street fighter II

Review of Street Fighter II on Capcom Arcade

JettLeave a comment

I have been excited for the release of Capcom Arcade ever since the iPhone app was announced. It’s a freemium application that allows players to play classic Capcom arcade games either by using up the 3 free tokens you get every day, buying 10 tokens to use at any point for $1 or buying the game to play without limits for $3.

Being able to sample Ghosts & Goblins, 1942 and Commando is great, though I have no real interest in playing them in depth. However, there was no doubt in my mind that I needed to buy Street Fighter II, which is also available with Capcom Arcade. Even though Super Street Fighter IV is on the cusp of being my favourite Street Fighter game of all-time, nothing will ever touch the nostalgia I have for Street Fighter II. Considering how awesome Capcom handled Street Fighter IV on the iPhone, I was expecting nothing less than the same treatment for this timeless classic.

Continue reading →

Street Fighter Concepts That Made Me a Better Basketball Player – Part 4: Exploiting Weaknesses

JettLeave a comment

This is an on-going series where I discuss the thinking involved in Street Fighter that I’ve applied to basketball. If you want to see earlier entries in the series, hit the link: Part 1: Spacing, Part 2: Punishing Mistakes, Part 3: Resource Management

Exploitation of Weaknesses

When I play the computer in Street Fighter IV as Akuma, regardless of difficulty, I can almost always land a Raging Demon. I don’t know what the guys at Capcom did about the AI, but 99% of the time when I input that command, the computer just stands there and eats it. Human opponents in general are tougher to fool, but virtually everyone has weaknesses of some sort. When I play an opponent, one of the very first things I check is my opponent’s ability to block a cross-up. It’s a tactic that most casual players don’t understand and won’t figure out how to counteract it within the span of one match. When I notice that my opponent doesn’t have an answer for that, or any other tactic that I throw at them, I will repeatedly use that tactic until I win or until my opponent finds an answer.

Continue reading →

Game Music I Love: Street Fighter II Soundtrack

JettLeave a comment

Back in the early 90s, you couldn’t walk by an arcade without hearing that intro theme music to Street Fighter II. Street Fighter II was revolutionary for a number of reasons. It became the blueprint that every 2D fighting game has followed ever since. It introduced a new layer of video game controls and complexity. It had what would become some of the most iconic sounds in all of video games (hadoken!). What it doesn’t get as much credit for is that it was one of the first games to introduce a new level of complexity in music while being as catchy and timeless as any of the best video game soundtracks ever.

Continue reading →

Street Fighter Concepts That Made Me a Better Basketball Player – Part 3: Resource Management

JettLeave a comment

This is an on-going series where I discuss the thinking involved in Street Fighter that I’ve applied to basketball. If you want to see earlier entries in the series, hit the link: Part 1: Spacing, Part 2: Punishing Mistakes

Resource Management

The goal of Street Fighter is to completely drain your opponent’s health meter before they can do the same to you. You achieve this by attacking your opponent. How you attack your opponent or defend yourself can vary wildly depending on what the health situation is. The easiest health situation to discuss resource management I can think of is when your opponent has a major life lead over you. When your opponent can finish you with one or two hits, you need to play much more conservatively in order to stand a chance of winning. Conversely, if you have a major life lead on your opponent, you may be able to win by “chipping them out” on wake-up with a projectile attack to avoid the risk of eating a last-ditch super move that could turn the tide.

Continue reading →

Street Fighter Concepts That Made Me a Better Basketball Player – Part 1: Spacing

JettLeave a comment

For many years, I’ve been an avid basketball player. I’ve played in a few leagues, on a few school teams and participated in a few basketball camps. I am by no means the next LeBron James, but I had the skills to make some noise on almost any given local court. Over the last few years though, finding the time to hit the court has been extremely difficult. During my basketball downtime though, I got really into Street Fighter IV on a serious level. I began to really pay attention to the concepts behind the game and how to use them to my advantage.

This year, my life has really settled down and I now regularly play basketball again. While I’ve had to work hard to get back into game shape (I lost 20 lbs and counting since I started playing again in April), and I’ll never have the raw physical talent that I did in my prime, I do have something now that I didn’t have before: Street Fighter knowledge.

Oddly, I’ve been able to apply much of the thinking involved in playing Street Fighter into my thinking of basketball. Has it made me a better player? I think it has. I’m not saying that Kobe Bryant should dust off his E. Honda to get better, but having that parallel helps me see basketball in a different way, allowing me to play the game smarter. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to apply these concepts in a one-on-one basketball situation, because adding in more players will make this more difficult to explain than it should be. I have at least four parts to this series ready to go, with more possibly in the future.

I don’t need to set this up any more. Here is part one of Street Fighter concepts that made me a better basketball player.
Continue reading →

Lost In Translation

JettLeave a comment

Over the weekend, I was out with my girlfriend on a date that partially consisted of a trip to the local…I’m hesitant to call it an “arcade”, cause it’s more of an amusement place with lots of arcade games in it. Semantics aside, they had a Street Fighter IV arcade machine there. This is significant because Capcom never made a North American arcade version, so this place actually imported a machine (not the one above, but something like it). I didn’t think this place in particular would do that, but there it was and I had to give it a go.