Small jump/hop

The 'hop' has been prevalent in most KOF games. A lot of people say that with the inclusion of three types of jumps (six if you include dashing jumps), it adds much variety to the gameplay. But basically what the hop is, is a good way to perform an overhead which I already explained before. This is a really good thing because it really prevents people from turtling (people who block all day). The result would be a more active fight. As you can see, doing this greatly improves your odds of not getting hit out of a jump because it's short and fast. The thing with KOF's jumps, they all serve a purpose of positioning, instead of like most of Capcom's games where they have one generic jump, these three types of jumps: long, regular and hop, aid in giving the person more options to play the game.

Crossup

Ever played SF2 and had Ryu do a J.RH on your blocking character, but still Ryu still managed to hit you? Yes you were in standing/high block. Yes you were pressing the right way. But ever notice something different? How it wasn't the foot that Ryu hit you with, but almost looked like he sat on your head with his butt.

Well that my friends is called a Crossup. A crossup is the term used for an method of a jumping attack in which you hit your blocking oppoent on the "other side" of their body. In the case of Ryu still kicking your head with his ass, the point is that what happened is that he actually hit you on your "other side" as he jumped over you.

Let's just say your character was facing towards the left. By the time the attack Ryu dished out on your head actually hit, he was so far on the other side that you holding "Back" to block was actually switched to pressing "Towards" and walking towards the right. Ryu and Ken's RH crossup is very famous because it's basically one of the first attacks to be associated with crossups. Now overall, not all attacks have the potential to be crossups so be careful. There are some that are more useful than others. The most famous crossup attack ever though, (and actually was an attack made for exactly crossup purposes) is KOF's Iori's J. Back.WK. What this attack does is have one of his legs extend behind him (if he were facing right, his kick would come out to the left) during his jump and hit the opponent. Very useful because it doesn't require the character to be pratically be sitting on the opponent's head to perform a crossup, Iori could do a jump or SJ even closer to his opponent, sail way past him and still be able to hit the character, potentially less risky.

So why would you want to do a cross up? Combo potential. What basically kills a combo is the fact that each attack (whether hit or blocked) results in the opponent being pushed back. The stronger the attack, the further the push. Often the term Jump deep comes into constructing combos. (Jumping deep means to basically jump and attack as close and far as you can go without landing on the ground in order to lengthen the time the character is stunned so as to continue on with a combo. Anything earlier might cause the stun to run it's course before you recover to perform the rest of the combo). Jumping deep helps in constructing combos in the way that when you jump you jump so deep that you end up right beside the character (not within an attacks length range away) and have potential to throw more attacks because you are closer, therefore less "push" space would occur.

The cross over acts like the extreme part of jumping deep. Despite how deep we might jump into an opponent, we always end up with the small amount of "push back" space that shortens our combo. With a crossover, the thing is, even though you sill hit the opponent on the "other side", your oppenent still get's "pushed back" as if they were hit in the direction they were facing. This means the "push back" goes "towards" you as you land. You can see how great this is because essentially you had eliminated any form of push back and resulted in your oppoent being right beside you, opening up to potential of using more attacks in the combo, or even using more powerful attacks because of the more "push back" space you have to work with.

Air blocking

Blocking in the air, as simple as that. It basically makes jumping all the more easier and less risky. KOF however had made it (such as in KOF 98) where it was more defensive oriented, by making air blocking only availble when you jump backwards, not forwards. Generally nowadays, save for 'spazz games' (GG, VS. series) there is little air blocking since the whole point of jumping has to have an element of risk behind it anyways. In the ends, it differs between which games have and don't have air blocking, but generally the Alpha series, GG and VS series have full on air blocking.

Dashing/Running

It's obviously how dashing and running are performed, just two taps towards (hold towards if running). This really helps out considering that it greatly speeds up gameplay and is often crucial to winning a game (as in the VS. series.). The thing is, there must be a different made between dashing and running. Dashing is really short, about a few feet sometimes at most, half of the screen. Running is all out sprint and will always keep on going so long as the runner does so (and not get hit). Often you can back dash and forward dash, but never perform back running.

Advanced tactics in dashing and running

In KOF, Iori has a great back dash. The thing is, when he dashes back, he actually rises in the air a bit, thus accessing his basic air attacks. The thing is his cross up mentioned before, flattens him out pretty well. So if you dash back with him and press B.WK while doing so, you make his body flatter, therefore he spends more time horizontally moving since he has more vertical time as well. In effect, he can dash back half way the screen becasue of this party trick, very handy to get away from opponents.

In the VS series, there's a recent term that has been coined called "wave dashing". The thing is, with some characters, dashing ends rather messily. When you dash, some characters go to their limit, slide (or stop) and there's like a "dash recover" in the process of the dash. Wave dashing had came about from the fact that you could cancel the dash at any time by ducking (thus letting go of any commitment to a complete dash with dash recovery). This resulted in a thing where you dash, duck and dash and duck (repeat) at regular intervals (depending if the character needs wave dashing or not). Hence it looks like a "wave" of dashing where dashing goes up and down. This helps out greatly because most characters go across the screen faster because of this method (especially for those characters with short dash distances) and even make people with short dashs, have a long dash. The thing is, not all characters need this because characters like Magneto, or Sentinal in MvC2, are fast enough and have far enough dashes that are better off *not* wave dashing.