Thursday, October 18, 2012

Back to the Basics - Street Fighter 2

One of the perks of where I work is that my boss like fighting games.  Enough to have his own personal SF2 cabinets.  We have one cab that is SF2: CE, and Super SF2.

So, most arguments as you may have guessed are decided by who wins on the arcade cabs!

I had one of the most interesting progressions in learning fighting games - I went from SF4, to SF3: 3rd Strike, to now SF2.  This game threw me for a loop at first - no supers, no damage scaling, none of my main characters.  The raw penalty of messing up in the game is so severe that it forces you to re-think what bad habits you learned from other games.

In SF4, you could EX cancel fireballs, and punish jump-ins.  Not so in 2 - you'll eat a nice, unscaled combo or get dizzied real quickly.

3rd Strike allows for parries.  No penalty on jump-ins if you have the execution or can bait them.  In SF2 you eat the normal or the uppercut.  

So the great equalizer is now the risk analysis that you must make when throwing out any move - everything has the potential to get dizzied, so you can only really make ONE mistake.  This is something that got rebalanced once Turbo was released (i.e. the addition of supers and new moves/rebalancing).    

Characters like Ryu benefited from the addition of the super gauge, as the super could turn the tide of a match and limit moves.  With every character's super, the game changed significantly and some bad matchups equalized to 5/5.  Others like Dictator or Boxer got better options, new moves, and the ability to tech throws, which made things a lot better if you had a throw happy opponent.  However, the version we have is right before the Turbo edition, so some matchups are MUCH harder - especially when some of the older employees use the highest tier characters.   

I've tried counter picking, but I think the best thing to do is to adapt new strategies for the game and scale accordingly to operate within SF2's boundaries. 

So for those who never really dived into SF2 and have only played 3 or 4, go buy SSF2T:HDR on Xbox Live or PSN, and try it out - you may learn some better fundamentals that you can bring into more recent games!