BRINGING THE ARCADE EXPERIENCE HOME
STREET FIGHTER IV, REVIEWED
By Shaun Hatton - February 24th, 2009
Street Fighter IV marks a strange milestone in videogaming history. Its recent home release for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is optimized for play on our HDTV home theatre set-ups, and yet its arcade roots remain obscure to most gamers who will play the game. It’s a rare occasion of the first home version of a game being better than its arcade predecessor, which is something we’ll likely see more of in the future as arcades all but die out.
So when you buy Street Fighter IV, you will not be getting an arcade game. And when you play it, you will not feel the authentic experience of playing it in an arcade. To best emulate this, you would have to play on a 27-inch flat screen CRT running at standard definition with your face just one foot away from the screen while you sit on an uncomfortable plastic chair with an arcade stick shelved up between you and the monitor.
Completing the experience, you’d have to have ambient music from other games pumping in the background, fighting for your attention while you struggle to maintain your composure facing off against the kid sitting in front of you - someone who has, without a doubt, been playing Street Fighter IV for much longer than you even knew it existed. This kid will mercilessly reduce your best moves to a pathetic joke, and above all else, you hear the frenetic rapid tapping as he rolls his fingers across the three punch buttons in between his actual attacks.
Thankfully, then, this home version of Street Fighter IV is without all the awkwardness of playing it in an arcade for the first time - assuming of course you happen to actually find one of these mythical arcades and that the game is even in it. If Toronto folklore is to be believed, the only arcade in Ontario that has a version of SFIV is Thornhill’s Lovegety Station, where in the height of its popularity, and depending on the time of day, the cabinet has had at least a half-hour wait.
The age of the arcade is coming to a fast close, but the home versions of Street Fighter IV do their part in bringing certain parts of the arcade aesthetic home. Yes, we’re playing on nicer televisions and can actually hear the game’s music now. We don’t have to wait forever to get our one-minute game, get our butts kicked, and have to stand in the back of the line again. But apart from these differences and physical location, this is as close to an arcade as you’re going to get without the fear of being knifed for winning looming over your head (if you’re on Xbox LIVE, however, expect angry kids to send you hateful voice messages from time to time - kids who weren’t even around the first time you played a Street Fighter game).
Beat the Candidates
By default, the single-player arcade mode of the game is set up to allow challengers to enter the game, much like a real coin-op allows another player to jump in at any time with the insertion of tokens/quarters and the push of a button. If you’re playing with this option on, expect your game to be interrupted with “A new warrior has entered the ring” quite often, and often before your single-player match-ups even begin. There’s no shortage of players willing to jump into a game, so if you really want to finish the story mode, it’s best to play with this option off. Sixteen characters are selectable at the start of the game, including the entire cast of Street Fighter II: Championship Edition (Ken, Ryu, E. Honda, Blanka, Chun-Li, Dhalsim, Guile, Zangief, Vega, Balrog, Sagat, and M. Bison). Rounding out the initial roster are the following newcomers: El Fuerte, a loco lucha libre with a penchant for gratuitous yelps and hollers; Abel, a tough-as-hell martial artist who’s fond of grapples; Rufus, an abnormally large, spherical acrobat; and Crimson Viper, a sharply-dressed special agent with rockets in her heels and a deadly arsenal of moves.
After meeting certain conditions in-game, fan favourites Akuma, Sakura, Dan, Cammy, Fei Long, Rose, and Gen become available as well. If you’re good enough, you may be able to unlock Gouken, Ryu and Ken’s master. This is the first time he’s been available as a player character in a Street Fighter game. And on top of all that, SFIV’s final boss, Seth, is also unlockable - more on him later. Each character has his/her own anime introduction that plays at the start of Arcade mode. Similarly, they each have their own anime ending. The animations in these are decent, but nothing to get too excited about. The character endings are far too short to reveal any sort of relevant story information. In many cases, the endings will leave you wondering, “and then what?”
The Street Fighter series practically defined (if not invented) the fighting game genre. With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that the game-play mechanics of Street Fighter IV are among the most solid of fighters. Anyone familiar with previous titles should be able to pick up and play the game with some degree of competence with little difficulty. Much like its predecessors, Street Fighter IV is comparable to a game of chess; you must think first, including about possible reversals to your actions, before you move. However, arguing that SFIV is just like SFII would be akin to saying that The Empire Strikes Back is just like A New Hope. Street Fighter II introduced us to much of the cast, but Street Fighter IV features re-vamped versions of them.
