Street Fighter 4 Rant

Where do I begin with this review. I can not promise much structure, but one of my fellow heads in the hydra said, “Just start writing to get the ideas out of your head.” Here comes the diarrhea of my thoughtcicles.

I'm a huge fighting game fan, and and even bigger Street Fighter fan. Playing fighting games consumed my adolescent years. Every Friday, a group of my friends and I would get dropped off (before any of us were 16) at the local Navy base, and we'd make the rounds in between a bowling alley arcade and a convenience store/pool hall/arcade. We affectionately were dubbed “the curfew kids” by the local military and especially military police, who would stop us from time to time, as we walked around the Navy base. I loved the evolution of Street Fighter. I was a fan of CE (Champion Edition), just for the playability of the bosses. I didn't play HF (Hyper Fighting) too much, but Super and Super Turbo were the huge leaps in how the game was played. The game was faster, a lot of characters were rethought, and most importantly, the game was looked at from a competition point of view. Years of feedback from gamers led to an attempt to balance a game. This showed the players that the game developers wanted this game to be their outlet for players to show that competition was possible at a high level.

This base in the fighting game industry has come back full circle for Street Fighter 4. Alpha's custom combos and SF3:Third Strike (SF3:TS) were games for the super-player. These types of games were my favorite when they came out, and if players are available, I still love to play these game. SF3:TS is still my favorite in the series. These types of games though were catered to an evolutionary fork to the SF series. They changed the fighting style of the game. SF3:TS alone showed that a fast paced game existed for SF with many levels of mind games with parrying. Without verbally describing the game, it made guessing games and mind games tools for reaction time. The average player could pick it up, but the true game and its purpose lay in the super-human calculations of strategy. Although the basics of hit confirming was the basis for SF3:TS, it was insanely difficult to land when most of the competitors you faced at high level arcades are gods at the basics, which forced the newcomers or average level competitors to elevate their game. This was an exciting goal for me, as I found an old favorite in SF3:TS, but it had such a new edge, that it was in itself a new game.

Street Fighter 4 is a throwback to the average player. You don't have to have reflexes of a god to play. Here in lies a different fork in the evolutionary tree that is Street Fighter. Gone are the air blocks from Alpha and the parrying from SF3. The game in its total is slower than even SF2: Turbo, but the game still seems faster than the original SF2. SF4 is definitely a layer of games, and the amount of thought they put in the game lets the player experience the layers only based on their will to learn the new mechanics or see the new mechanics from their opponent. The first few days playing the game, I'm introduced to many new characters and relearning the familiar faces. This coupled with not knowing the game, SF4 can play like old school SF2:ST. This is exactly how my friends and I played the game. Simple 2 to 4 hit combos, anti-air games, and lots of timing issues. We were searching through the tangled mess of new characters and moves to find priority of moves and timing. This is where the game gets deceptive. There are some new mechanics that truly change the game from old school ST into its own game. There is a new mechanics called “Focus Attacks” FA. This move lets the user absorb a move and apply damage. There are 3 levels to this move. The first level absorbs a hit, and when released, it gives a standard hit. If the hit in the previous scenario registers as a counter, then the opponent will “crumple”. A crumple is a state that is somewhat similar to a dizzy, but it's for a short amount of time, and if the character is not attacked, then he justs falls to the ground, but if attacked, they are in a sort of juggled state. A level two FA, is a guaranteed crumple, and a level three is a deeper crumple, where the character falls slower allowing for bigger combo setup. The more advanced version of this move, is a FADC (focus attack dash cancel) which lets the character break out of a move, to perform another move. This is mainly used to setup larger combos or setup for a super or ultra move at the expense of half of a character's super bar. The other new mechanics is the revenge meter. This meter gets built up the more damage you take. The ultra gets released, after the revenge meter flashes, and the bigger the revenge meter builds up, the more damage the ultra does.

OK, let's start with the likes. I love the graphics. The backgrounds are so full of life, especially the stage with a busy street. There are so many things going on in the background. The characters are also full of detail. The overall theme of the game is a sort of water paint base. So, a lot of moves and actions in the game take from the water paint theme. I also love the personal attention of winning quotes for one character vs another. The amount of different colors for each character is also a plus. This point in turn is also a bad one for the home system. To access more colors and taunts, you must play lots of single player challenges to unlock these items. Also, the game by default does not give you access to all of the playable characters. You must unlock characters by fulfilling certain scenarios. This is annoying as one of the base features of the fighting game, learning all of the characters, is limited by having to unlock them all. It's also not a one for one issue, certain characters will unlock new characters while others will just add titles, pictures, movies, etc.

With the advancement in home systems, the current gen systems heavily encourage online competition. This is one of pros as well as cons. I love online fighting games, which I've spent most of my time in between the week before Thanksgiving 2008 and now playing lots of HD Remix. In comparison to SF4, HD Remix is light years ahead of fight matching. The method of finding games is cumbersome. Most times I spend more time trying to find a game, than actually playing. There are two options of online games, player match and ranked match. First off, player match is just like a local arcade or an extended home gaming session. You can choose who you want to play with or host a game and let wanderers come and play. Ranked match is a game where you earn battle points by winning matches. The bigger the difference in battle points between the two players, the bigger the difference in points won or lost. For example if you beat someone with a big difference in battle points, you win a big percentage of their BP, and they lose that amount. If someone with a larger amount of BP beats a lower level BP player, they will only receive a small amount. Luckily you can filter your search by finding someone with a greater BP than yours to aid in gaining BP, match by similar levels of BP, or search by network stability. The problem with ranked match, is that you can choose who you fight for the ranked match. Because you can see the player, someone can avoid well known players. This should really be a blind random matching system, as it is in HD Remix. In addition, once a player is matched with someone else, both players' cursors are visible in the character selection screen. When you boil down a lot of fighting games, especially SF, it's really a different level of paper, rock, scissors. Some characters have advantages over others. The player who picks second always has an advantage. In tournaments, they use a double blind rule. One player tells an admin which character they will choose before the other player chooses. Then the second player chooses, and the first must use the player he mentioned secretly to the admin. This way the player selection is not based of off the other player's choice. This was handled in HD Remix, in both the friendly match system and the ladder match system. All games had double blind character selection, which should have at least been implemented in the ranked match system in SF4.

Also, to go back to the matching system for both ranked and player (friendly) matches, they have a quick match option. In HD Remix, quick match truly was a quick match. Upon selection, a random player was chosen and matched. In friendly matches the other user's name was shown prior to charcter selection. In ladder mode, the opponent name was not listed, so you had no way of even guessing a character based off of the user name. In SF4, quick match still lists random host listings, and you still have to choose! Not going into too much detail of how annoying this is, most times finding a game is more stressful than playing a really good opponent. I get frustrated just waiting to play! Aside from how poor this system is, there are also some really poor matching errors. There are two that make sense, host game full and no responding host games. The first error states that a host game listed “was” empty, but someone connected before you could. That error is straightforward. The second error states that the game finding system is so network laden, that not enough games replied to its query, so that's a limitation in the network or bandwidth. Te last error is the most annoying just for the fact that it doesn't even make an excuse. It just says, “Unable to play” or something like that. It's like some lame excuse that Capcom could have set an error to. Instead of trying to say, network port error, lag issue, other guy doesn't like your face, they just have a generic error. I can't state how annoying trying to find a ranked match game is, but on average I play about 20% of the time and the other 80% I'm looking for a game.

For now, this is going to end my first part of my rant. It's 3:30 AM, and the current episode of Star Trek: Voyager can't keep me awake, although Seven of Nine is involved. To be continued...