When it hit arcades back in 1991, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior instantly perfected two things: balanced martial-arts fighting that let players choose from a variety of wildly different styles, and trash talking. Arcade gamers at the time didn't even need to insult their would-be challengers after brutalizing them onscreen; their characters did it for them, delivering the dis with a finesse that soon became legendary. For Street Fighter fans, some of the things that their favored fighters said would be etched forever into their minds, and not just because they were repeated over and over again after each match.
No, those victory insults were part of what made each fighter cool - and they were weird. With Street Fighter IV on the way and a full five days of SF retrospectives kicking off on GamesRadar this week, we can't think of a better time to look back at some of the most memorably strange put-downs to come from the series over the years.
When it hit arcades back in 1991, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior instantly perfected two things: balanced martial-arts fighting that let players choose from a variety of wildly different styles, and trash talking. Arcade gamers at the time didn't even need to insult their would-be challengers after brutalizing them onscreen; their characters did it for them, delivering the dis with a finesse that soon became legendary. For Street Fighter fans, some of the things that their favored fighters said would be etched forever into their minds, and not just because they were repeated over and over again after each match.
No, those victory insults were part of what made each fighter cool - and they were weird. With Street Fighter IV on the way and a full five days of SF retrospectives kicking off on GamesRadar this week, we can't think of a better time to look back at some of the most memorably strange put-downs to come from the series over the years.
Stretchy-limbed yogi Dhalsim is usually portrayed as a pacifist in Street Fighter canon, but going by that terse victory speech, he's one angry pacifist. He's so angry, in fact, that after pummeling poor Blanka into sad-eyed submission, he's going to go and meditate - an activity normally meant to bring calm and clarity to its practitioners - and then, when he's done, he's going to come out and destroy Blanka. Utterly destroy him. Because dammit, just cracking his dumb mutant skull from across the screen wasn't enough.
And hey, while we're on the subject of pacifism, check out those skulls. You know many pacifists who walk around with human skulls dangling from their necks? We don't care how he came by them(Wikipediasays they belong to children from his village who died in a plague), wearing human remains around your neck is hardcore. And creepy as hell. When you step into a ring with that, it does not say "gentle pacifist who fights without malice." It says "batshit loonball fire-breathing cannibal who will slowly tug out your still-beating heart while moaning 'Kali-maaa' in a menacing baritone."
With that in mind, we don't want to see what's going to happen when he meditates and "destroys" us. We just want to get the hell out of India and fight someone who's not completely psychotic.