Offense, Defense, and Control
All the classic fighters have their old moves, but these have been rebalanced, resulting in a new rock-paper-scissors-like hierarchy. In some cases, the rebalancing has achieved an almost unfair advantage for some characters over the others. Zangief in particular is even deadlier than he is in HD Remix (where he was already beefed-up in the moves department). Flagship characters Ryu and Ken now seem a little bulkier and less effective in terms of their special attacks; Ken’s shoryuken uppercut no longer has the great horizontal range it did, and the recovery time for Ryu’s hadoken fireball is slightly greater. In a Street Fighter game, every second counts. The hurricane kicks for both these Shotokan fighters can now travel above most projectile attacks (depending on timing), making them a more offensive move than ever before. Furthermore, what used to work as counterattacks to many of the special moves are now reduced to futile attempts at keeping an enemy at bay.
That’s not to say the defensive move set has been obliterated - it’s just been changed. After all, this is not just the previous Street Fighter with a new coat of paint. It’s its own game. New to the series is the Focus Attack that is accomplished by holding the medium punch and kick buttons, then releasing them. It has the ability to absorb opponent attacks (much like tech moves in Street Fighter III Third Strike) and then releasing the built-up energy in a move with knockdown potential. Focus Attacks can also be used to cancel out of certain special moves to mess with an opponent’s mind and begin a whole new series of assaults.
During a match, each successfully landed attack or special move will charge up the Super Combo metre along the bottom of the screen. This metre has four sections to it. Once a section has been filled up, the stored power can be unleashed in the form of a devastating Super Combo attack. Unlike previous Street Fighter games that had Super attacks, each character in Street Fighter IV seems to have only one. This is unfortunate, especially for a character like Akuma, who used to have many. In addition to the Super Combo metre, there is a revenge gauge that fills up as you’re attacked with special moves. Once it’s full, and if you’re skilled enough to land the first hit, you can perform a visually stunning Ultra Combo. These attacks take a huge bite from an opponent’s health metre, but the visual build-up of it takes so long that it serves as ample notice for the other player to altogether evade the attack. It’s therefore a good tactic to hold off on the Ultra Combo until your opponent lets one out, countering it with one of your own. Similarly, it’s a good move to use on an already-incapacitated foe such as one just felled by a Focus Attack or one who you’ve dizzied. Mid-air blocking, which was a key strategic point in Third Strike the Alpha Series, is now gone.
With the rebalancing of characters, and with the amount of depth typically found in Street Fighter titles, there is no shortage of strategies to consider while playing the game. As I’ve already mentioned, players who’ve played previous titles in the series will be able to pick things up fairly quickly and to some degree of competency. However, the new battle techniques and combo systems will take some time to become accustomed to for those who never stopped playing Street Fighter games (that is, people who are actually good at Street Fighter games). For example, it’s now possible to string two standing medium punches together in a combo. The timing for some of the combos has changed, and some of the newer ones are so odd, impractical, and useless that I can’t picture anyone actually using them in battle save to inflict massive humiliation. And while combos are still the most efficient way of dealing damage, they now drain far less of an opponent’s health metre.
Prior to getting the game, I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to play effectively using the Xbox 360’s somewhat gimped D-pad. With it, it’s easy to unintentionally hit the wrong direction. Although this is the case in most games, the level of concentration needed to play Street Fighter puts me into an almost Zen-like state. Turns out, I can play with the OEM controller just fine, but it has left me with a newly-formed callus on my left thumb that I wear proudly.
Eye Candy
Fighters and environments are all 3D, but movement is on a strictly two-dimensional plane. The textures are designed to make the game look like an oil pastel and India ink illustration in motion. Still screenshots, even those provided to the press by Capcom themselves, do not do the game visuals justice. The Street Fighters look better than ever with their three-dimensional makeovers and move with fantastic grace. The only time these models degrade is in the match intro and outro close-ups, where it’s evident that much of the detail of the characters is accomplished through texture mapping rather than a high polygon count. Another design oddity is the abnormally large gap between
pecs of the male fighters.
