With Nekohashi’s blessing, we finally added this move to the game. I know it makes a better story when things turn out totally differently than you expect, but the fake fireball turned out exactly as we expected, at least so far. It really does add an interesting mind-game to a lot of fights. It also has another use as a rushdown tool, such as cancelling low roundhouse or low fierce into a fake fireball, then quickly throwing the opponent. This technique actually lets you recover slightly faster than if you did low roundhouse or low fierce alone, and also the visuals trick the opponent into blocking, so it’s an effective technique. I think it’s not overly powerful though, but we’ll continue to test it and keep an eye on this.

The command for fake fireball is qcf + short. Ryu players tend to fake with short anyway, so this was a natural place for it. Also, putting it only on short kick ensures that you will never ever accidentally get the move when (on button up) you try to do low medium kick or low roundhouse into a real fireball.

So there we have it. The first character change list I’m presenting to you is unusually short: only one item long! But it’s quite an item with power that ripples through a lot of matches.

—Sirlin

Here’s a brief bio on our guest blogger:

David Sirlin has competed in Street Fighter tournaments for 16 years, and for 11 years he has helped organize and run the tournament series that started as B3 and has now become the international Evolution Championships. He represented the United States in SSF2T in Japan‒s Super Battle Opera tournament, wrote the competitive gaming book Playing to Win, and provided narration for Bang the Machine, a documentary film about the Street Fighter community. He‒s now overseeing the design and gameplay on Super Street Fighter 2: HD Remix.