When i was still young and kicking, i liked this genre a lot, but getting older and older i moved to other interest in the gaming genre.
But i still have fond memories of my favorites.
The two first fighting games i ever played were on my old amstrad :
Yie Ar Kung FuI still remember the music. I think what made me like this game is that some of the moves the player character was able to do were coming directly from an old Jackie Chan kung fu movie that i had watched a bit before getting this game (doing a split while making a double hand chop to the enemy balls).
Way of the Exploding FistThis one was very interesting because it wasn't arcadish , you had concepts of distance, priority, parry timing and etc.. that would be of course more developped in the genre later. Similarly to International Karate that came later, the game was borrowing a bit of the gameplay from the coin op game "Karate Champ" from Date East.
That said, my favorites for the time i spent in my "fighting game career"
were :
Street Fighter 2 : World WarriorWhile the updates of it (championship edition, turbo and etc...) were getting more content, the fact remains that i liked that original SF2 so much in coin op that this was the game that made me buy a super nintendo when they did a port on it.
Interesting note that this original SF2 was one of the few variant of SF2 in which the AI wasn't cheating as much as further updates of it (by cheating i mean reading the inputs you did in later versions of SF2, as in original SF2 it still cheated a bit, Guile superkick and Bison/Vega "human torching" say hello , all those charge type of move the AI was doing while walking forward)
Street Fighter 3:Third StrikeTo me it was an incredible shock when i saw it in coin op, i had skipped following the franchise development for a while so the earlier SF3 or SF0 i wasn't much caring, so when i saw and played this itteration, wow, everything felt so perfected in every possible way , that parry system was fantastic, and what to say about the utterly amazing animations i couldn't imagine the tons of work the artists must have put into them.
My best friend at the time ever purchased a dreamcast that had a near perfect port of it, and was even better due to a secret page you could unlock that allowed you to edit lots of the gameplay to your liking.
Can't count how many duels we had there.
The King of Fighters 96Ah memory of the capcom vs snk war between fighting game fans
KOF was a most excellent serie that saw yearly new release, but of the big bunch of them , there's a title that saw me hooked the most in coin op : KOF 96
I'm not sure exactly why but to me it was just perfect in the teams, the atmosphere and that boss team that was really full of charisma, i never managed to appreciate any of the later release with those additions of charisma-less dozen characters that had design more and more silly, i think it showed that the developers and designers weren't the same.
Samurai ShowdownSure, there had been several sequels and etc... that i liked (and some of the sequels brought some cool characters and gameplay change), but this first one made such a huge impact on me, the music, the ambiance, the over the top characters, everything was impressive, and he was probably one of the most balanced SNK last boss as more people were beating him down than other SNK games boss.
Still having fond memory of the Wan-Fu stage.
You can't imagine my smile when i discovered neogeo emulators years later and could rediscover those titles.
Tekken 3This one i never knew it as a coin op, only discovered at a friend's playstation.
And wow, it was so much better than any of the past versions in every ways, it was visually amazing for a game of that era, and most characters were actually interesting to play.
I had specialised into Bryan , the guy that had those white hair, it was a character new to the serie, and it showed as his moves weren't as robotic animations as some of the characters there from the start.
Didn't followed the serie after that.