Shooooooryuken!
Exquisitely balanced. Incredibly deep. Absolutely gorgeous. Relentlessly addictive. Insanely fun. Street Fighter IV is all of these things. It's also quite possibly the best fighting game ever made, and marks the return of the king.
Published: February 17, 2009
Tapping and holding for a bit longer will open the move up to being followed by short (but potentially momentum-shifting) combo, and holding it down for a few seconds will turn the strike into an unblockable attack. EX moves consume a quarter of the Super Meter, which means you'll have to balance the offensive and defensive properties of the strike with your desire to unleash an extra-powerful fireball, for instance. EX moves can also augment some moves (again, using the fireball example, turning it from a normal blue one-hitter into a multi-hit red one), so there's a stunning amount of strategy involved in just pressing two little buttons. EX moves can also be used to cancel out of other combos and even dashes, opening advanced players up to flashy feints and allowing them -- so long as there's enough juice in the tank -- to switch up strategies mid-move.
As you're hit, you'll build up the Revenge Gauge, and when that hits about three quarters full, it becomes an Ultra Combo. Like Supers, the attack is a double-motion, but all three punches or kicks depending on the move. If you can build up both Super and Ultra Meters, you'll unlock a True Ultra, which does even more damage and burns through both meters at once. This is best saved for either really creaming an opponent or a last-ditch desperation strike that may instantly flip the results of the battle.
All of this comes to bear when you finally open yourself up to being played online. Before you start Arcade Mode, you can toggle an option to allow yourself to be challenged for both friendly and ranked matches while you're playing offline. It's effectively the same as when you were playing by yourself against the AI and someone came up and dropped in a quarter and started challenging you. You'll go through the match, win or lose (and if you're playing a ranked game, you'll earn or lose points that are used to help automatch you against other players of the same skill level), and then drop right back into playing through things on your own. It's a terrific way to experience both online and offline play seamlessly, and the matches were blissfully lag-free for me. Yep, all of 'em, though I only played within US borders for most of them.
The online system is, frankly, like crack. Between spending countless hours earning titles and icons to show off in the Challenge Modes, and then playing against other people with them turned on, you're actually able to build a full online persona -- even one that's deceptively meek with little quotes like "don't hurt me" or "I'm just starting out!" When you finally do jump into a ranked match, the thrill of knowing that if you lose, you forfeit some of your hard-earned experience to the other player and they earn some on top of that is an incredible motivator. If Capcom ever ends up finding a way to turn that into some kind of in-game currency for unlockables later on down the road, you may never see another update from me on TPS again.
Street Fighter IV would be a great game if it were a solely offline experience. It would be great if it was only online. But you do get both bits (just as you should with any modern fighter these days), and they complement and support each other in such a way that it never seems like there's a lack of stuff to earn or do or people to fight against. It really is the best fighting game I've ever played -- and yes, that includes those halcyon days of playing Street Fighter II in the arcades well past when I was supposed to be heading home, sacrificing lunch money so I'd have a few more precious, tourney-extending quarters, a bit more grist for the mill that was one of the best arcade games ever made. Street Fighter IV bests it, and does it with a handful of new characters that all play wildly differently from the tried-and true fighters (especially Crimson Viper, who is a straight-up SNK transplant).
I could very easily keep ladling paragraph after paragraph of praise on what Capcom has accomplished here, but instead, I'll simply give the game the highest honors we can bestow, encourage every person that reads this to run, not walk, out to get the game, and wish everyone the best of luck when they find me online. Sakura and I are gonna rip it up.
