Richard's Online Journal
Street Fighter IV: Day One
After a few hours of playing against the computer — I know, I know, but I’d rather swallow broken glass than try learning the ropes on Xbox Live — all I can think is this: I don’t like anything that’s been added since Street Fighter II.
“Open your eyes and you’re going to prison! Teehee!”
This is not a slam against the game as a whole. I’m sure it’s great. I’m sure it’s what everyone else wants to play. This is purely a personal thing, and entirely coloured by my own tastes. Just to demonstrate the sheer weight of uninformed I am about the current state of the genre, I’ll freely admit that I haven’t really played — not sunk major time into — any of the games since the Turbo edition on the SNES, where you got to play as the bosses. All of this endless screed is almost certainly down to old muscle-reflexes running headlong into stuff that everyone else in the world probably finds as natural and effortless as I used to find the original. It doesn’t stop everything, everything jarring. Don’t mistake any of this for a ‘proper’ review or ‘an informed opinion’ or even ‘fair to the game’, if we’re going to be brutally honest here. To answer any angry comments up front: This is my website. I can whine if I wanna. And I’m gonna.
I was a huge fan of Street Fighter 2 back in the day, but not on anything approaching a professional level, or even particularly good, except by the standards of the small-town street on which I lived. What I liked about it was how easy it was to jump in and play anyway, and compared to other franchises both of the time and which came later, everything was dirt simple. Every character had a small range of very easy to remember moves, all pretty much as simple as a screwdriver, a hammer, and other basic tools, as opposed to the hateful, hateful number of memory-test button presses required to pull off complicated stuff in Mortal Kombat, or Dead Or Alive’s hateful insistence on players being full-on psychic boob-physics fans, not just easily distracted warriors.
That was coupled with the excellent feel of most of the opposition, none feeling particularly overpowered, and all thankfully missing the kind of godawful SNK type bosses or other gimmicky crap that really annoyed me in other beat-em-ups. It had gimmicks, sure. But there’s a difference between that and gimmicky crap.
This time around, those basics are firmly in place, and they’re great. The fighting controls well. It’s easy to remember most of what everyone does. All the old moves are back, looking super-special awesome in 3D and with a savage amount of oomph behind them. That part of the game is great. It’s the new stuff that I don’t like much, not because it’s necessarily bad, or even that it doesn’t succeed at making the game tactical, but because it feels like a level of the game I just don’t want to have to care about. Two charge bars to watch? Focus Attacks? Ultra Attacks? Button presses to control recovery time? I’ve read flight simulator manuals that were easier to absorb than the SFIV one, and at least they don’t ask you to do things like make a Z with a useless analogue stick, or struggle so hard to find buttons to map things to that two of them have to be assigned to “All Punches” and “All Kicks”.
What does “All Kicks” mean, anyway? See? Already, I’m lost and wishing I was in an adventure game or something instead. I wouldn’t feel so dumb in one of those.
As for the final boss: Jesus. Sorry, that was just a sigh of annoyance, even if the alternative would be pretty interesting, now I think about it. SFIV’s is a blue robot called Seth, and he’s the absolute definition of the kind of boss I loathe and despise. Irritating reality-warping, power-stacked, cheap teleporting little Villain Sue rat-bastard Seth. I’m not sure why Street Fighter decided to follow DOA’s pattern here, suddenly launching into futuristic nonsense out of nowhere, but I wish they hadn’t. It’s really silly, not remotely fun, and not even cool. Bison was a great final boss because while he was overpowered, at least he seemed a level of awesome above everyone else. This one just screams “We ran out of ideas! It worked in DOA4, didn’t it?”
No, it didn’t. Get this shit out of my Street Fighter, please.
Fine, fine, you win. I’ll just go and get a drink while your endless uber-attack animation kills me. Again.
Final boss aside, a standard game so far mostly consists of me pounding the first few opponents without breaking a sweat, and having a great time with it, only for every other character in the game to spontaneously decide “Screw that guy” and start breaking out their own flashier versions of Zangief’s health-bar crushing Spinning Piledriver. I’m aware that I suck at this almost as much as Xbox 360’s horrible, horrible, horrible controller, even though at least it’s possible to play this version, unlike the Live Arcade ones. Still, there’s no need to rub it in. I’m already sick to death of launching an attack on an enemy, only for the game to turn into a cut-scene where I get punched in the crotch hard enough to make my eyes pop out, then get to sit back for several seconds of seemingly unblockable pyrotechnic sadism.
The chance of one day being able to rip my ultra moves off as easily as a fireball or Sonic Boom doesn’t get past the fact that right now, while trying to get back into the game, my attempts to fight back mostly seem to consist of me pausing the game, looking up my own character’s Unskippable QTE Of Doom, only to end up throwing a pathetically weak punch that the opponent doesn’t feel the need to block before shaking their head sadly, walking off screen, and returning fire with a V2 rocket. Or something like that anyway. Now that combat battlesuits have been added, there may as well be a character who just hires a freelance sniper to take out their enemy two seconds into the action. By Street Fighter standards, it’d hardly be cheating, and it’s not like there are many witnesses standing around the active volcanos and swamps where many of the fights now take place.
