@giantlennonx_x: Ah I think I can help you there. Looks like you're talking about something that's referred to as a 'charge' move. What you have to do is "charge" that first directional input by holding that direction for a while. So for example, Guile is a charge character and his Sonic Boom projectile is done by holding back for a second or two (to be technical I think it's 55 frames in USFIV, so a little bit under a second), then pressing towards and punch. His Flash Kick is done by charging downwards for a similar amount of time and then pressing up and kick. The down/up ones can prove a little trickier, because you have to press the kick button quickly enough to start the move before the up input causes your character to jump instead, so it's probably easier to get a feel for the commands by playing around with the horizontal ones first. Guile's Sonic Boom, M. Bison's Scissor Kick, Blanka's rolling attack, Chun-Li's Kikoken fireball, E. Honda's flying headbutt - These are some of the back-forward charge attacks.
Basically, the need to charge an attack gives another way of balancing the move. Guile's Sonic Boom is a REALLY good projectile, it recovers much faster than, say, Ryu doing a Hadoken, so Guile is free to move around etc sooner, meaning he can also block sooner after throwing one and it's much harder to punish him for a bad fireball than it is with Ryu. Likewise, Guile's flashkick is a good move for dealing with somebody coming at you from the air. The trade-off is that you can't just do the move whenever you feel like, you have to be prepared and already have the charge ready when the situation arises. It can also affect your mobility, as you can't really charge while walking forward etc. Overall, I think it's generally an interesting mechanic and can be really rewarding to incorporate well into your playing!
There are some other aspects to it, like if you have to charge down, any input containing down will work, ie down, down+back, or down+forward will all work. Same with back and either of its diagonal inputs. This means a character like Guile, who has both a back-forward and a down-up charge move can have a charge for both stocked at the same time. Down-back to foward will work for Sonic Boom and Down-back to up will work for Flash-kick. Infact, you can even do down-back to up-back for a down-up move and it'll come out and you'll still have maintained a back charge. There are lots of tricks like that. It's funny though, it's just a piece of knowledge that I take for granted, having played Street Fighter for so long, I've never even thought about the fact that the game probably does a terrible job of actually explaining those inputs! Also, this somehow turned into a novel and somebody has almost certainly answered your question in a much more concise manner... EDIT: YUP. :D
Oh, there are also supers and ultras that use charges, and that's just charge the first input and then do the rest of the sequence in quick succession. Also, some of those inputs are kind of a nonsense mess, like Guile's Ultra 1. Weird zig-zag thing.
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