"Street Fighter is about everything games are about – all you’ve learned about positioning and strategy, every reaction tightened by every sudden twitch of your trigger fingers, every educated guess made at your opponent’s next move – all played out in a simple two-dimensional box where you test everything you’ve ever known about videogames. Street Fighter IV is the same old game of two-dimensional space control, strategy, and flat-out mind reading but it took whopping great polygons in an old-fashioned game to take a 2D fighter back to the masses." This is all true.

"When their fond memories of these games are challenged, they become nearly catatonic. Really, most of these players were just mashing ‘fierce punch’ as hard as they could and occasionally pulling off a quarter-circle turn. Once they’re faced with online competition… Well, they may be in for a terrible shock.”

Some interesting links here, but I swear: could people please find something OTHER than *that* Daigo Umehara video to link to when they talk about fighting games? There's this massively rich space to be explored, and it goes beyond 15-hit parries.

Excellent interview with Yoshi Ono on some of the design challenges and nuanaces of Street FIghter IV. The stuff about when to skip frames (and when not to) is particularly interesting.

"As a trained guitarist and budding programmer, the future scenario for the sonic gaming interface for me became crystal clear: Two battling guitarists in a classic street-fighting video game. I thought, what better game to play that Mortal Kombat?" - thi