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
I'm not going to start this review the way I've been tempted to since I first started playing the final review build of Street Fighter IV. I'm not going to talk about my childhood days or slapping quarters up on the cabinet row to call next. Everybody did that when Street Fighter II came out, and they kept doing it through the Hyper Fighting and Championship Editions, through Super Street Fighter II. And then, something happened. Arcades started to die out. People started seeing home consoles as not an inferior second-hand gaming experience to the arcades, but something that could be its equal.
There was a confluence of factors that accounted for my exodus from racing down to the local bowling alley or honest-to-goodness arcade, quarters slinking around in my pockets, but the biggest was just that they suddenly up and disappeared. Every time I'd find a place that had a couple of good games, they were prohibitively expensive or the cabinets weren't maintained well. The feeling -- and it wasn't just nostalgia -- of the arcades when Street Fighter II originally started sucking people in was just gone.
For years, I thought it was just because of everything surrounding the games; the arcades were gone, the crowds weren't the same, my friends had just stopped playing. In truth, those were just the symptoms. The cause was that, frankly, the magic of Street Fighter II's freshness and varied fighters and the feeling that no matter who of those original eight fighters you picked, you stood a chance against anyone that would come up and challenge you -- and they could pick anyone and feel the very same way. It wasn't until I started playing Street Fighter IV, though, that I realized this. That's how good it is.
At first blush, Street Fighter IV probably looks like the franchise just finally got that 3D face lift it's been long overdue on for years now (and no, the EX). It's when you play it that suddenly the game's roots make themselves readily apparent. Though it's far-removed from the ones and zeroes that made up the original game, there's an inescapable sense that somehow the game that all but started the arcade craze here in the States is being channeled. After a brief adjustment period for certain things like timing jumping strikes (everything in the game almost feels buffered, though it's quick to respond with the exception of the timing for hitting with air kicks and punches), muscle memory takes over and before you know it, you're doing a jumping roundhouse kick into a ducking strong punch into a fierce fireball without even thinking about it.
This is Street Fighter II, but made better with technology, with a wider roster of characters, with subtle tweaks to movesets and damage (though I'm nowhere near hard enough to start breaking it down per-punch or frame-by-frame; this is simply my n00b gut feeling after a good 25+ hours with the game), with an ornate attention to detail and polish and balancing that can only come from a pure, earnest labor of love. The game plays every bit, if not even better, than it looks -- and it looks good. Little things like the light casting reflections on the underside of the overpass stage or the way everything bounces around the fighters after a big fall.
What's more, everything runs at a rock-solid clip, which only an occasional (and never match-ruining) little half-second pause per few hours of play. The animation here is absolutely exquisite, but the game moves at just fast enough a speed that you'll actually relish seeing the moves slowed down a bit during supers and ultras. Everything from flapping cloth to billowing hair to the little ink splashes that follow after a solid EX hit is represented with striking clarity and nary a hint of slowdown.
There was a confluence of factors that accounted for my exodus from racing down to the local bowling alley or honest-to-goodness arcade, quarters slinking around in my pockets, but the biggest was just that they suddenly up and disappeared. Every time I'd find a place that had a couple of good games, they were prohibitively expensive or the cabinets weren't maintained well. The feeling -- and it wasn't just nostalgia -- of the arcades when Street Fighter II originally started sucking people in was just gone.
For years, I thought it was just because of everything surrounding the games; the arcades were gone, the crowds weren't the same, my friends had just stopped playing. In truth, those were just the symptoms. The cause was that, frankly, the magic of Street Fighter II's freshness and varied fighters and the feeling that no matter who of those original eight fighters you picked, you stood a chance against anyone that would come up and challenge you -- and they could pick anyone and feel the very same way. It wasn't until I started playing Street Fighter IV, though, that I realized this. That's how good it is.
At first blush, Street Fighter IV probably looks like the franchise just finally got that 3D face lift it's been long overdue on for years now (and no, the EX). It's when you play it that suddenly the game's roots make themselves readily apparent. Though it's far-removed from the ones and zeroes that made up the original game, there's an inescapable sense that somehow the game that all but started the arcade craze here in the States is being channeled. After a brief adjustment period for certain things like timing jumping strikes (everything in the game almost feels buffered, though it's quick to respond with the exception of the timing for hitting with air kicks and punches), muscle memory takes over and before you know it, you're doing a jumping roundhouse kick into a ducking strong punch into a fierce fireball without even thinking about it.
This is Street Fighter II, but made better with technology, with a wider roster of characters, with subtle tweaks to movesets and damage (though I'm nowhere near hard enough to start breaking it down per-punch or frame-by-frame; this is simply my n00b gut feeling after a good 25+ hours with the game), with an ornate attention to detail and polish and balancing that can only come from a pure, earnest labor of love. The game plays every bit, if not even better, than it looks -- and it looks good. Little things like the light casting reflections on the underside of the overpass stage or the way everything bounces around the fighters after a big fall.
What's more, everything runs at a rock-solid clip, which only an occasional (and never match-ruining) little half-second pause per few hours of play. The animation here is absolutely exquisite, but the game moves at just fast enough a speed that you'll actually relish seeing the moves slowed down a bit during supers and ultras. Everything from flapping cloth to billowing hair to the little ink splashes that follow after a solid EX hit is represented with striking clarity and nary a hint of slowdown.
