The fighting game community is a group that was built from the ground up with face-to-face interaction, but the advent of online play and tournament streams has taken away from the real-life experience necessary to truly understand and appreciate it. While perusing our forums today, we here at Shoryuken stumbled upon a great piece written by [...]

Gamespot recently posted an interesting article examining fighting game stages, in particular character-specific ones. Editor Maxwell McGee talks about how successfully designed stages can say a lot about a character’s personality. Fighting games aren’t usually known for their story, and even story modes themselves can be lacking. Stages provide much needed characterization that the story [...]

Jay “Viscant” Snyder, one-quarter of Team Broken Tier and EVO 2011 Marvel vs. Capcom 3 champion, recently wrote a piece for G4TV on what it takes to become a champion. While Viscant’s years of experience obviously come from the perspective of a fighting game player and focus on the aspects of the genre, these tips can [...]

Reno has just started the first of a new series of articles dealing with his ideas over at his Versus City blog.  Inspired by a similar thread over at our own forums, these articles present his ideas on how to improve the fighting game genre. Part 1 focuses on how fighting games need to better [...]

Why is playing fighting games competitively fun? If you are a seasoned tournament pro you already know this answer, but this article isn’t for you. Instead, this article by Hates over at 8WayRun is for the “casualcore” audience, i.e. the people who are confident in their abilities but have not yet taken the plunge into the deep [...]

  Wesker: Not Overpowered. an editorial/commentary/theory fighting by Renegade. Hi everyone, I’m Renegade, and I was a cheap [guy] that played Wesker/Tron/Phoenix in vanilla Marvel. I have some thoughts on the first UmvC3 major and the salty tears being shed. I’m getting some deja vu from 9 months ago… when everyone complained about one OP [...]

Balance, or rather the lack thereof, is the most common complaint in all of fighting games. Every player of every game has their own unique take on it, and with their own ability to win matches on the line, the arguments can get heated. If you wake up in cold sweats at night worrying about [...]

The sexualization of female characters is considered an issue in video gaming at large, but I don’t think a single genre displays it more blatantly than fighting games. From Chun-li exposing every inch of her thick legs in Street Fighter to BlazBlue’s Litchi “Booby Lady” Faye-Ling, female characters in fighting games have never cared about [...]

In Soul Calibur III, players interested in the vanity and fun of creating their own fighters had several options. Of course they could dress them with any number of clothes and accessories or choose their hair and skin colors, but there were more significant options. Players could choose one of a specific number of unique [...]

Around 10 years ago, Seth Killian wrote an article explaining why Street Fighter rules. In summary: Street Fighter rules because the barrier to entry is so low that almost anyone can become a competitor. Contrary to the world of pro sports, where your relationship with top players is forever relegated to the realm of “fandom”, [...]

As if the U.S. recession wasn’t bad enough, Japanese champions Daigo, Mago, and Tokido came and took a mammoth-sized bite out of hefty prize money that was up for grabs at the CEO and ReveLAtions, winning three out of the four big tournament games that weekend. Thanks to the magic of internet streaming, I had [...]