And speaking of sternums, Seth’s sternum is absolutely covered in muscles (he also has a 14-pack of abs - and a globular rotating yin-yang insignia in his abdomen). Try to remember the first time you ever fought M. Bison in Street Fighter II. Remember how cheaply he fought, and how you could barely get a move in without having your ass stomped? That’s Seth. To be fair, he is an engineered super soldier who uses the special attacks of many of the original World Warriors to dispatch his enemies. His super attack is one of the oddest in any Street Fighter game - he creates a vortex that pulls his enemy into his abdomen, and then fires the foe out at the camera.
Visual details of the fighters include a variety of facial expressions as they react to opponents’ moves, lip motions as they pronounce the names of special attacks, and somewhat realistic behaviour of pieces of clothing. The fighters even have their own unique sparring gestures; Dhalsim not only has stretchy limbs, but he now moves with a rubber-like fluidity even when not extending them. Despite these animation frills, and perhaps because of it, certain visual expectations that have seemingly been overlooked stand out. For instance, while fighting Vega, it’s possible to knock off both his claw and his mask. When this happens, they fly off him and bounce onto the ground. But when he retrieves his lost accessories, he merely walks over them and they’re suddenly back in place on his person. This is just me nit-picking - I mean, at least the characters don’t suddenly gain out-of-place muscles and other miscellaneous growths in certain frames as they do in HD Remix.
Sights and Sounds
The game’s stages are far more intricately detailed than those in any previous Street Fighter game. Background characters are no longer limited to herky-jerky looping animations (though I’m glad they’re still somewhat goofy). Onlookers react to fights in different ways - some are even too self-absorbed and/or inebriated to be bothered watching any of the action. The stages depict locations around the world and are not necessarily tied in with specific characters, meaning you will not always fight Guile at the air field, for instance.
Background music in these stages is very typical of what gamers have come to expect from Capcom. The tunes are both catchy and instantly memorable. Under certain conditions, the music contains leitmotif to songs from earlier entries in the series. For the most part, the stage themes have an upbeat, driving techno rhythm. Some even sound like they could have come from a Mega Man game, only without the 8-bit sound. And do I detect homage to the Ironside theme? The only drawback to the musical score is the song chosen to represent the game’s introduction and title screen, and therefore the entire game: “Indestructible.” It’s a failure of a “Nothin’s Gonna Stand In Our Way” 80s movie theme, but contemporized, making it sound more like a boy band’s top 40 hit. Changing the game’s language to Japanese doesn’t help it much, but it does make it slightly less annoying. Nevertheless, a Street Fighter game’s theme song should reflect an aggressive fighting spirit, and this song comes nowhere close to doing that. Contrast this to Street Fighter II’s rocktastic theme, or Third Strike’s mellow yet punchy hip hop intro and you’ll find it pales in comparison.
In the options menu, you can select the game’s main language as either English or Japanese. Once you’ve completed the game the first time though, you’ll be able to choose the spoken language of each character individually, which is a neat little extra but one that’s ultimately useless to me since I prefer the Japanese actors’ talents over those of the English ones. Regretfully, the language option does not override the voice of the game’s announcer. And the announcer likes to talk - a lot. He doesn’t shut up, much like Greg Proops in the pod race sequence of The Phantom Menace. I’m hoping for a patch to be released that will give gamers the option of turning this dude’s voice down without affecting the volume of the characters’ speech. He introduces matches, provides unwanted commentary during matches, and is, in general, more annoying, boring, and repetitive than your average football commentator. “Will the tide of battle turn?” NO! I’m going to win again. Shut up.
Brawling Beyond
Back to the actual fighting side of things, there is certainly no shortage of game-play options. In addition to the Arcade mode, a series-standard versus mode, and a very solid online match-up system (I’d go so far as to say this game has the best online infrastructure usage of any console game I’ve played), there is also a Challenge mode. This mode has several sub modes which test out your speed, defensive skill, and combo skill. It also serves as a good warm-up before hopping online to face real people in addition to being a means for unlocking additional colour palettes for the characters.
The first of what I’m certain will be many waves of downloadable content is already available: optional outfits for the fighters. I’m hoping future DLC will include additional Super Combos for each character (that truthfully should have been included out of the box) and, if it’s not too much to ask, the bonus stage where you get to trash a luxury automobile.
