Doom vs Street Fighter II

Not being a PC gamer, I hadn't thought of Doom in a long time, decades maybe, until I read about it on a recent post over at Dave's blog. I did spend more than a few weekends playing Doom back near the end of high school, though. There's no mistaking the legacy this title has had on the videogaming landscape. First person shooters still seem to be en vogue.


However, two years prior to Doom's 1993 release another seminal title was rolled out into the arcades: Street Fighter II. With SFII, and it's army of clones and knock-offs, arcades were viable for a few more years as home consoles looked to resign them to history. Refusing to be knocked-out, fighting games remain popular today with SFII itself still played at tournament levels.


So, what say you....Doom or Street Fighter II?

(Sure, this may be an apples and oranges comparison, but hey, besides being the big shakers in their genres, they are also unified in both having terrible flicks.)

Doom.

I enjoy both genres, but I don't need a live opponent to have fun with Doom.

Doom, like Nirvana, inspired a slew of shitty imitators. But Street Fighter II inspired David Sirlin.

VOTE: Doom

Doom was the first popular FPS, which is objectively a far larger market than fighting games. The most influential fps' in the past decade, Call of Duty, Halo, Counter Strike, Half Life all owe something to the original Doom and all outsell their fighting game counterparts.

Street Fighter on the other hand is an awesome game that has a small but passionate fan base. In the end, it can't win against the immersive qualities of an fps story and the sheer undeniable desire gamers have of shooting bad guys in the face with a double barrel shotgun.

I hate fighting games like poison but this one isn't even close.

Vote... Street Fighter II


The time spent at arcade machines in college playing this was priceless...well actually it was pretty expensive. Started with Dhalseem thinking the range of those limbs would be key, eventually moved to ChunLi doing jump grabs and all sorts of fun shenanigans.

This is coming from one of the biggest FPS fans on this site too. I played Doom back in the day but there were just way too many other, better PC games in the day. I have better memories playing wolfenstein than Doom, actually. I think Call of Duty 2 and 4 really opened up what makes modern day shooters so much fun and hyper realistic and tense. I think too much time and praise is spent on originals.

This one is easy...

Doom blew my mind when I played it at my neighbors house. It was like Wolfenstein 3D, but with a hellish, demonic layer of paint. It was love at first sight.. Sadly the game moved so damn fast that after 15 mins of playing I felt like I was going to puke. So despite loving the game, I physically couldn't play it. It wasn't until much later on when FPS moved at a slower pace that I could actually play the genre.

Street Fighter II in the arcades was unlike anything I had ever played before. The vivid cast of characters, the special moves, the excellent sprite graphics, amazing soundtrack. I'm a fighting game fan for life because of Street Fighter II.

Vote - A Zangief spinning pile driver of Street Fighter II

At the end of the day it comes down to what I still like to play. Street Fighter II wins hands down. Many an afternoon was spent in the arcade owned by my friend's dad playing SFII and kicking ass with Blanka, Dhalsim, Zankief, and Sagat. The satisfaction of landing Zankief's 360 degree pile driver is sublime.

Fighting games have always been one of my favorite genres ever since the appearance of Karate Champ. FPS's don't even make my ranking system. SFII was revolutionary and completely changed the way arcades work.

There's a soft spot in my heart for actual arcade games... SFII is an arcade game, a social game, a leave your quarter on the cabinet game. Doom is you alone in your room with a PC. I can't vote for that.

Goddamn do I miss arcades, they were a magical and dirty place.

Vote: SFII

I never really got into either game, but I played some FPSes (they also gave me motion sickness and migraines) and eventually embraced the genre. Apart from Tekken 3, I never cared at all about fighting games.

These are both profoundly important, impactful games that I personally have very fond memories of- especially the first time I played them.

With SFII, I was in the Gold Mine arcade at Cumberland Mall the day they wheeled the machine in. I was there with my friend Billy, and we literally stood around while they unpacked the machine and plugged it in. I was thinking "Oh, they made another one of those games where you hit those big giant buttons". We were the first to play it. I picked Ryu, because he was the "main" character and I knew him from the first game. It seemed kind of like Karate Champ, but way cooler. And at this point, remember, the only "move list" we had was the one on the cabinet. By the end of the day, people were gathering around, doing the quarter thing, and trying to figure out how somebody did something. It was an awesome day, one of my favorite video game memories.

With Doom, I preordered the SHAREWARE version of the game at a computer show. They had these signs up for it, "Doom, coming soon" and so forth. I had already played Wolfenstein 3D a ton, and it definitely seemed like it would be even better. I had seen it in some magazines too so I put down my $5 for Knee Deep in the Dead, to ship at a later date. I remember getting it and going down into the computer room and loading it up and it was just mindblowing. The speed, the gore, the guns...god knows how many times I played that first episode, finding all the secrets, blowing through it with IDKFA just for the hell of it.

But I'd give the nod to SFII here, because I like Japanese games more than American games and even though Doom is so significant, I think it also led us down a couple of negative paths- graphic violence, endless genre entries, this whole hateful/negative/dark attitude. Regardless, I am still pretty excited about Doom 4, the original is still in a lot of ways the best.

With Doom, my FPS playing experience was later eclipsed. First, with Goldeneye Deathmatch Parties throughout college, then later playing co-op in SW: BattleFront. I haven't played Call of Duty, Half-Life or these others, but as much fun as Doom was there are other titles I'd rather play.

SFII, on the other hand...
Back in the day my buddies and I would make friends with kids from cross-town, rival high schools around a SFII cabinet at the mall (arcades were a cool place, man). Later, even though I dabbled in most of the other Capcom fighters (and the non - MK, Primal Rage, Virtua Fighter, Tekken, Killer Instinct, etc) it was always some flavor of Street Fighter I'd still rather play. But more specifically some version of Street Fighter II. I'm not sure what it is about that game, but overcoming a round where even chip damage can knock you out is just as exhilarating in 2015 as it was in 1991.

VOTE: SFII

An aside, the past two weeks I've been teaching my son SFII (vanilla - I'll get Turbo and SSFII after he has the basics down), it's been interesting. At 8, he's been playing video-games now for about 3 years and is really good at MK8. Beats me half the time. He can also do really well in FPS (Metroid, Splatoon) and Smash Brothers. SFII though has proven to be a bit more of a challenge. However, teaching my son how to do high and low blocks, about space and timing, and all the ins and outs of a Street Fighter dance has felt more like a 'rite of video-game passage' than any other title we've played. I've really enjoyed it.

EDIT: I'm generally a 'charge' character guy, so Guile, E. Honda and later Dee Jay are my dudes.

Josh Look wrote: But Street Fighter II inspired David Sirlin.

Speaking of Sirlin...has anyone here actually seen 'Bang the Machine'? I keep hoping it'll show up on Youtube or the like one day, but so far...nothing...

SFII was great and all... but it was still just like an arcade game. DOOM was like an experience. Such great atmosphere and the level of immersion was intense. The competition is none. VOTE DOOM.

I wonder if a more fair comparison would be COUNTER-STRIKE. SFII was a social experience and that sways a lot of folks in the comments above.

For me, either way, it's STREET FIGHTER II. Life-changing. My Dhalsim was utterly unbeatable other than by hacks (handcuffs, &c) with our arcade's house rules (throws were very discouraged except after stuns). Folks couldn't believe it on the local scene, but between me and Zangief Bob shit was real in Acton, MA.

Doom for me. Never had much spending money to play SF2 back then.