They were trying to get to being douchebags, and succeeded. Giving Capcom (particularly Cap USA) WAAAAY too much credit, there.
Doesn’t Sheng Long come from the old April Fool’s Day joke, where EGM(?) magazine said there was a secret boss character in SF2? Did the US version of SF2:WW have that Ryu quote, or was it just the later games?
SRK didn’t cancel out projectiles because the standard form of invincibility in SF (and all games up to that point, sans RPGs or other point-based systems)) was something that hit, but could not be hit. The effect this has is that when two things with this property happen in close proximity, they’ll pass through each other (neither one can be stopped). Unintended side-effect…which was removed in some later games… Projectiles are also invulnerable, except that they’re canceled out by other projectile attacks…you’ll notice there are some games where this doesn’t happen, and two projectiles will fly through each other and keep going (ie. Mortal Kombat). The idea for non-projectiles that would cancel out projectiles didn’t really come about until 1994 (SSF2T/X) with Zangief’s Banishing Flat (green backhand move), which is a stationary projectile, essentially. It got a little more evolved afterwards in SFA/Z, with Rose’s Soul Reflects absorbing or reversing projectiles, and then later on there were games where projectiles could be stopped if they were hit (X-Men:CotA, Rolento’s daggers, etc).
Got COA asking COJ about it…kinda…dumb.
Even Final Fight One when you play as Alpha Cody seems to indicate the two haven’t really fought yet, I think (although of course it’s hard to tell with FFOne’s mangled translation)
