LOL someone better tell Kuni Funada that Zangief is bottom tier.
I could’ve sworn that in an old issue of swatpro, they had ranked Sagat and Guile tied for first for SSF2 (Guile coming out on top since they claimed he beat Sagat).
yeah Balrog is fucking good but he has a HORRIBLE match up against Dhalsim, ST has a high counter character factor
I still have the book.
Stuff that needs to be known:
ProfessorS’ list based on the mag is on point.
They list a series of tiers that are ranked as follows:
Tier1 = PsychoBison, ClawVega, DeeJay, Balrog, Ryu, Dhalsim
Tier2 = EHonda, FeiLong, Guile, Sagat
Tier3 = ChunLi, Ken, Cammy
Tier4 = Blanka, THawk, Zangief
They also had a chart listing counter matches. The largest margin counter matches are:
Dhalsim 7 v Guile 3
Ken 7 v Blanka 3
MBison, Vega, and DeeJay are tied based on this ratio with 84 points. Zangief has 60.5. Nowadays, people say that in order to be the best, you gotta hang with them. With that theory in mind, based on GamePro’s chart, Dee Jay doesn’t have an advantage against any character in Tier1. Ryu has a only one adv, and that’s 5.5 to 4.5 against DeeJay. All characters have win/loss records and win percentages. Super Versions are not included. Akuma is not included.
The book is organized by Arcade Tournament Rankings, followed by combos, and lastly my favorite, Tournament Winning Strategies.
The strat section mentions of a Midwest Tournament in Chicago called The Super SFII Midwest Championship, which still runs to this day. It also mentions that you can use these strats for the Genesis/SNES along with the arcade, and assumes the home version as arcade perfect…
Top 4 players were #4 Steve Warwick from Los Angeles, #3 Eddie Ferrier from Chicago, #2 Jessie Howard from Minnesota, and #1 Mike Watson from Los Angeles. Ranks #1-3 have pictures of the players if the ‘fountain of youth’ tickles your fancy.
The mini book was published in August of 1994.
The book has a pic by Bengus (I think) of PsychoBison which is a direct source from his taunt in the CvS series.
Let me know if you guys want me to scan and upload this.
I’d love to see page scans of the book, it definitely sounds quite a bit different than Gamepro’s strategy guide. And wasn’t Eddie Ferrier also a well known MK player back then?
You are a fucking moron, people do play SSF2. Lots of people play it. What the hell are you talking about?
I remember this tier list and that gamepro issue. Didn’t they release this list within the first 3 months of the games release? Throw characters were always low tier to the gamepro editors they had back in the day. Zangief and Hawk’s rankings shouldn’t surprise anyone who subscribed back in the day.
I remember them stating that Sagat was slow character or something so they put him that low for that reason. Still can’t remember why they have bison as number 1.
Read the book again. I just noticed that they recommend using Original Sagat instead of the ST version; meaning they were probably well aware of the Super Versions, yet didn’t put them in the rankings at all.
I’ll scan the 1st few pages tonight*
*(Edit: Sunday night hopefully. Current issues with scanner)
anyone have the 'CE or HF ones?
people on this site make the distiction between ssf2 and ssf2t/x. ssf2 being the game in between hyper fighting and ssf2t which had supers. with that said, no one plays ssf2.
except for the people that do correct? like Vintage, DGV, JSJ etc… right?
I have the 'CE tiers lying around some old mags, but i think it’s the EGM tiering not Gamepro’s if you don’t mind.
SSF2 was not a real big hit with tournament players when it was new. Not just because they’d been hit with SF2, CE, HF and SSF2 in a row, but SSF2 was actually slower than H which was a step backwards to a lot of people. People here have fond memories of the game because we’re newer, and grew up playing the game on SNES/Genesis, or are even MORE new, and play it via Kailera like it was new.
SSF2T wasn’t popular when it was new either, if you can believe that.
Neither was 3S, while I’m at it.
I remember Gamepro tiering the SSF2 characters.
I think Tomo Ohira was involved in the rankings.
I think I remember Guile being #1, and Sagat being #2 overall. In the strategy guide they also did “power” rankings which took the bottom 8 characters out of the equation and only did match ratios for the top 8 characters from the overall rankings. In that chart, Sagat moved to #1.
I remember this. About SSF2, it actually gained some interest for like the 1st 3 weeks since it was Street Fighter, after all. The speed (and other stuff) was a major turnoff and the playing crowd wasn’t quite the same…not like CE and Hyper Fighting.
I think the players wanted something different around this point. The Neo Geo was on the ‘up and up’ with Samurai Shodown. Also note that in the US, a couple of months later from Super Street Fighter 2’s release, Midway introduced Mortal Kombat 2 and that was HUGE at the time. I was told that one arcade in the Detroit area had like 4-5 MK2 machines just to compensate for the demand.
The last 2 games mentioned was true as well…though I almost got back into the SFIII series with 3rd Strike until Tekken Tag Tournament came along :karate: remind me to scan that book tonight.
sure, i’m sure its just as funny.
definitely. there was A LOT of reasons for the decline in sf players, but I think it really varies depending on the location, which is why many people on this board don’t see it as being so dramatic. Bigger citties and certain areas never saw that much of a change, while smaller cities saw sf cabs in grocery stores, gas stations, restaraunts, etc being rapidly replaced by the newest fighting game. I remember seeing CE and HF cabs at arcades going up for sale only a short time after they had been released.
Also, like TS said, many people never experienced sf in the arcades at their height because of age. Their first sf game was supert or alpha on a console…
one thing ive noticed is that hardcore players seemed to go in two different directions:
those that felt 'CE (or HF) was the pinnacle of sf (they stopped playing because they did not want to keep up with all of the updates and just wanted to keep playing CE or actually wanted sf3) and those that thought the updates were better (crackheads :karate: ).
personally, i was one of the hardcore that just wanted to play CE and stopped going to arcades around 95. But, if it wasn’t for all of those updates, sf3 probably would have never been made (the way it is), i would have never played it for the first time on ps2, and i would have probably never gotten back into sf and only broken out the snes and emulators for nostalgia. wow, thats a lot of run on sentences.
I love saying this. But my first game was soul calibur 2 and I’ve moved backwards from soul calibur to tekken to guilty gear to sf3 to sf2. Now I play ST all the time.
OK then, here it is:
SF 2 CE Tiers according to EGM:
- Ken
- Ryu
- Guile
- Chun Li
- Bison
- Blanka
- Vega
- Sagat
- Honda
- Dhalsim
- Zangief
- Balrog
blasphemy
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!