(UPDATED: Forgot to mention. Yes, there is an “Easy” mode where opponents don’t typically use their super-finishing moves, but it’s a joke. You only have to win one remotely challenging round in it, and that’s the last boss. He gets one round in which he can barely tie his shoes and you can kill him by spamming kicks, then he wakes up and absolutely crushes you in the second, using pretty much everybody’s powers simultaneously and deploying game-unbalancing uber attacks whenever he damn well feels like it. I really, really, really, really, really, really, really hate Seth.)
The characters look fine from a side-on view, but really odd in some of their close-ups - like their muscles have been pumped full of strawberry jelly. It’s a very pretty game though, and the fighting has real oomph behind it.
Anyway, yes. Most of that isn’t so much the game’s fault as my own for being terrible at it. I doubt I’ll play it enough to particularly improve, but fine, whatever. I’m on slightly safer ground with my general dislike of most of the new wrappings, and top of my hit-list is the goddamn Announcer. I hate this guy already. I want him to be my opponent. I want him dragged naked into the arena, and to pound his face until it’s a mushy imprint of my fist. He could replace the old bonus stage where you had to trash the car.
(“And the battle begins!” he screams. “Let’s pick up the pace!” he adds, blinded and trying to pick up his own teeth from the four quarters of the Earth. Yes…)
The only thing more satisfying than turning this guy’s stomach into a side-order of ribs and then force feeding him those ribs would be if the Announcer from Team Fortress 2 could jump the gaming gap and show him how it’s meant to be done, ideally while caving in his head with her exquisite microphone. And here’s the best bit: Capcom lets you flip a switch to have the characters talk in Japanese, but there’s nothing — that I found, and I spent some time searching — that lets you get rid of this guy.
Aargh! I haven’t been so annoyed with a game’s compere since Lance Boyle in Megarace. I saw the actor while watching the Hitman movie, and even though he was playing a mostly irrelevant character, still longed to see 47 just randomly walk in and stab him in the balls with a blunted fondue fork.
The blades are a good way of stopping people calling him Wolverine’s gay brother. The new mask… not so much.
Some of the other new stuff is just weird. When you’ve got a game that’s primarily going to be played multiplayer, having to repeatedly replay the single-player game to unlock all the content should be a crime punishable by… actually, I can’t beat the fondue fork thing right now. Let’s just do that again. I don’t really have a problem with it for a couple of characters, like Dan and Seth and so on, but it seems silly that series stalwarts like Cammy and Sakura are behind the wall.
After all, nobody in the history of all things has ever uttered the line “Hey, let’s go round to your place so I can watch you play Street Fighter on your own!”
Story-wise, the game opens up with one of the cheapest looking pieces of anime ever to thumb its nose at concepts like ‘frame counts’ and ‘explaining what the hell is meant to be going on’. All the characters have their own stories, none of which explained or even particularly coherent. I know there’s a huge mythology around the Street Fighter 2 games, with the Shadaloo stuff, and robot girls called Dolls for some reason, and probably some reason for why Sakura is still wearing that silly school uniform, but here’s the thing: I don’t care. When I hit the New Game button, I want to see insanely powerful fighters kicking the living Tekken out of each other. I’m as big a fan of story in games as anyone else, but a bunch of people I don’t recognise jabbering on about things that I’ve never heard of and aren’t mentioned in the manual doesn’t count.
I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT. Seriously, what’s wrong with just having a fighting tournament, anyway?
As for those characters… hoo-boy. It’s probably just my familiarity with the original eight, but I never really got along with anyone added after that. Fei Long, Dee Jay, T-Hawk and so on increasingly felt like forced or gimmicky additions, and yes, I’m well aware of Dhalsim and Blanka. This time around, the gimmicks seem to be the result of a lost bet with the Dead or Alive team. A gourmet chef? An insanely fat guy called Rufus? Abel’s just chunky and boring. Silliest of all is Crimson Viper. You’re kidding… right?
One second, phonecall…
“Excuse me? The guy who usually played DOA as Christie in her formal suit has a problem with my tailoring? And have you seen Chun-Li rece-”
Sorry. Wrong number. Anyway, that’s the first few hours I’ve spent with the game. I want to like it more than I do, but I doubt I’ll play it enough to get over the speed-bump. I played a lot of these games back when I was younger, and without wanting to sound too old, they’re one of the few genres that I preferred back then. That’s not the case for most others. I want to see adventures push the boat out, I want RPGs to expand and improve, I want driving games to get better, and I want shooters to keep impressing me. In fighting games though, I want to feel 12 again, and I miss the simplicity that hooked me back with my SNES and puny bedroom TV.
I don’t blame SF4 for not recapturing that in just a few hours of being beaten around the face and neck for being inadequate. I just don’t feel the magic this time around, or find much in it that really compels me to devote hours and hours to searching for it behind the great pile of stuff that just doesn’t do it for me.
It’s completely my fault, I’m sure. Still, it’d sure have been nice…