Before I continue on babbling, I think I should stop and take a break with all this verbal diarrhea. So I decided to put up popular “gaming terms” that have been produced as a result of fighting games:

Button Masher: This is quite obvious. A kind of relation to the screamer in gyms (people who shout like they’re passing a kidney stone every rep). Kinda sad really, since it’s merely the problem that they don’t know how to play so they randomly just press buttons…AKA Mash. Now a relative term to this is Masher Friendly Game. Usually this is an insult to games since it says

“Anyone can be successful at this game by just mashing the shit out of the buttons.”

Also meaning this is a skill-less game. And to some degree that is true, there are plenty of games out there that are *very* masher friendly especially 3D fighters and Capcom’s VS. series (X-Men VS. SF [XvSF], Marvel VS. SF [MvSF], Marvel VS. Capcom [MvC], and Marvel VS. Capcom 2 [MvC2]) mainly because of how many things are simplified, or else a lot of stuff has been put onto the buttons, that about any combination of “mashes” would result in some elaborate combo (I hate when mashers beat me actually. They make me cry).

Infinite: Ah, the bane of all fighting games. There’s still continued debate on how “cheap” this is, but I’m not here to explore the geeky philosophy of fighting games. Infinities are basically a combination of attacks that will hit your character forever, so long as the person continues the combination of attacks. The VS. series is seriously bad for this since even XvSF, almost everyone had an infinite.

Relatively are “semi infinities” that are more related on the KOF side (only when in KOF 2000, characters had “assistants”/strikers which they called out a character to perform an attack or action). They were limited because at one point, the allowed “use” of your assistant would deplete, leaving someone people with no way to continue on the infinite, hence “semi-infinite”.

Rush that shit down!!! This is a term spawned by the VS series. Why this is the case is because the VS series actually sped the speed of fights, therefore making some characters really fast. Hence these fast nimble characters (Like Wolverine, Stirder, Chun-Li and recently Magneto) were labeled Rushdown Characters. These were characters that super fast, in your face and comboed the shit out of you. They’re speed alone could keep you pinned down for an entire match, forcing you to block, until you made one mistake.

Hence when someone is doing some weird shit, like just throwing fireballs, or jumping around, once a Rushdown Character came out it was time to “Rush that shit down!”. Of course this could apply to anything IMHO. Like exams would be “Exam that shit down” or like C++ programming “C++/Program that shit down!”. It’s a barrel of geeky fun, but still it’s basically as cool (if not less) than 1337 speak and we all know how 1@m3 +Ha+ !$ LOLLY!

Tiers

Can be related to sports. Basically what tiers mean in fighting games is the grouping of characters in their relation to rank in the game. The oft used top tier means that these characters basically are the best to use the entire game. Bottom tier means the worse possible characters. Of course I have to mention that the difference between tiers, (say top and second tiers) is whether or not characters in the second tier can face off and have a fair chance of beating a character in the top tier. Note that these tiers are often established at tournaments or the top players of each respective game. In relation to this is the idea of balance. A balanced game is usually a game who has relatively few tiers or the tiers are fairly close. As seen in CvS2, it is somewhat unbalanced due to the fact that Sagat and Blanka are the *only* characters in top tier out of a few dozen characters, and dominate the game very easily.

Granted there is some sort of “joy” in having such a small tier. It’s very much how scientists or artisans suddenly spend a bulk of their lifetime analysing this one insignificant thing, which really holds a lot of information on it. But in the long run, it’s kinda bad since a worth of a game is how much stuff with other characters you can do, not how well you could continually do it with the same characters over and over again.

Supers

Ah, the infamous super. Somehow magically get’s mashed the fuck out, surprising newbies and children alike. This part would be different in descrbing the “specials” since in a sense, the supers nature is relatively the same. However what is important is the some of the execution of supers and some other neats things that had popped up recently related to supers. But first:

Super bar: To tell the truth, SNK invented the super with Fatal Fury 2 (FF2), of Art of Fighting (AOF). A super is basically a souped up attack of the character's regular special moves (but nowadays a lot of characters have supers that are original upon themselves). However it wasn’t in such a way where you have to “build up” a super bar in order to gather enough to pull off a super attack.

What FF2 did is when near death, your lifebar starts to blink red and yellow. It was both as an indicator that you’re near getting skooled and telling you can do a super move. It was usually around 80% life gone before it starts blinking. However in relation to your character’s dire circumstances, they coined the super the term Desperation Move (DM for short) (and the suped up version, Super Desperation Move [SDM]). These terms are usually related to SNK games, where as the general term ‘supers’ are related to Capcom games.

It was actually quite fitting since these moves could greatly change the entire course of the match. A character would be near death, barely taking 20% off their opponent, but when the super blasts out in FF2, pfft…anywhere from 45%-60% of your life…GONE. Of course, having this power was kinda unbalanced since there were no actual limits to how many times you could pull off a DM. So then you have another chance to quickly end the match by just pulling off another DM killing you opponent easily. This has been toned down of course to some degree, but I’ll explain later.

Then came Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (SSF2T) with the inclusion of the “super bar” an actual gauge that builds up with each sucessful attack or special pulled off. Like SNK, these supers were devastating, taking off 50% off easily. However it did prove to be a limit to how many times a character could pull off a super. In my experience though, it seemed like futile since every round, the super bar resetted to nothing and it would almost take an entire rounds’ worth of fighting to build up one super, usually a one point where my opponent was almost dead anways.

I’d like to also touch onto the “rage meter” that belongs to the Samurai Shodown/Spirits (SS) series. This is also another form of super but it was made in such a way that only built up when you got hit. Therefore as it grew, so did your “rage” which when topped off would result in increased abilities (higher power, and viltality) but also the ability to use up all your rage bar to pull off one super (usually breaking the opponents weapon in the process if it hit).

So the evolution of the super bar continued, and still continues (primarily on SNKs side) but I would explain the general idea behind these two companies super bars.