Category Archives: Fundamentals

Spacing (Part 2): Projectiles 101

Without a doubt, the most useful tool a character can have in terms of controlling space is a projectile. After all, why bother getting in range to use a melee attack and risk getting damaged when you could let a separate entity do all the space control work for you instead? However, the rabbit hole […]

Spacing (Part 1): When and Where to Attack

When you perform an attack in any fighting game, the most obvious aspect of the move is the space it takes up in the game (i.e. what the character’s sprite or 3D model is doing and where it’s positioned). However, things are not always what they seem, as the sprites are only rough guides for […]

Air vs Ground in a nutshell

Whenever you see the arena in any 2D fighting game, you may notice the great amount of negative space above the 2 grounded fighters but below the life bars and timer. Up to this point, you’ve spent most of your time and energy focusing on what happens on the ground, but what about the air? […]

Rushdown: Keeping the Advantage

Now that you’ve secured your advantage, how do you keep that advantage? You use the process of rushdown. Rushdown has 3 major components: pressure tools, reversals, and blocking. We already know what blocking is, so let’s focus on the other 2 parts. Pressure tools are attacks whose sole purpose is to limit the opponents’ options […]

The Ground Game and Gaining the Upper Hand

The most basic type of strategy in any fighting game happens right at the start of the match. When the announcer tells the players to fight, their characters start in the middle of the arena facing each other. There is an equal area of space behind and between each character, and the characters start off […]

What are Fighting Games?

Fighting games. All of us have seen them. Many of us have played them casually. A decent amount of us play them competitively. Very few of us are good at them. Some of us like them, and some of us don’t. Many of us are very confident of our opinions of them, but we struggle […]