Action & Fighting Games · 5

Yie Ar Kung-Fu helped popularize the idea of facing a sequence of visually distinct martial-arts opponents, each with a different style to learn. Meanwhile, the mechanics tell a second story: Fighting games turn distance into vocabulary. The same button can be brilliant, useless or suicidal depending on whether the opponent is one step closer. The strongest fighting-game move is often the one your opponent knows you are too nervous to use.