You’ve got it. I loved Final Fight and dreamed of a game like that but with Street Fighter characters and special moves. I think Streets of Rage is a bit closer to this idea, but I never got to play it as I was a SNES kid back in the day.

I always wished for a Street Fighter side scrolling beat em up.

Technology keeps getting better and better; it is capitalism that keeps getting worse and worse.

I’ve come to realize that I don’t really “upgrade” anything but the GPU and adding storage. I’ve never so much as dropped in a new CPU without going through the whole rigamarole you just described. Build them to last, folks.

I think it’s a memory issue, most likely due to the sorry state of my Windows installation. Need to knock off the lazy and wipe it, but it’s pretty remarkable that it works as well as it does. I started with fresh Win7 and have survived upgrades to Win8 and Win10 in addition to the major feature updates that come now and again. I thought it was totally borked a few years back but some obscure automated tool managed to fix it.

IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!

Back in the 90s and early 00s, frequent upgrades were kind of required to stay up to date with new games. The last 10-15 years have been muuuuch slower in that regard, thanks to consoles I guess. I’m not complaining, but I miss the sense of developers really pushing boundaries like they did in the old days.

Well, I’ve had the same CPU/Mobo/RAM for over ten years and only upgraded my GPU once from a GTX660 to a 5700xt at the start of the pandemic. I’m finally seeing some issues with some modern AAA content. Hogwarts legacy won’t really run at all, for example.

I also haven’t wiped my system in the same amount of time, so that may be more the culprit than the system itself. Still going strong!