Having lost dozens upon dozens of times to Sagat - whose attacks seemed to be able to penetrate my blocks at will - I was locked in yet another seemingly hopeless battle with him, tied at one round apiece with only a sliver of health remaining and him at full health.

Then my dragon punch connected just so, taking advantage of a lack of mercy invincibility to nail him twice. He then inexplicably jumped back into the dragon punch before the animation ended and got hit a third time, somehow gifting me the win in the process.

Everything about this game - the blocking, the input lag, the hit detection, the knockback, the jumping - feels very off. That's not its fault, given that no principles of good fighting game design had yet been codified at all. But as a bit of an evolutionary link between games like Yie-Ar kung fu and the 'modern' 2-D fighters, this lacks the simplicity and elegance of the former and the polish and presentation of the latter. It even lacks the saving grace of other "bad" fighters - being able to button-mash with random characters against a friend - because there's effectively only one playable character.

Thanks for the sequels, I guess?