfy handle holes in the sides, so my friend got it without my help, however much help a tiny pony could have given. This thing is obviously going to need some assembly.

Don't you just love easily-peelable tampering stickers? Now we can carefully re-pack it and return it to the store! Just kidding, but we still find it funny.

Hoo-boy, instructions. Ain't nobody got time for that! Too bad, suck it up and get to work!

The big box has little boxes inside it! It's like Russian nesting dolls! Did Zangeif package this? He's the Russian character in Street Fighter II. Actually, if Zangeif did package this, it might have just been mashed up into a ball.

We couldn't help but click those buttons through the wrapping. Kids these days might not appreciate it as much, but those things pressy-press just like real arcade buttons and it's all kinds of coolness.

We've built a few Ikea things, so this was not going to be that big of a deal for us, we thought.

Handy-dandy power screwdriver... activate! We don't often get to use this thing, but sure glad we have it when we need to.

D'oh! The power screwdriver won't quite fit in the corners behind the monitor! Good thing we have a regular one as a back-up. It's got an auto-ratchet feature so it's a little better than a regular screwdriver, too.

Half-built and this next part says it's easier with two people, to align the holes. Well... my friend figured it out. It wasn't that bad but might have been better with help.

This is starting to look pretty good! Of course it's taking a quick nap on the floor.

Here's the part for little 'ole baby Grogu from The Mandalorian. The screw-on control knob for the joystick. I was expecting a little more construction, but the whole "console" part of this is totally underneath this panel. So that was easy-peasy.

They include a tip-guard kit for fastening this to the wall. It's good that they include it rather than making you get one on your own. Also, we were a little worried when we noticed they included only exactly the number of screws you'd need, but there were extras in another bag marked "Spare Parts", so that's cool, too.

It's like Xmas morning! Big pile of scraps! It took several minutes to organize this enough to throw it away, flattening the boxes and gathering up all the various wrappings. But we figured we'd do that first to get it over with, so we didn't have to do that mess later.

We didn't have a "spot" planned for it, so we wound up moving this cabinet aside so we could just plug it in and see if it worked. Funny enough, we found a game token against the wall! It's from The Shell Factory, anybody know where that is? No tokens needed for this arcade game though!

Awwwww yeah! The little-kid fantasy is now reality. This crispy monitor and rocking title screen music is warming my friend's very soul. For the villain M. Bison, this was a Tuesday.

My friend's two favorite characters, Chun Li and Dhalsim. Chun Li is fast and jumpy, while Dhalsim has arms that stretch all the way across the screen. His Yoga Fire-Kick strategy was solid. He can blow a slow-moving ball of fire and then kick the opponent out of the air if they try to jump over it. Brutal.

I had totally forgotten that there were bonus stages where you get to destroy things, like this metal pile which was once a car. Chun Li has rapid-fire kicks that make this really really easy!

Did I need to include a gratuitous shot of Cammy? Some people would say no, but other people are like; of course you have to include the gratuitous picture of Cammy's victory pose! Hey, she works out a lot and is proud of her body.

The one thing I might have not remembered was how HARD this game is! Good thing we don't need any quarters, because it would have cost a lot to either practice-practice-practice, or just keep continuing until you finally figure something out. Have some funny winning dialog, it's all like this.

It took my friend about 45 minutes to beat the game once. After winning, Dhalsim goes home to his family, and the kid asks what that picture on the wall is. When he responds "That's your dad, in his past life." My friend got his mind blown a little, as it also seems like that was a past life when he played this game so many years ago.