Through the Lens: Video Games - Game Design Theory - page 115

So how do you make a racing contest into more of a game? Well, I
made some suggestions already, but hopefully your goal is clear: to create
some kind of system that allows ambiguous decision making. Remember
to start from scratch. If you take nothing for granted, chances are you'll
discover some amazing new form of racing game (or driving game, at
least) that has never been imagined before.

Consider Handicaps
The idea that one player will be handicapped in order to make a game
more competitive is extremely unattractive to most gamers, especially
digital gamers. This is unfortunate because it is an incredibly useful and
good tool for doing exactly that. Instead of taking the Nintendo route
and simply making decisions matter less for everyone (which I think
is throwing the baby out with the bathwater), you can simply turn on
handicaps. It might be useful to realize that handicaps have been used
for thousands of years and is actually an inherent rule in competitive Go
playing. There is no shame in playing with a handicap, or against a player
who is using one.

Fighting Games

Examples: Tekken , Street Fighter , Mortal Kombat , Super Smash Broth-
ers , Virtua Fighter

A direct ascendant of the world's oldest game— real fighting—a fight-
ing game is usually a one-on-one combat game, often themed with two
humanoid characters punching and kicking each other, and usually seen
from a side view. As with most other genres we've talked about so far,
fighting games tend to come in two main subgenres, with a few outliers.
One thing that's common to all fighters, though, is that they're highly
asymmetrical, with various characters each having its own set of special
moves, strengths, and weaknesses.
The first subgenre is the 2D fighter This genre exploded in the 1990s
with Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat , as well as a dozen spin-offs,
sequels, and other games that tried to emulate these two games. Some
might go so far as to say that Street Fighter gave us what we now recog-
nize a fighting game to be. 2D fighters are still in production as of this
writing, although they have declined massively since the 1990s. They of-
ten have health bars (or meters), and later games introduced other bars
such as super bars. They're also known for complicated input sequences
that players must memorize and execute in order to do special moves.
Some 2D fighters (one of the early ones being Killer Instinct ) became