Street Fighter 4

Street Fighter 4 was released February 17th for those who pre-ordered at Gamestop, and February 18th for the rest of the United States.  After a few days of playing through the various modes and online, I've come to this conclusion of the game.

First, the gameplay is the best and also the worst part of the game.  It runs smoothly and feels great, but there is some weirdness with the priorities in attacks.  For example, after knocking down Ken, Ken can use his uppercut, while getting up, and it will have priority over most moves.  WHILE GETTING UP.  With the reduction of damage of special attacks and increase of damage in normal attacks, Sagat is ridiculously powerful.  Zangief is now one of the better characters as well.  Obviously character balancing is still an issue, as with all fighting games, but it seems that in Street Fighter 4 the bigger characters are at an advantage, because they deal more damage and take less (and are not interrupted by most attacks, so they can still pull off their super strong attack while tanking your wimpy ones).  As for online play, there is really no real sense of lag, which is very good.  But the gameplay encourages turtling, so pretty much you get a strong hit in and most players will just be defensive for the entire match.  Given priotization of attacks, characters like Ken and Sagat pretty much sit in a corner all day and spam their dragon punches, then uppercut you if you get close enough while proceeding to hide in the corner once again.  Zangief is probably the best counter to this, because his character encourages aggressive style of play, and he can take a hit or two while still managing to pull off his spinning piledriver throw.  But for a 2-D fighter, having gameplay that encourages turtling is pretty annoying.

There are a few new features added to the game too.  The most noticeable would be the Ultra and Focus attacks.  If you take damage, Street Fighter 4 rewards you with a "revenge bar" that acts like the super bar.  But instead of filling up when you attack, it fills up as you take damage.  Once it reaches a certain point, you can unleash an Ultra move, which is usually the same button combination as your super, except with a different punch/kick input.  The damage rivals that of the super, and sometimes even exceeds it, so it can easily turn the tide of a battle.  I personally don't like it because it rewards people for taking damage, but I guess it's ok since most fighters aren't stupid enough to fall into an Ultra anyways.  A focus attack is executed when you hold the medium punch and medium kick buttons together.  You charge up a melee attack, which becomes unblockable after charging it up all the way.  If it hits, the victim is stunned and falls to the ground.  Also, unleashing this attack will allow you to not become interrupted, so you can punch through a Hadoken and still hit Ryu and stun him, although you'll still take the damage from being hit by it.  New gameplay modes include Time Attack, Survival, and various Challenges for each character.  These modes aren't new to fighting games and are pretty self explanatory, but it's great to finally have a Street Fighter game with these modes.

The graphics are stunning.  It looks really colorful and bright, and the work done on the backgrounds of each stage is impressive.  They have crowds doing various things, and sometimes people even fall into the ring, which is quite hilarious.  There is actually a real storyline too, which is prequeled by the animated movie that comes with the collector's edition (although the subtitling job for that movie is horrible if you listen to it in Japanese).  Although I personally would rather play Soul Calibur 4 if I wanted to deal with turtlers, this is a much better Street Fighter than SF3, so I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game, and will continue to abuse Ken's defensive abilities online until Capcom fixes it.

Rating: 8/10