Since my friends lack the certain knowledge of being able to actually befeat me at fighting games, I think I should go about ushering them into the basic concepts and techniques of fighting games.

Basically there are a lot of different fighters. The most common one would be just a fighting game where two opponent battle it out for the best two of three rounds. Of course the amount of rounds could differ depending on the amount set up the arcade operator.

A new trend in games is the tag-in feature. Anywhere from four to 6 players are chosen (2-3 each per player). A button or combination of buttons causes the designated character to pop out, while letting the tagged out player to rest and regain energy.

Movement

Why I decided to focus on "movement" first is due to how important it is. I mean to hit someone you have to be within range to hit them. Usually movements have consist of primarily 3 things; walking back and forth, jumping (backwards, forwards and straight up) and ducking. Some more advanced tactics would be the inclusion of dashing, and running (both usually performed by tapping forwards [or backwards] quickly twice.) and short/hops or long jumps. But that's later. First I would like to emphasize blocking.

Blocking

Blocking has always been a natural convention of merely holding back or diagonally back. What always happens with new people (aka newbies) and never fails to amuse me to tears is how easily I can defeat them by the way of just sweeping their sorry asses to a KO mainly because they don't know how to block low. To understand this it's very simple.

Regular blocking is holding back/away which means it will block high/jumping and standing/mid-level attacks.

That means almost any attack that comes your way with your opponent firmly in their up-right (non-slouching position) or flying through the air, will be stopped by you merely holding back.

BUT this doesn't mean pure invincibility, otherwise you just get off the first hit and block all day long holding just back. Going with common sense, there is lo and behold a low block. This meaning that:

Low blocking is diagonally back which means it will block standing/mid-level attacks and low sweeping attacks.

I put high emphasis on how powerful this technique is because usually, especially in early fighting games, blocking low was fairly important. The idea behind that is that it's much more of a risk to do a jumping attack that leaves you very vulnerable regardless of whether you do anything or not; than to just merely stay on the ground whether you do anything or not. Not many moves in general of the fighting game world is a specfically low attack since because there are just so few.

Not many people catch onto this, even when I give them a chance and all I do is low sweep them to death. Usually the best position to have when not moving back and forth and your opponent isn't sky bound is to just be in crouching block (by holding diagonally back). When your opponent is moving, it might be better to hold onto just standing block (back). Of course this talk of being in the defensive mode especially when in DB leads me to:

Offensive and defensive crouch

What other people fail to recognize is that sometimes characters don't just have moves of a standing nature, jumping nature or crouching nature. An emphasis on offesive attacks and defensive attacks are also divided into each type of nature. That's why a lot of people miss good opputunities when they just press the attack button and decide not to test the waters with different standard joystick directional holds and attacks.

I emphasize offensive and defensive crouch for the main fact that it could help me with two items with one article: The emphasis on different attacks with different standard joystick movements and awareness of defenseive crouch and offensive crouch (from herein be referred to defensive crouch = [DB] offensive crouch = [DF] or crouch = [D]).

The thing is people usually associate the Cr. with two things. Ducking and low blocking. The thing is, although DB and D does do both of these things, it shouldn't be just reffered as such since it does open a lot of offensive capabilites. Especially in Capcom VS. SNK 1 (CvS1) where doing a offensive crouch plus one of the heavy attacks causes a medium attack to come out. However to outline the general standards of these capabilites.

Defensive crouch (DB) or crouch (D) usually results in standard low attacks, aka kicks, attacks, sweeps.

The only exception I could think off the top of my head is Dhalsim of Street Fighter (SF) fame. In the Street Fighter Alpha (SFA) series, Dhalsim gained almost a extra set of low attacks (and standing ones if holding B) when someone holds back in the crouching position. The thing is, Dhalsim usual bunch of crouching kick attacks result in him "sliding" to kick the opponent. This can be both in DF (offensive crouch) or just D

Usually an attack would force someone back when blocked, but this provided somewhat a bad positioning strategy since if you just wanted put distance bwteen you and your opponent. You crouch kick them, they block, you slide into them still end up in the same place, only a few feet more to the left or right. The opponent is still in your face and you actually might have left yourself vulnerable with recovery time from the slide. With Dhalsim you can see the problem.

However when in DB (defensive crouch). Things change. Dhalsim gotten the basic crouch non--sliding kicks of all his counterparts and results in functioning just as good as the rest of his comrades in arms. This means no more slding and even the potential of a new set of moves with different priorities.

Offensive crouch (down forward) usually results in attacks that are a variation of sweeps (or something entirely different) that results in advancing low attacks.

This is really important since usually a lot of people over-look this avenue of attack. The thing is in the old days there would be one crouch attack for all three positions of crouch (back, down and forward). Defensive crouch was used often because of the fact that you could both attack and block, and crouch was used often because it was just fast to tap and hold down. But offensive was hardly used because it posed a threat to you since it too the same amount of time and effort of defensive crouch, but not the same reward of being in block as well.

To really emphasize this point home, regard Capcom VS. SNK 1/Pro (CvS1/Pro). Since Capcom had made this game and decided to adapt SNK's usual four button system (Capcom has a six button system) the medium attacks were lost (Med. P and Med. K). To compensate, they instead used the not often used offesive crouch to brng out the "medium crouching attacks". Now regular combos that required the medium attacks were left intact for most of the Capcom characters. Although this mean a bit more to learn, people got accustomed to it.

However for a more pratical sense, I would have to regard Kyo Kusanagi of The King of Fighters (KOF) fame and Zangeif of SF.

Both their heavy DF (offensive) kicks result in them going further and advancing than their regular DB defensive/just Cr. attacks. This helps out since it increases the range of their effectiveness. Kyo's attack doesn't result in a knockdown, but instead a two hit attack which can be linked into other combos. Zangief's attach reaches out, but the trade off is usually it takes him longer to kick out that his regular kick. Usually the trade off for range is either in speed, power, recovery or priority (meaning which attack would beat out the other attack if they both struck each other at the same time).