This one's a little more advanced, but nontheless very important if you want to be any good at the Street Fighter games.

The idea is to do one move, and before the animation completes, you do another move for Big Damage(tm). The easiest way to show this is with Ken. You want to lead off with a Strong Punch, then immediately press Forward, Down, Down-Forward + Strong Punch. If you do it fast enough (and it does take quick fingers) then you'll hit once with the punch, and then three times with your Dragon Punch for a four-hit combo!

Which is kind of tough to see in static picture form, so I've made an animated .gif you can check out here(2.3 MB, watch out, dial-up users!).

There are lots of moves that can be canceled like this, way too many to list here, so have fun finding them!

Oh, and this also works for Street Fighter IV.

Take a look at this page from my Super Street Fighter 2 manual.

In particular, check out the entry for 'blood type'. You might look at that and think, "Why would I care about that? I'm not going to be working in a fictional hospital where this fictional guy might go to get treatment." But there's more to it than that.

If you dig enough, you can find blood types for lots of characters, not just Street Fighters.

But why?

It turns out that there's this theory in Japanese culture that different blood types have different personality traits. For instance my blood type, type O, says (from this site) that I'm

"People with blood type O people are outgoing, energetic and social. They are the most flexible of the blood types. They easily start up projects but often have trouble following through because they give up easily. They are flighty and not too dependable. O types always say what's on their mind. They value the opinion of others and like to be the center of attention. Also, people with O blood are extremely self-confident."

Does that describe me? Kind of, but then again, so do parts of the others. So, take the profiles with an appropriately-sized grain of salt.

You can get more info at Wikipedia.

In the street fighter games, the Russian guy Zangief has one of the most powerful moves in the game, the Spinning Piledriver.

You perform this maneuver by doing a 360 on the controller and then pressing punch

But, that is kind of tough to get right, since when you press any of the 'Up' directions, your guy jumps, usually out of range of the move.

It turns out that you don't really need to go the full 360 degrees, just 270 will do

In fact, any 270 will do, so go nuts.

Also, this works with any move requiring 360s, including T. Hawk's crazy face-smashing move

And this applies to games in the whole series, including sequels and crossovers. Pretty much anything with the words 'Street Fighter' in the name.

The original Street Fighter 2 (no 'Super', 'Turbo', 'Championship', or whatever) was pretty much the launchpad of the Street Fighter series proper. It was pretty basic, you have your eight characters, each person picks one, and then you fight it out to determine who's the best button-masher.

And, just like in real life, both people couldn't pick the same character to fight in the same battle... even though this was available in the 'Championship Edition' of the game that was making the rounds in the arcades.

But what if, after seeing the Capcom logo fade in and before it fades out, you take controller one and hit Down, R, Up, L, Y, B? Do you hear a funny sound? You do?! Great!

Now, when both people try to pick the same character, they're able to, and whoever picks second gets snazzy new clothes.

Who says fighters can't be fashionable?