Gamespot Best of 2006 Awards

[MechDeus]

And War Gods.

[Razor Ramon]

Honestly, if a fighting game has 4 characters that are viable for high-level play, it's doing better than most. Most of them boil down to one or two.

3S has three: Chun-Li, Yun and Ken. While they are the creme de la creme, each character is viable and can/have won tournaments. Dudley, Urien, Yang and Hugo have been known to be deadly in the right hands.

MvC2 and CvS2: These are the only two Capcom fighters where two characters stand out hella high above the rest. For MvC2 we have Storm and Sentinel. It's arguable that Sentinel just rapes everyone else (and it's pretty much true with his guard breaks, unfly, unblockables, full-life combos, etc.) but a good Storm or a GREAT (cannot emphasize this enough) Magneto or Cable can handle it.

In CvS2 Sagat and Blanka reign supreme. Huge hitboxes, high priority and adaptable to any groove makes them vicious. You'll have the A-Bison or A-Sak that can wait for an opening to wreck them but, honestly, these guys are broken beyond broken and every top player knows exactly how to abuse the fuck out of them.

A3: We have A/X-Dhalsim, V-Zangief, V-Akuma, V-Ryu, and V-Sak rounding out the top characters. That doesn't mean they can't be beaten though. A-R. Mika or a V/X-Rolento have been known to wreck shop when used in good hands and even a decent V-Dan has it all over V-Akuma, who is ranked the third best character in the game. Hell, given how V-Ism allows for easy as fuck CC infinites I'd say about a good 1/3 of the cast is playable and tournament worthy. I've seen V-Cody and V-Sodom devastate good players and I have seen some fantastic A-Guy scenarios that involve running and playing tag.

A2: Ryu, Chun-Li, Rose and Ken are pretty damn broken. Not only do their Alpha counters take out a pretty large chunk of life, but their CCs are ridiculous even at level one. Again, when I can take about half of your life with just one level CC, it's too much. It leaves everyone else pretty much out of the running.

So yeah, Capcom has more than one game with 3 or more dominant characters. I still don't see why A2 is the bees knees.

[GameHED]

For me A3 is "fun" because of the rolling, flipping out, everyone having an airgrab, being able to whiff a grab/throw, and generally more options. Even if it wasn't that balanced I would still like playing it.

One thing about the alpha games though is, some characters that rely on anti-air specials like guile (poor old guile who barely got any upgrade since the original WW while everyone else advanced and learnt new tricks ) are now in deep shit thanks to airblocking. Somersault kick ain't what it used to be. It goes without saying that the more characters that you chuck in a game the harder it would be to balance. So you got to choose between "is this fun to be able to have the character in the game to play?", vs "if we don't put the character in maybe the game will be more balanced and there won't be complaints about the powerful characters having too much advantage in competitive games".

I personally don't mind it if there are weaker characters as it can be a challenge to use them. But I prefer if possible that the game had a "stone paper scissors" form to it. Where some characters are just generally stronger against specific characters and weak against others, while other characters are stronger against a different character but weak against the ones that other characters are not weak against. So if a person choose to stick with say sagat throughout the tournament and devotes his whole time to just one character, there is a better chance he will be matched up against a person who is uses a character that is strong against sagat in particular. (kinda like in a rpg or RTS where you have enemy-specific weaknesses against some things)

If possible damage scaling should be unique to who it is you are fighting rather than be across the board. I know it might seem a little stupid at first but as I mention above, characters like guile need more damage if he has not been given new moves.

Of course in the "storyline/timeline" guile (in alpha period which is a prequel) was supposed to be a bit a pussy or something because bison mentions in sf2 that "he isn't the runt he used to be" or some such crap so there you have this other group of people who might actually like an unbalanced game for story reasons. Maybe the reason guile kicks ass so much in "sf2 world warrior" is because of the intense training to get revenge for charlies death. I never thought of it that way. heh I mean if Bison (like Darth Vader/Anakin from the star wars prequels) was more powerful in his younger days (where he had demonically possessed the fat muscular body) and weaker in his later years (skinny bison with no screen-filling super), why not Guile being the reverse? (ie getting gradually stronger, faster, more abusable etc)

[Frogacuda]

So yeah, Capcom has more than one game with 3 or more dominant characters. I still don't see why A2 is the bees knees.

Yeah, but most of the time there aren't, even in some good fighting games. Garou is mostly Dong Hwan and Kevin Rain, but I love it all the same.

[MarkRyan]

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 gets criticized for being unbalanced, and while it probably has the most useless characters of any popular fighting game--by virtue of having the most characters, period--it also has a pretty decent lineup of competitive characters, and the near limitless combinations of those characters make for even more variety.

[StriderKyo]

I can't believe we're having a conversation about the best 2D fighting game and everybody isn't saying Third Strike. I'm ashamed of you guys.

[StriderKyo]

Given the games on that list, it's T5: DR and it's not even close.

Confirmed. That's the game that made me un-hate Tekken. Seven months later it still holds up, and there are still mountains of content I haven't gotten to.

All the people still playing DoA4 have me kind of interested in it though. The demo left me kind of flat and it was kind of dismissed when it came out so I never really played it.

[Razor Ramon]

Third Strike is fun but I don't see how it's the best fighting game. EX-moves are overpowerd (a lot of them lead to insane juggling/chain combos: see Urien and Dudley), parrying promotes super turtling and it doesn't have much variety. (You can argue choosing your super gives the character variety and it does, but not in the way choosing -isms and Grooves does.)

I love playing 3S whenver I get the chance but after an hour or so the game gets hella stale.

[Anthony]

I am going on record now as saying I dislike 3s. Artistic style aside, I find it to be the most boring of the major competitve fighting games. This year apparently Yun is the only character left (or so i have heard). I don't enjoy watching it, playing it gets tiresome as well. The Alpha series is more enjoyable to watch, I have very little serious experiance with it though.

Everyone just go play guilty gear (unless the most recent one ruined it)

[Razor Ramon]

Guilty Gear is the most boring game ever. Believe that.