Evolution of the Super Bars

In order to really grasp the idea of super bars, I'll bring you along a short history of both the Capcom side and the SNK side of the super bars.

Capcom History

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo was the first to introduce super bars to the SF series. In general it's merely one super bar for one particular super move. Nothing special. As I mentioned before, also not very effective since by the end of the round, the use of a super was more for show than any actual tactical advantage. (OOOO shiny sun flash!) Usually the excution for the super move would be a repeated joystick motion twice (usually similar to the special that the super move is based upon) and *one* button. Such as the fireball be:

QCF, QCF + P

Now it didn't matter what strength of punch you did since it was really only one super bar.

Street Fighter Alpha 1 + 2 I skipped over the Darkstalkers and XMEN:COTA just because chances are you wouldn't be playing these too often. The alpha series featured 3 levels of super bar, with each level giving more power and damage to your super and sometimes different supers. The thing is how to differentiate the different levels of supers is usually determined on how many buttons you pressed in the super move motion Once again with the fireball:

QCF, QCF + P: Pressing only one punch button (anyone Jab, Strong or Fierce) will result in activating a Level 1 super. Pretty easy to remember and if you are still kinda button mashing, quite often a mistake that you might make when you try to do a fireball, yet are a bit too quick.

QCF, QCF + 2P/PP: Yields a level 2 super. Usually the level 2 supers are the ones that are the most different supers of the bunch since it's in the middle. They have a more tactical advantage, but only in a few cases.

QCF, QCF + 3P/PPP: Yields a level 3 super. The most powerful attack of that super, but as seen on some controllers like the PSX controller, they've assigned two extra buttons with a button called 3P and 3K so you don't need the flexibility of a yoga master in order to actually pull off this feat with your fingers.

Street Fighter Alpha 2: Side bar...Custom Combos. Custome combos was kind of a debated topic of how useful it was. The thing is when you had more than half a complete super bar (1.5 levels) you could activate the "custom combo" mode. What resulted was your character would flash and start to advance on the opponent very quickly (without you pressing forward) and have shadows following him for effect. What this mode meant is that you could create any combo you wanted to with any move. You're recovery time on every move was basically nil (save for super moves which would instantly cancel the Custom Combo [CC] and shoot out a super move) and you could connect every single possible move together wihtout having to worry about the opponent getting pushed back (because you are always advancing). The drawback is that in exchange for you speedy attacks and ability to link everything together, you lose attack power.

As you can see, this could be done very well or else very poorly. Usually this type of mode promotes button mashing but it cannot be helped. Activation of this mode is done by:

Pressing two kicks and one punch together or vice versa.

Street Fighter Alpha 3: Large shift in how the game is played since this is when it first introduced the "groove" to the SF series. A groove is basically a battle system for you to pick in order to play your character. In SFA3, we have A-ism which was for the SFA series, so 3 level super bars and air blocking etc.

There was also the X-sim which was more attuned to the SSF2T series when the super first appeared. The trade off was it was bare bones fighting, basic blocking and only one super and one super bar. The advantage was that this mode left your character *much* stronger. You attacks caused more damage and your have more defense and your supers were extra powerful, possibly even more powerful than their A-ism counterparts.

The last was the V-sim which was pretty underrated. Possibly the hardest groove to learn, this was the groove where you had basically everything of the A-sim mode, but instead of supers, you have the CC's (this time called Variable Combos, hence the "V-sim"). Supers had changed drastically since it was more simplified, and resulted in less mistakes due to sticky fingers, or buttons. Once again in the case of the fireball super:

Lvl 1 super = QCF, QCF + Jab
Lvl 2 super = QCF, QCF + Strong
Lvl 3 super = QCF, QCF + Fierce

This wasn't really a new idea since long ago, EX characters basically paved the way for Grooves. EX usually refers to "extra characters", a different version of a character in a game usually accessed through pressing "start" and a button at the select screen. Usually EX character are referring to old incarnations of characters which were often fairly popular or throwbacks to older different games. KOF 98 had many EX characters, usually incarnations of previous KOF versions, or even in other fighting games series outside of KOF (Such as some of the Fatal Fury characters have properties of their Fatal Fury counterparts).

Street Fighter 3: Once again this throwsback to the idea of the SSF2T series where there was only really one super bar, no levels. Although it was a bit different. First of all characters did have multiple supers, however you could only choose *one* super to use for the entire game (of switch when 2P joined in in the later games). Usually there were 2 -3 supers to choose from. The thing is, depending on your super of your choice, the result of the super bar would be very different and drastic. Basically one could liken to "stocks" of super bar stored up.

If you chose a super which was fairly fast, but not very powerful then in most cases you would have a very short super bar with the ability to store up 2-3 stocks of that super. It's not really levels of super since in almost all cases, you cannot increase the power of your super by expending more stocks of your stored up supers. (Aside from Akuma and Oro).

