Street Fighter 4 : A fighting game that allows players to pit martial arts warriors against a giant baboon, or the only sumo wrestler on Earth with a 6 pack, or an international superpowered terrorist for that matter.
Story : Not completely sure, but it feels like a safe bet to say it involves the cliché fighting game storyline of an evil force attempting world domination by means of hosting some kind of fighting tournament, with the reasoning behind how such a tournament can lead to world domination often being very, very irrational.
Street Fighter 4 has very recently been released in Japan, and a select few arcades have wasted no time trying to be on the cutting edge and import a machine of their own. It just so happens that one arcade within my proximity decided to pick it up (and they’re wasting no time trying to cash in on holding tournaments too) and being that most North American game websites don’t bother reviewing arcade games, I get the meaningless claim of being able to review Street Fighter 4 some 6 odd months before everyone else does.
Street Fighter 4 feels like an attempt by Capcom to rejuvenate the lost interest of the millions of former Street Fighter 2 fans. Perhaps Street Fighter 3 and its subsequent updates were too bold, what with how it flushed away most of the existing roster in favour of attempting to create new and interesting characters, and having the audacity to use 2D sprites – back in a time when most people looked at any new 2D game and brushed it aside because they thought it had “Super Nintendo graphics” all the while claiming that this was the cutting edge of technology.
And so we have Street Fighter 4, which brings back the entire original cast and animates them in 3D. Note that only the graphics are rendered in 3D but not the gameplay, it still controls almost exactly like any old Street Fighter game. The upside to this is that anyone who vaguely remembers how to play Street Fighter 2 can pick this game up and know what they’re doing. The downside is that this game, as a whole, lacks any semblance of originality. I didn’t actually get to play as any of the new characters; when you’re fighting some brash punk kid with expensive clothes and a lady on his arm thinking he’s original for using Ken with the white colour palette outfit, you tend to be thinking less about experimenting with new characters than you do thinking about kicking his face in – but they do look like they’re fun to play as. It’s just that they consist of four overdone fighting game clichés – the luchador, the fat man who fights with his gut, the SNKish sharp dressed woman wearing a very revealing tux, and another guy in a karate gi. Needless to say, this is a game that takes few chances. There’s a couple of new gameplay mechanics, a simpler variation of the parry/counter, the SF3-style superpowered special attacks, and a few other abilities with names I can’t be arsed to remember.
It’s hard to say too much about the game itself being that it’s an arcade game, and your gameplay options are limited to either beating up one AI opponent after another, or waiting for that guy in the Che Guevara shirt to hurry up and grab some corners so you can piledrive him again and again. I guess I can comment on the characters I used: E Honda fights like E Honda, Vega fights like Vega, M Bison fights like a slower and lamer version of M Bison, and Zangief has been training hard and dodging any sort of drug testing scandals that may have come up in the last ten years because he’s become one nigh unstoppable force here. I’ll go on a limb and say that until I see later updates of Street Fighter 4 (and you know they will make more updates) that I doubt that it’ll have the same staying power of Street Fighter 3 or Marvel vs Capcom 2 in arcades. Rather, that this game was made for the many, many people who don’t go to arcades because they can’t parry all of Chun Li’s rapid kicking attacks. This game’s audience is the rest of the world, the people that get drunk and high in their buddy’s basement/bedroom and alternate between playing old games and watching late night Teletoon or Cartoon Network. The people that wear retro t-shirts with goombas and mushroom sprites on them despite never beating the third world of Super Mario Bros. This is Street Fighter for the masses, and that’s both a good and bad thing.
Pros : Rufus’ victory dialogue includes a story on how he broke his bed frame, presumably from masturbating. The first Capcom fighter in almost a decade to have not bad music.
Cons : A final boss that rips off the final boss of Super Smash Bros Brawl, which in turn was a ripoff. Nothing bold and daring – even Clayfighter was a more gutsy franchise than this.
3 1/2 stars
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