Super Street Fighter IV has ushered in a new community of fighting game fans and continues to cater to us old schoolers. So why do I get the sneaking suspicion that we could be on the cusp of yet another fighting game flood?Within the week of me writing this I’ve had the pleasure of: purchasing my first arcade joystick, arranging plans with friends to attend a fighting game tournament and review a long-time competitor in Tekken 6. Needless to say, I’m suffering from a frame counting overload. Imagine my surprise when I opened up a little envelop in my mailbox and out popped a shiny new copy of Super Street Fighter IV. Looking at my stack of growing games I rarely play, I noticed a dusty copy of the original Street Fighter IV which was released a year prior. My joy slowly waned as I questioned whether Capcom was repeating history and gouging its fans by flooding the fighting game market with sequels and spin-offs.
There are improvements and additions that, I could argue, would have been an excellent form of downloadable content. Upon my month long playtime with this supposed super version of a Street Fighter I already owned, I realized that there are some significant changes. Sagat isn’t as powerful as he once was. Damage, in general, has been knocked down a peg, so lucky punches and wild combos aren’t constant contributors to a player’s loss -- or win for that matter. What interested me is the new additional fighters and how the balance of the game would be affected.
Hakan, one of many new fighters introduced in this series of Street Fighter. His grab & mix-up game is tricky and may have you missing the parry system of Third Strike.The oddest takeaway I got from Super Street Fighter IV is remembering why executive producer, Yoshinori Ono, wanted to make the original Street Fighter IV initially. He felt the fighting game genre lost fans due to a supersaturation of the fighting game genre and a dip in quality as a result. I remember Ono specifically referencing Street Fighter III: Third Strike’s characters as “weird” and “off-putting”. Fast forward to now and look at characters like Hakan and Yuri. A wrestler who douses himself in oils so opponents slip and slide all over him and Yuri’s outrageous knack of having an extended range thanks to some form of evil Tae Kwon Do? With the obvious points aside, it looks like the gaming community needs solid fighting games to be intermixed with the constant flow of first-person shooter releases.
Its great that the musical tracks from the original Street Fighter IV are now playable across all game modes instead of just the single player. As a consumer you are left with the parasitic thought of, “was the time invested equal to or greater than the money invested?” Personally, I adjusted my thinking and felt the game would have suffered from a standard DLC update. Especially, considering how few people actually download additional content in this console generation. As a compromise, Capcom decided to sell Super Street Fighter IV at a $20 dollar discount to assuage fans fear of getting gouged as the publisher has shown it is more than capable of doing.
Protip: The highly anticipated return of the bonus stages fondly remembered in Street Fighter II. However, In SSIV, you may want to judge your distance and time on the barrel stage. Roundhouse & Fierce may be your only hope.The end result is a game that boast 35 fairly balanced players. Background environments wade and waft moments of serenity as well as panic. For a 2-dimensional fighter this is the most I’ve ever been attracted to what was occurring in the foreground as well as the background. The sound and dialog is clear and sometimes a bit overbearing. An example would be your rival matches in single-player mode when players are shouting one-liners and catchphrases -- almost to the point of shouting over one another, this turns the fight into an explosion of word salad.
The online functionality, at least for the PS3 verison, seems to have improved greatly over the original version. Fewer games are dropped, but the learning curve is still there. Be advised, if you aren’t at least playing the single player mode on the hardest level, you should be practicing in Training mode prior to hopping online. Better yet, find a friend, you kids still do that right?
As usual, Street Fighter's artstyle is incredibly pollished. I'm still not a fan of how the characters, but I see the good in it.As much as I’d like to complain about the goofiness of the story and the bizarreness of the character design [don’t worry, Rufus’ belly-jiggle physics hasn’t been tampered with]-- Super Street Fighter IV manages to be well worth its price of admission. I’ll let those more emotionally in-tune with their finances make the argument that Super Street Fighter IV is a traditional Capcom cash in. I have a tournament to train for and $40 dollars seems like a mere speed bump for, what I have in mind with this game. Here’s hoping Capcom has learned from their mistakes.
I give Super Street Fighter IV...
The “Deep Purple Fireball Album” Award