fighting games
Categories: l33t
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Man, it’s nice to finally be able to post a normal entry again… ever since I played Street Fighter 2 in an arcade many, many years ago, I’ve only played a few fighting games. A significantly less number than the number of RPGs that I have played.
Street Fighter 2: The grand-daddy of them all. Played a lot in the arcades, owned the SNES version, imported the Super Famicom Turbo version. I played up to Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo then stopped following the series. This was one of those games that I constantly played, and I became very good at it. Good enough that during my trip to Japan, I was still able to beat most people at it despite not having played in years. The characters were fairly unbalanced. Ryu and Ken had an edge over just about anyone, though I became very good at playing as M. Bison and Chung-Li as well.
Mortal Kombat: A good novelty. I felt the battle system to be more simplistic and less fun than SF2. MK2, though, rocked. I played MK1 mostly on my SNES while I played MK2 at the arcade. The graphics were much improved over the first, and the new characters added some diversity to the game. The babalities, friendships helped bring some humor into the genre as well. MK3, though, was just plain horrible. I played mostly as Sheng Tsung and Sub-Zero.
Tekken Tag: Then came, oh, 5 or so years that I didn’t play any fighting games at all. Tekken Tag brought me back to the fold with its, well, tag system. However, I don’t like Tekken’s (or Virtual Fighter’s) system that stresses button pressing and move memorization rather than the frantic joystick thumping of the old 2D fighters. I was good enough at TT to win a lot at it in Japan. Apparently, no one in Tokyo could defend against Paul’s phoenix smasher into a shoulder tackle (a popular move in California). On the PS2, I usually use Julia, Jun, Jin, Kazuya, or Angel. At the arcade, it’s all about Paul’s phoenix smasher.
Super Smash Brothers Melee: A very simplistic, yet very complex, fighter. Each character has basically 4 special moves… direction arrow plus B. My main draw to the game was to see all of favorite Nintendo characters punch it out. I stink at it… I’m still haven’t completed the final two tasks and decent Smash players run circles around me. Strangely, I use Ice Climbers (nyuu!) and Link (up + B).
Guilty Gear XX: I got hooked on this game when I was in Tokyo. It reminded me of how fun the old 2D fighters were. Back are frantic battles that place joystick control and offensive abilities ahead of turtling and button memorization. I also like the quirkiness of all the characters. Can’t wait for the PS2 release since there’s no GGXX machine near me. Dizzy and Ky Kiske. Dizzy reminds me of what the offspring of Shinji Ikari and Belldandy might be like. Ky plays like Ryu and Ken from the good old SF2 days.
