The Gaming Den

I consider myself a fighting game fan, but I generally have only played fighting games within one series (Smash Bros.), and only really know much about one other fighting game series (Street Fighter).

I noticed something interesting last night, after playing a lot of Soul Calibur 4 and, afterward, checking some websites for better Soul Calibur strategies than the basic stuff I had come up with the first couple times I had played it. That interesting thing was language differences.

You'd think that, the fighting game community being a small subculture of video games, that the language would be consistent. This is not the case. Where if you were playing Ryu in Super Street Fighter II Turbo, were facing left, and wanted to perform a hadouken, the motion would be described as a "quarter-circle forward, fierce". The equivalent description in Soul Calibur lingo, however, would be 236-Z (where Z is whatever button). Of course, as Smash does not use these motions that other fighting games use its language is a bit different (you have the idea of "tilts", "smashes", and various-direction aerials and specials instead).

I suppose that I'm just trying to say that I'm surprised at the difference in terminology to describe identical motions in two different fighting games, seeing as how they are both fighting games and have a good deal of common ground.

It depends on the control scheme.

A lot of fighting games used Street Fighter-esque controls, back in the 2D days. You could do a projectile of some kind by doing a quarter-circle forward.

But there was Primal Rage (Fighting as giant dinosaurs? Sweeeet), where to do special moves/fatalities, one had to hold at least two buttons and then do a directional input.

For the record, the Smash Bros. series is pretty out there for a fighting game. It's a 2D playing field, and the stages emphasize mobility, and everyone has the same control scheme and you reasonably know what to expect when you do a dashing attack or an up-tilt.

The SC games have a 3D playing playing field, and everyone has a unique list of moves, some of which are more or less difficult to pull off. When I owned Soul Calibur II, I only managed to do Ivy's Summon Suffering once.

And, basically, the differences in terminology arise from the evolution of, in this case, the fighting game industry, and from non-overlapping gaming populations.

Maxus wrote:It depends on the control scheme.

A lot of fighting games used Street Fighter-esque controls, back in the 2D days. You could do a projectile of some kind by doing a quarter-circle forward.

I'm quite aware of this; my point was that the Street Fighter lingo and the Soul Calibur lingo both described equivalent sets. While Smash, on the other hand, does not.

Okay, I'm posting this in the High-level Wizard Playtest thread.

Let's see where it lands.

Edit: That's weird. It found the Video Game Lingo thread.

Yeah, the high level wizard playtest thread (and K's other thread) got lost in the server move it seems.

He only moved the DNS records. The database is on the same server untouched is my understanding.