If you chose a more powerful super you might just get one long huge super bar, or two fairly long super bars. As you can see often it really pays off on which super you have to pick but in the latest SF3 game (SF3:3S) you would eventually pick some of the more powerful supers since the short super bar little damage supers are just a waste sometimes.

Once again the motion of the supers are back to how SSF2:T would be, any punch or kick button would do fine.

X-MEN:COTA, MSH, XvSF, MvSF, MvC, MvC2

These are were super outrageous supers that I was talking about. Very much a cumalation of all the games I mentioned because of some many elements. I will got through each game briefly to explain the differences, but what stays the same throughout is this, all supers were greatly simplified with this motion, once again with the super fireball:

QCF + PP or KK

As you can see this shows how simple the game is sometimes especially needed when fast gameplay is included.

XMEN:COTA: As mentioned before, just one large super bar. When completly filled, their super can be unleashed. Smaller and weaker supers or abilities could be released when the color of the bar changes to indicate a different level, however it's not set in stone on where it would be for each character.

MSH: A small note: Infinity gems could be used in order to augment some powers. In some cases, most characters have one specific infinity gem attuned to them to give them extraordinary powers different than the other characters. Such as Wolverine getting the speed gem, would make him especially more speedy, more than the other characters. Shuma Gorath getting a specific gem would make it split into two characters, no other characters have that ability.

The super levels are more attuned to how SF3's system is like. Characters might have more than one super, but often the "stocks" of super that they can hold differs from character to character. Wolverine can hold 2/3? stocks of super, whereas Shuma Gorath has only one super stock that takes a long time to gather super bar energy for.

XvSF: This was the first inclusion of tag team match ups (and SF characters) into the Marvel world. Tagging is performed by pressing FP + RH together This is where everything was set. Once again a super uses up only one super bar, but you could store 3 stocks of super meter. However an interesting concept was to have "team supers" where your team (when you do QCF + FP+RH) you use up two super bars, but inflict potentially twice the damange while your character and their partner comes out and unleash two supers simotaneously (the super of the partner is predetermined, there is no way to choose what super they do).

Benefit, Akuma's usual lvl 3 super raging demon could be performed with only one level of super bar. FUN FUN FUN.

MSH vs. SF: Stil the same old same old, nothing new save for some potentially new duo supers. Inclusion of secret characters and the emergence of "assists" for characters. By pressing Strong + Forward together, you result in your tagged out character to jump out and performing a special move. Pretty nice, but it leaves you (and your partner) very much vulnerable since you taunt for a long time for this to happen.

MvC: Some drastic changes. You start out with one super bar already. You can choose an assist character to help out, but depending which assist character, it determines the amount of times you could call them out during a match. Collosus was very popular due to how he comes in (fast and from mid way up the screen) and pushes the character back (whether or not blocked) and goes in for multiple hits. Great character to set up for combos or if you need some space. Not to mention that there were 5 stocks of him to call him out and he had armour, so he was fairly hard to actually hit out.

NOTE: The assist characters were at first seen to be random, however with the proper buttons holds you could choose your assist character AND access some hidden characters as well.

Most notable change was the mode to bring in you partner and use both characters the same time with the potential of *infinite supers*. Yes, for a specific time (after getting more than 2 levels of super) you could call your partner in and perform infinite supers for utter mayhem. Not really great considering that whatever you do, you partner does as well, but the confusion often screws up the opponent on where to block. Usually the opponent has to block against the character they were fighting, NOT the partner. The partner could be kicking your backside, but if you block against the character you were fighting, then you'll be safe.

MvC2: Big changes indeed you could choose 3 characters this time. Assist characters had been replaced with your own selection of characters. When you choose you character, you could also choose 1 of 3 types of assists they can do from their special moves list. Calling them out has been replaced with two buttons Assist 1 and Assist 2. Of course the result was that the Medium attacks, Strong and Forward were replaced. The assist buttons laid where the FP and RH were, and the FP and RH were moved to the left one space to the missing Strong and Forward buttons spaces.

Tagging in and out were put for:

Jab + Short = Tag in second character.
FP + RH = Tag in third character.

Of course the assist buttons had replaced the "duo super attack" for a "triple super attack" combination. You just press A1 ande A2 together to perform the attack. For three super bars you get all three characters to perform supers...supers which are determined by what assist attack you assign them when you choose them.(you can choose for some characters now). However if you have only 1 super bar stock, you would just do your pre-determined super; 2 levels of stock, then you have only two characters to perform the attack.

Lastly you could "link" supers together. Before one super is done, you could call out your other character to replace your current character to perform another super and continuing the onslaught of attacks.

There are other things to consider but this is only concerned to what the supers are.