As it is, however, there is a lot of fun already packed into the retail copy of Street Fighter IV. If you were ever in an argument with someone back in the day over which was better, Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter, just look at the last few years of each franchise’s history and you’ll have your answer. I’ve been playing and loving Street Fighter games for 18 years. The latest entry to the series lives up to its name, but it will take many more years of playing it before I can actually decide whether it’s the best of the bunch. After all, it will once again take time to master each of the characters. Street Fighter IV offers years of game-play goodness for the price of a single title in a time where we consume games like they’re going out of style. If that’s not a steal of a bargain, I don’t know what is.
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13 responses so far:Subscribe to the Toronto Thumbs RSS feed to be notified when new articles are published.
I tip my hat to you Sir. There’s nothing I enjoy more than reading a review written by someone who really understands what they are talking about and truly engages the game.
I wish I spent more time with fighters, the idea of learning every possible variation of movement from your opponent and knowing the right reaction and executing it all within a narrow window of time dependent on reflex skill to boot. sigh
I think I’ll leave the fighting to your capable hands and keep to the bullet patterns of the shmup arena.
Thanks - I’ve enjoyed fighters since I first played Street Fighter II. My friends and I would walk down to a local but dirty arcade every day at lunch in Grade 9 just to play it while eating greasy pizza.
When the updates were released, we’d change up our lunchtime destinations. It seemed that each new iteration would pop up at a different convenience store or arcade. At the time, I wasn’t that great a player. But I’ve been playing the series since then and have grown with it, keeping up with the newer entries in the series. It’s always exciting to play them for the first time, and very engrossing to delve into all the little details in the weeks/months/years afterward.
Liked the review, just had a few comments:
I have no idea how you manage to play at a high level with an Xbox gamepad. Even ignoring the crappy dpad, certain combos are just impossible to perform with face buttons. I couldn’t even imagine performing something as simple (and essential) as Ken’s Kara-throw with face buttons.
And more supers for each character? Street Fighter is already a game that can take years to master even individual characters, why do we need more complexity? I understand the appeal of the idea of introducing new characters through DLC for variety, but changing the core gameplay of characters doesn’t make much sense. It would also have to be free DLC so that the playing field is kept level.
Hell of a review, good sir.
This is the kind of thing that makes me miss playing Street Fighter. Even if I had a PS3 or a 360 to play it on, though, as good as some controllers are, nothing will ever compare to the camaraderie and joystick/button feel of playing on the arcade-format machines with friends.
@Amn - thanks for the alternate angle on extra Supers via DLC. I hadn’t considered something like that being or causing an unfair advantage, but you’re absolutely right. They would also definitely add yet another layer of complexity/depth to the game - but it would be a neat way of keeping people on their toes. If Ryu also had a hurricane kick super, for instance, he could possibly deal some vertical damage to opponents, too.
On another note, and I hadn’t realized this until after writing this review, one can play through the entire game on any difficulty as Zangief and win using only one move: his spinning lariat attack. Just remember this when you’re playing against someone using Zangief: it takes no skill whatsoever to play as him.
@Reay - While not the same as SF4, you can beat your Jonesing for SF by downloading one of the many versions available on the Virtual Console of your Wii.
OR, since you already have a PS2, pick up the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection.
@Jorge - I’ve not managed to get the Wii online yet. Then again, since we finally got it hooked up some weeks ago, we haven’t played it, so y’know. Thanks for the thought, though. I’ll try to keep it in mind if/when I ever get it webbish.
@Shatton - True enough. Of course, there’s been no other videogaming beyond the (mighty) DS since December, but there are, indeed, ways to scratch the itch if it gets bad enough.
Good read, Shaun, and having played it myself I can say I agree with pretty much every gripe and plaudit you’ve mentioned here. Excellent review.
Great review Shaun! You covered all your bases and it was so good to read. I’m glad that you’re enjoying this game so much!
And hopefully still sleeping despite how much you love it?
Thanks, James and Chrissy. It’s a rare occasion that a game comes along that demands a lot of my attention, so when one does, I have to give it my all.
M-m-mid air blocking??? In my 3rd Strike? >__>
Hey William! Thanks for pointing that out. My bad - big time! I meant Alpha and somehow that was missed in the edits. Cheers!