Online shooters are awesome if you enjoy killing twelve-year-olds, Level 80 is the ultimate anti-mating call of online achievement, and you can't win at RTSes because you're reading this in English. So where can the modern gamer go to win a little glory? The fighting game is the modern world's gladiatorial combat, a true clash of champions that corrects ancient Rome's critical lack of fireballs and "swimwear posing as combat attire."
Just make sure you're not fighting against the following, characters so broken and unbalanced they're often confused with half a shopping trolley, each so ugly and out of place they'd make John McCain welcome at a student orgy.
Seth's the cheapest fighter in Street Fighter, but that's like complaining about a guy arriving to arm-wrestle with a machine gun - he's obviously an asshole and your best bet is getting out as quickly as possible. We'd also talk about Akumabusers but every time we try they run away while bouncing up and down firing projectiles, apparently playing Scramble instead of Street Fighter. But for the very cheapest in fighters, you need Sagat -- not because he's overpowered, but because his advantages became known and now every no-talent whiner online uses him in hopes of gaining an unfair advantage. His range is slightly longer than the average ICBM while his high standing kick could have defended Britain from the Luftwaffe. But most would-be-abusers have no idea how to actually use him: When you're cheating that badly in a videogame that's meant to be fun, you're not just Disney villains. You're Disney villains in a kids' movie about videogames. There's a word for how lame that is but you can only pronounce it while somebody's breaking your legs.
One of these things is not like the other: dragon punch, flying body press, butcher thrust, instant-unblockable-stunning-eye-laser-with-infinite-range. That last one was Tekken 2's contribution to the wonderful world of "It's a legitimate strategy!" whining, aka "People who not only need a punch but are subconsciously working to get it."
The unlockable Devil and Angel characters had instant laser beams. In a game where other characters didn't even have fireballs and a Sonic Boom would have been a devastating weapon the likes of which had never been seen. One's an infinite horizontal beam, another's a fly-up-and-rake-half-the-arena-in-nearly-unavoidable-death beam. Neither had much windup, post-use-delay or limit on use, and were instantly triggered by pressing two buttons at once. It's like arriving at a chess match and finding your opponent's bishops are tactical nuclear warheads.
Killer Instinct: masturbation for people who wish they could combo. Popular back when "even PRETTIER pictures" was the only selling point, we can now admit it was about as fun as Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots. The digitized fighters were as balanced as an alcoholic after an inner-earectomy and less original than a knock-knock joke in a photocopier. Who can forget "the robot," "the girl," "generic Ryu," not to mention "the fire one" and "the ice one"? These fighters were so stereotyped they actually transcended genres to bring platformer cliches into a game without platforms.
The game emphasized combos, in the same way a copy of Playboy emphasizes having sex. A single special scores multiple hits or -- translated into not-idiot -- one hit with a stupidly long animation. But even in a game where character balance was afforded less importance than choosing a cool font for the box art, Eyedol was cheaper than trading in Tetris for the Game Boy Color.
Eyedol players can trap the opponent in a permanent air-juggle, an infinite combo. The final proof that Rare was taking the piss is that the damage dealt in such continuous combos decreases exponentially with each strike -- turning the combo into an excruciatingly long punishment for playing the damn game. Even better, in a game where the main selling point was giant combos, this one wasn't intended -- it's a glitch. "Make an actual fighting game" was clearly far below "Advertising" and "Make Orchid a horrifying parody of the female form, and Sharp-Nippled Queen of the Uncanny Valley" on Rare's list of priorities.
The Dead or Alive series is known for two things, and without significant back support neither of them are balanced. The fact any DoA character can exist without falling forward (and bouncing off the ground) is a testament to a mind-bending suspension of both disbelief and other improbably proportioned items. But the most broken character of all was Dead or Alive 3's Omega, the only unplayable character on this list and more annoying than spam offering free yeast infections. Apparently the devs thought he was insufficiently lame even with long-range priority attacks (aka "let's turn fighting into a rhythm mini-game where you press 'block' whenever he does anything"), so they then tilted the camera.
You spend the whole game training up with your character, then the controller gets rotated 45 degrees for the final fight. It's like taking a physics course, only to be told on the day of the final exam that the test is via interpretive dance and the theme is "Morocco." It's impossible to get across just how incredibly stupid this is without installing malware on your computer. And when the controller tilts another ninety degrees should he get on your other side it's past "poor design decision" and into "they are actually laughing at you."
