There are plenty of fighting games out there. Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive, BlazBlue, and Soulcalibur are all classics in the genre. But what’s in a fighting game? What aspects of this genre make it fit together? Let’s take a look.
First off, fighting games have, well, fighting in them. From Ryu’s Shotokan Karate techniques to Ivy’s transforming whip sword, fighting is one of the key elements to any game in the genre. In the past, most games that qualified as fighting games had limited fighting styles, usually having only one or two variations for the entire roster of characters. One example comes from the bloody brawler Mortal Kombat. Basically, there were plenty of characters, but all of them fought identically, apart from their special moves. It wasn’t much of a proper fighter, but the series gained fans due to its graphic content (i.e. ‘shock value’). It wasn’t until the advent of Street Fighter II that unique movesets and combinations for characters were implemented as a regular feature. In fact, the familiar combos we know and love today originally stemmed from a glitch in the programming! When a character attacked, certain combinations of moves just happened to be able to land on the enemy before they could block, thus racking up the damage. This is now the basis for many combos in the Street Fighter series, as well as many other fighter games. So, you can thank Capcom for creating combos for everyone! (more…)
