We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

E: After watching some videos, i do think there are missing frames. According to the capcom wikia (dubious source, i know) due to the RAM limitations of the Playstation, a few animation frames had to be removed.

While there isn’t really any way to identify the exact reason unless you somehow know someone who worked on it, yes, it is a very safe assumption to say that frames were excised and that the reason is because PlayStation didn’t have enough RAM for that. Because it didn’t.

Honestly, I've played enough fighting games and heard enough actually good players talk about them that I can say that yes, that one frame can make all the difference in the world.

one frame is the difference between getting locked in that infinite combo loop and losing the match and turning it around at the last second, etc etc

A one-frame difference makes the difference, I’ll buy that. But if your opponent has the same handicap, it’s not enough of a difference that the gameplay suffers in any measurably significant way. 1/60 of a second is faster than any human being in the world sees anything—it’s faster than a signal gets from the eye to the brain, and it’s certainly faster than any reaction gets from the eye to the brain to the hand.

Hate to say it, but worrying about any (constant) lag time under a certain threshold is wandering off into an audiophile-like la-la-land. Yes, “good players” like to talk about frame advantage and stuff like that, which is a valid concern in theorycraft on simultaneity. Yes, synchronizing beyond a certain latency gets to be a problem, and with certain kind of time-dependent tasks, that gets to be intolerable (audio, for example). But I see people imply that it’ll throw off your reaction to something if the moves come out 17ms later, and the science seems to indicate against that. If you react to something in under 100ms, you either performed a false start, or you have übermicro.