It's clearly designed to turn the entire fight into an extended clip of your character's ass, meaning DoA may be the first game to both truly understand its target market and include the ending reward cinema in the final fight.
The very concept of fair fights becomes impossible when half the characters come from a world which only continues to exist because they keep forgetting how easily they could blow it up. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 pits two teams of three against each other, drawn from a total roster of 56 -- that's two match-ups per person in the entire United States, yet cheapologists still found the ultimate combination almost instantly.
Capcom didn't even try to balance: Cable shoots a gun instead of punching, we don't remember the comic where Magneto was a lightning-fast rotating blade of punches (though that does explain where Quicksilver got it from), and Iron Man can fill his half of the screen with a gun and the enemy's half with what comes out of it. Add Cable's ability to cancel out of super moves (for those who don't play fighters, that's like studying for an MBA and halfway through the final exam you can switch across and qualify as doctor and pass the bar as well) and you've got a non-stop flow of projectile beams which make the finale of "Star Wars" look like cavemen arguing.
Complaining about broken fighters in Mortal Kombat is like lamenting how checkers pieces can't pilot jetfighters. Unless it's "Dude A ripping out Dude A-in-a-different-hat's organs," neither Midway nor its fans give half a ripped-out kidney. Noob Saibot proved that whatever malnourished monkey the company employed for quality control died in 1996, and no one noticed or cared.
Noob Saibot has the "Disabler." It's a fireball. A fireball which stuns you, which is as broken as it's possible for a fighting move to get without becoming allergic to electricity. He runs over and punches you for a while, and then fires another Disabler. Assuming by some bizarre fluke that you're an MK player with actual "reactions" and "the ability to play real games" (on par with finding a Scientologist who can cure cancer through sensual massage) you can escape the trap -- unless you let him ever hit you with another. Which he can launch at any time. The only real counter is to do a quarter circle + "Eject cartridge" button.
Ken vs. Ryu were the eternally balanced rivals of Street Fighter II, where "eternally" meant "until Turbo" when Ken permanently won the hell out of it and ascended to minor godhood. The game was only renamed Turbo at the last minute, replacing the previous title of "Street Fighter II: Ken Wins Edition." Dragon-punchers have always been top-tier, but when Capcom started milking SF2 like a farmer with Parkinson's the fierce shoryuken became the solution to all mankind's ills. (It remains the military's primary contingency plan for alien attack.)
If Ken had been faced with a sick mother and spiraling credit card debt he'd have dipped his shoulder, dropped his fist to his knee, set it on fire and jumped into the air while spinning. And it would have worked. It went through air moves. It went through grabs. If someone had coded an M1 tank into the game the burning uppercut would hit for three and set it up for a deep heavy kick/throw/corner-trap. By Street Fighter III it got to the point where choosing anyone else meant "I'm just doing this for fun!" and tying one arm behind your back.
If someone selects Eddy you can shoot him in the hand and he's still the cheating scumbag. Eddy Gordo is the worst thing to happen to fighting gamers since repetitive strain injury. Armed with the mythical art of "Movie Capoeira" he's an unstoppable whirlwind of chained attacks as long as the user remembers to press kick two tries out of three. As opposed to real Capoeira, which has a habit of getting punched in the face for instant knockout (check YouTube), or real real Capoiera, where the whole point was to distract your opponent for a second or two before permanently messing them up and not looking like you were fighting to begin with.
Even in Tekken 3, a game where annoying novelty characters almost outnumber the real ones (and it doesn't count as murder if your victim chooses Gon more than once), Eddy's the worst. He makes Doc B look like Guile. Eddy is Jar-Jar Binks, a floppy-limbed aberration staining a beloved classic. Keep hitting buttons and his invincible whirligig of ass-kicking could defeat General Grievous in a combine harvester. But if you do you'll lose the true struggle of the warrior: to find your true self and hope it's not a loser.
Luke McKinney writes for Cracked, Bitmob, Beer Magazine and lukemckinney.org. He's also scientifically shown Seth to be the worst boss ever by testicular extrapolation.