Terms You Don’t Know
(Note: this blog has not turned in to a fighting video game blog. It’s just an interest area of late)
In the process of practicing Street Fighter 4, which came out for consoles in February, and interacting with the community that plays it I have picked up a lot of new vocab. I was going to put the definitions, but it’s more interesting without. You might think fighting games could be spoken about by their fans with simple terms like jumping, punching and kicking. But you would think wrong.
Like most niche communities who consider themselves elite, the fighting game player base has a lot of obscure terms that are a total mystery to average gamers. This list doesn’t even include specific game franchise related terms. These are just the ones that can apply to any fighting game.
Terms you don’t know unless you play a lot of fighting games:
Trading
Buffering
Stuffing
Mashing
Hype
Rage
Punish
Mind Games
Combo
Loop
Infinite
Tick
Kara
Canceling
Cross-up
Mix-up
Safe
Footsies
Frame advantage
Scrub
Whiff
Hit Box
Poke
Trap
Cheese
Rushdown
Runaway
String
Options
