While early titles tried 3-D fighting too, the tight, focused, precise close-range combat of Tekken won audiences over contenders like Tamsoft’s Battle Arena Toshinden and Square’s Tobal No.1. As Street Fighter II influenced 2-D fighting games, so Namco’s Tekken influenced 3-D. Street Fighter IV, released in 2008, would build upon all that came before by sprucing up graphics and gameplay for a new generation, adding a fresh coat of paint and updating mechanics with systems like Ultras and Focus Attack canceling.
series with its advent of team-oriented gameplay and the beginning of tie-ins with other intellectual properties like Marvel Comics and SNK’s King of Fighters / Fatal Fury series and the Street Fighter III series, which altered mechanics and introduced the parry, enabling more tacticsoriented, “Tekken-esque” gameplay over a decade before Street Fighter X Tekken was conceived. It would go on to spawn an entire cottage gaming industry of SF properties: the Street Fighter Alpha and Darkstalkers series, with their introduction of chain combos, more lenient juggling the first appearance of “Dramatic Battle,” in which more than one character fought another at once, and a wide variety of new characters the Vs. Home console releases of SF2 would be some of the most successful releases not just for fighting games at the time, or for that console generation, but ever. It was impossible to miss with its ubiquity in arcades, gas stations, pizza parlors, bus stations, malls, airports, and just about everywhere else with room for an arcade cabinet and a power supply into which to plug it. SF2 at the time required more knowledge from the player than perhaps any game before it. Street Fighter II was one of the games most responsible for pushing gaming into more complex territory-it had six buttons instead of one or two, and (at first) eight characters, each possessing dozens of distinct attacks. To this day, it is easiest to describe a fighting game as the sum of its similarities to SF2 and its successors. This game introduced enduring, iconic characters, and laid down the very bedrock upon which nearly every subsequent 2-D fighting game has been built. Introduction & Glossary CAPCOM X NAMCO In 1991 Capcom released Street Fighter II (SF2), the seminal fighting game title. 386 *The contents of this strategy guide are based solely on the research of BradyGames ©2012 DK/BradyGAMES®, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. ©2012 DK/BradyGAMES®, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.