波動拳 ↓↘→＋🤜🏾💥

April 5, 2020 8:44 AM

HADOUKEN! The Secret Move That Changed Gaming Forever [YouTube][Gamespot: Remember When Ep. 01 ] [Evolution of Ryu's Hadouken (1987-2018)][wiki] “The word itself is a Japanese coinage translated as “wave motion fist” or “surge fist” and, in the game’s fiction, is achieved by the fighter concentrating his or her ‘chi’ into a ball of tight energy in the hands, which can then be hurled at their opponent. But in truth, Street Fighter creator Takashi Nishiyama, now president of Dimps (the contractor that created Street Fighter 4), was influenced by science fiction rather than martial arts when he designed the move. While Nishiyama exaggerated real-life martial arts to create the blazing uppercut known as a Shoryuken and the helicopter blade spin-kick known as Tatsumaki Senpukyaku, the Hadouken was lifted from the anime Space Battleship Yamato. The eponymous battleship has a laser missile weapon called Hadouho, which collects energy before blasting it through space towards the enemy. Nishiyama took the concept, shrunk it to human proportions and turned it into a projectile attack that could be used by a character to keep their enemy at a distance in both the original Street Fighter and SNK’s Fatal Fury.” [via: gamesradar+]

Types of Hadoukens:

• Hadouken: The most common type of Hadouken, the character focuses their ki into a fireball that is expelled out from the palms.
• Shakunetsu Hadouken: A fire charged Hadouken that is used by Akuma and Ryu.
• Shinkuu Hadouken: A far more powerful Hadouken that is charged up for much longer and is executed as a Super Move. In Marvel vs Capcom 3 it can be any direction.
• Zanku Hadouken: A midair Hadouken that travels down diagonally, it is only used by Akuma and Shin Akuma who can fire two at a time.
• Metsu Hadouken: The most powerful form of the Hadouken that draws its power from the Satsui no Hadou, literally " Surge of Murderous Intent".

posted by Fizz (14 comments total)

I have the Space Battleship Yamato soundtrack on vinyl, with a special fold-out poster. It is sick!

Also this makes me feel old.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:23 AM on April 5, 2020 [7 favorites]

I mean, I can hear the sound in my head every time I read “Hadouken!” It's seared into my brain.
posted by Fizz at 9:38 AM on April 5, 2020 [9 favorites]

Star Blazers was my obsession when I was young and it was on in the afternoons after school. "There's only 114 days left to save the Earth!"
posted by hippybear at 9:45 AM on April 5, 2020 [8 favorites]

I was in the arcade biz 1986-1992, man it was funny how Capcom literally upped their game between the original SF and II.

Ho-hum beat-em-up to just about taking over our arcade in 4 years . . . we couldn't get enough II Turbo Champ Editions in our arcade, it was the golden era just before the Sony PS came out and diverted the quarters to them.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:02 AM on April 5, 2020 [11 favorites]

Star Blazers was my obsession when I was young

Mine too. I had an aquarium (or rather, my mom did...) and I named all the fish after characters from the show. (Just not IQ-9.)
posted by Foosnark at 10:27 AM on April 5, 2020

this is pretty timely since I need to maintain at least six feet of distance away from my opponent in any street fight I get into.
posted by mulligan at 10:40 AM on April 5, 2020 [18 favorites]

this is pretty timely since I need to maintain at least six feet of distance away from my opponent in any street fight I get into.

Unfortunately, Dhalsim has not heeded the social distancing warnings.
posted by Fizz at 11:16 AM on April 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

Also known as "ARE YOU KEN???" Will that guy ever find Ken so they can finally settle down?
posted by bleep at 12:03 PM on April 5, 2020 [5 favorites]

Also, if the Wave Motion Gun was the inspiration for this Street Fighter attack, I'm amazed it doesn't do damage to the player using it, like, 80% of the time.
posted by hippybear at 2:32 PM on April 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

My favorite bit of trivia about this stuff is that the motions involved to do the Hadoken and Shoryuken weren’t, as many players seem to assume, based on some sort of gameplay balance considerations or something like that, but instead simply based on the animation and the way Ryu moved.
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:08 PM on April 5, 2020 [2 favorites]

While I’m sure there’s something about some sort of “fighting game” in this post, clearly, this am was meant as a space to talk about Starblazers, so here goes:

Young elementary school aged Ghidorah loved Starblazers, which was shown weekday afternoons. The great tragedy of this story is that young Ghidorah also had Hebrew school on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Memory, which could be mistaken here, tells me that the local Fox affiliate ran the show in entirety twice, and that, both times it ran, the final episode aired on a day I had to go to Hebrew school.

I’d watch the cliffhanger episode with the Yamato crippled in space, with the evil bad guy’s new unstoppable weapon floating right in front, with the few surviving members of the Yamato’s crew huddled together on the bridge, awaiting certain doom, and plead with my mom to let me stay home from Hebrew school the following day so I could watch the last episode. My tears, my begging, absolutely no effect.

Flash forward, and I live in Japan (I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this is just a coincidence, there was no deep anime related urge to be here), and found the show on a Japanese cable channel, and was able to watch and experience the glorious end of the series.

At a time when the other options were G.I.Joe and Transformers, where people shot at each other in a toy commercial for 22 minutes an episode with no injuries, no deaths, no consequences, Starblazers was like being allowed to leave the kids table and sit with the adults. Things mattered. People died. It was an emotional experience in a way that American cartoons at the time didn’t offer.

And while the recent live action movie was cheesy as hell (though remarkably faithful to the series), it did give us the best, most amazing leather jackets, and the only piece of movie memorabilia that I could ever see myself wearing.

Of course, the best part was little Ghidorah’s complete ignorance of how the entire series could be construed as a remarkably blatant worship of WWII Japanese militarism, centered around the near worship of the actual Yamato by those on the far right, but, uh... I didn’t know it at the time, that’s my excuse.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:13 PM on April 5, 2020 [5 favorites]

I remember being very proud of myself for my ability to generate hadoukens at a rate faster than the ai, which could generate them very rapidly, which meant I could win the occasional hadouken battles where both opponents stand and shoot fireballs at each other.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 5:20 AM on April 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

Everyone understands "Hadouken!" It's a little trickier to parse "IdLikeAFruitCup!"
posted by FatherDagon at 7:06 AM on April 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

A little bit of Jackie Chan of silliness, which includes lots of Hadoukens and Shoryukens.
posted by eye of newt at 11:27 PM on April 6, 2020