Fighter

A one-on-one fighting game from one manifest: two fighters, an arena, best of three rounds against the clock. Pick each fighter's archetype (balanced: a fireball, a rising anti-air strike and a spinning kick; grappler: a command grab from half a step away and a charging clothesline; speedster: charge moves, a flip kick and a flurry of kicks; rushdown: fast feet, a sliding low kick, an overhead hammer and a rising knee; zoner: two speeds of fireball and an anti-air), a name and colours, who plays it (you, a friend on the same keyboard, or the CPU at easy, normal or hard), a theme for the arena (dojo, temple, city, harbor, beach, factory, jungle...) and a look (pixel, painted or flat), and the plate does the rest. Every fighter is painted in code and animated, with six attack buttons: light, medium and heavy punches and kicks, crouching versions (a sweep knocks down), jumping ones (an overhead), and a throw up close. Specials come from stick motions in the genre's own notation (a quarter circle, a dragon punch, a half circle, charges) read through an input buffer, and a super spends a full meter. The fighting is real frame data: startup, active and recovery, hit-stun and block-stun, blocks by holding back (down-back for a low; an overhead beats a crouching block), chip damage, knockdowns with invulnerable get-ups, fireballs that clash, combos that scale, hit-stop and a shake on the big ones. The two always face each other and never pass through each other. The HUD has both health bars, super meters and round wins, the clock, the combo counter, and the calls: Round 1, Fight, K.O., Perfect, Time. Arrows move, Z X C punch, A S D kick; player two plays on I J K L with 7 8 9 and 4 5 6; gamepads and a phone's touch pad work too. Three layouts: arcade, kiosk and clean. Ships empty on purpose.

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