I was a teenage Street Fighter II addict.
I was never any good at the arcade game, mostly because I was in middle school during the peak of its popularity. From 1991 to 1993, the world was caught in the grip of a never-ending martial arts tournament that saw Street Fighter characters like Ryu and Chun-Li endlessly battling it out for as long as somebody had another quarter. Street Fighter home cartridges grew more expensive with each iteration thanks to the games' increasing complexity, but they still flew off shelves.
But Street Fighter and its offspring didn't rule the game industry forever — in fact, the traditional 2-D fighting game quickly diminished in importance. Fighting games that remain popular today are mostly 3-D, like Soul Calibur and Virtua Fighter, but with Street Fighter IV, Capcom pulls off the ultimate straddle: The gameplay draws heavily from the classics, but the graphics are as advanced as anything else around — and neither gets in the other's way.
If you've spent time with a Street Fighter game before — and odds are excellent that you have — you'll know how to play Street Fighter IV, released this week on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. (The arcade version came out last year.)
You'll see two fighters, one on each side of the screen. Best of three rounds. An array of six buttons lets you do three different types of punches and kicks, and combining these buttons with a variety of preset joystick motions lets you execute special moves — fireballs, lightning kicks, all that. As you get better, you learn to chain moves together in unblockable combos.
Other fighting games have taken these simple concepts and added layer upon layer of complexity. Street Fighter IV pulls back on this a bit in an attempt to make the game more palatable for casual players. While each character still possesses a few show-stopping moves that require a good deal of practice to pull off, some powerful moves are as easy as hitting two punch buttons instead of one while throwing a fireball.
I don't think this means that a total newbie would stand any chance against a veteran player. But for those of us who grew up on Street Fighter II, playing IV is like riding a bike — so much so that, yes, it is definitely possible to squeak out some wins here and there against people who never stopped playing fighting games.
Street Fighter IV is a beautiful game. I mean that not only in the way that it generates tension-filled moments one after another, keeping you engaged whether you're a player or spectator. I mean it looks awesome.
This isn't the first Street Fighter in 3-D, but it is the first that looks just like the classic games. The cel-shaded graphics are even better in motion, and the cartoony expressions that line the characters' faces, especially when they're hit by devastating blows, are simultaneously heavily evocative of the previous games' style and wholly appropriate for the high-def era.
Appropriately, the cast of 12 fighters from the classic game are all here, so whether your fond memories of 1991 involve E. Honda's flying sumo head-butts or Dhalsim's stretchy, yoga-enhanced limbs, you can step back into those shoes here. A total of 25 characters are available, although unlocking the hidden ones is a tedious exercise that involves playing against the computer by yourself for hours on end.
That sort of solo action in a fighting game like this delivers a tiny fraction of the fun of playing against a friend. If you don't have a friend handy, both versions of the game support online play. (We were not able to test the online connection for ourselves in the pre-release Xbox and PS3 versions of the game we played for this review.)
If you slog through the single-player Arcade mode, you'll get more than just a series of matches. Each character has his own storyline, with animated story sequences at the beginning and end of the game. These add an occasionally amusing background to the proceedings, although the animation quality is Saturday-morning-cartoon-level bad. It's sad to see the polished beauty of Street Fighter IV's in-game graphics bookended by the cheapest of cheap 2-D animation.
It is half-assed stumbles like these that make the home version of Street Fighter IV less than perfect. The game's menus are clunky, which gets annoying since you're constantly going in there to tweak your button settings and check the list of special moves. A menu will often tell you to press the A button to confirm your selection, but pressing it does nothing.
And I fail to see how the all-important menu that lets you reassign the buttons on your controller could have been designed to be less intuitive. You'll be using that a lot, too, especially if you buy an arcade-style joystick — which I cannot recommend strongly enough, especially if you have an Xbox 360. The console's default controller is absolutely infuriatingly useless for this game.
Street Fighter IV finds itself hurt by a few ill-advised choices, but worry not: If Capcom Entertainment is truly intent on bringing back the era of the classic 2-D fighter, we'll be sure to see incrementally improved editions like Street Fighter IV: Champion Edition, Street Fighter IV Turbo and Super Street Fighter IV Turbo over the next two years.
For now, this is an excellent return to form for a series (and genre) many had written off as dead.
video:
http://blog.wired.com/games/2009/02/sfiv-review.html
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