Street Fighter 4

Developer: Capcom
Year of release: 2009
Platform: Playstation 3, xbox 360, PC
Official website: http://www.streetfighter.com

Back in the 90's, Street Fighter was one of the first player vs player fighting games that my brothers and I played. Before we played games like Double Dragon and Battle Toads on the NES, but with the SNES and Street Fighter 2 the player vs player fighting games were the new hype that would last for years to come. With all the different version of Street Fighter, Mortal Combat, King of Fighters, Killer Instinct, Guilty Gear etc I had plenty of fun playing all these games.

To me it all began with Street Fighter, all of my friends who had a SNES also had Street Fighter. Often we would play tournaments among friends, which is one of the nicest things that I can remember from back then. But there comes a time when your friends stop playing, because they don't have the time and commitment anymore to play the game. Or when someone starts winning a lot more than the others (which was often me), people stop playing with you. At that time games didn't support online play yet, so if your friends would stop playing a game eventually you would also do the same, unless you like to play against the AI, but that is nothing compared to fighting a real life person.

After years of 2d fighting games I switched over to 3d fighters, Virtua Fighter, Tekken, Soul Calibur etc. 3d fighters are good in their own way, but to me 2d fighters will always have something special to them. In my experience 3d fighting games have the same fate as there 2d counterpart, after a month of intensive play, people around you lose interest. It was still a few years to come before the fighting games would support online play (except the Sega's Dream Cast which had a version of Street Fighter that did have online play back than).

It was until the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 were released, before fighting games would finally be free of the 'no one to play against problem'. At that time my interest in fighting games had dropped to a point where I would only play the game for a few weeks and never touch it again.

It was the first trailer of SF4 with all the black paint effects being splashed on screen that made me interested again. Everything that was related to SF4 was interesting and all the comments from people around the world were positive. This is going to be it, the revival of Street Fighter.
Interested that I was, I was still skeptical about if the game would have any online support. It took a while before Capcom announced that SF4 would have online play on the consoles. With that being cleared up, this was a game that I had to get.

I pre-orderd the European special edition, which comes with:
- The game
- Ryu an C.Viper figure
- Hint book
- An extra blue-ray disk with an SF4 anime movie

The special edition was a let down tho, the figures are really cheap looking, the hint book is just a few pages with some images and button commands and the anime movie... well let's say as a anime fan the animation is quite horrible. But that aside it is the game that matters.

Street Fighter 4 is awesome. It makes true everything that I had seen and read on the net about SF4. The graphics are colorful and vibrant and the 3d models from the characters look fantastic. The character roster is great with all the most memorable characters playable, except for Deejay who should have been in the game, and 5 new characters.

The gameplay works like a charm and it reminds me a lot of the old Street Fighter games. It has everything in there that I desire from a SF game, it has the super meter to perform EX attacks, EX cancels and supers, it has the vengeance meter to perform Ultra's, Focus attacks to be able to take a hit without physically taking the effect of the hit to counter swiftly. All these moves contribute to different play styles and a deep combat system.

Next to the standard game modes, Arcade, VS and Training there is also the Challenge mode which contains the interesting trial modes. The trial mode consists of different stages. In each stage you have to perform certain attacks to progress. The commands for the attacks are shown and it is up to you to perform these attacks. The last stages are like chained combo's. The trial mode feels like an improved training mode stimulating the player to execute moves to continue. Its something every fighting game should have. For each stage that you pass, you unlock something for that character, artwork, title or colour etc.

And of course the Network Battle Mode. Finally online play for Street Fighter! If SF4 didn't have online play I probably would have doubted to buy the game. Online play for fighting games is the solution to keep the game interested for players for a long period. Online I have met all kinds of players with different play styles, some good, some bad, but it is was always interesting.
And there is the online ranking for the players who play ranked matches. When playing a ranked match you will gain points when you win and lose points when you lose the match. You gain more point when you win from someone who has more points than you and you lose more points when you lose by someone who has lesser points than you, fair you would say, but quite harsh in reality. Knowing the fact that you can only see the amount of points from a player after the match.

I have played ranked matches for the first one and a half month and I ended between the 3500 - 4000 battle points, which was in the top 3500 worldwide on the PS3 at that moment. The main reason why I stopped playing ranked matches was that it took so much time to gain points. Sometimes it took an hour to gain 100 points while you could instantly lose them when you would lose 1 match. So if you would play bad for a few matches you could easily lose 500 points which perhaps took you almost a day to regain. A little to harsh if you ask me. I think the developers could have tweaked it a little better making it less harsh on the losing player. Losing isn't really fun, but also losing a lot of points is like an additional slap in the face.

It was around the time that Capcom did a free downloadable content for SF4 which added a new online mode called Championship mode. In this mode the player has to win a few matches in a row to win the championship. Also a new ranking was introduced which looked at the players grade points. A player receives grade points depending on how high the player has ended in a championship. Winning a championship rewards you a little over 100 points. There are 4 levels of championships, G3, G2, G1 and GS. Players who don't have any grade points start in G3. To win a G3 championship you have to win 3 matches in a row. If you lose the first match you still get 1 point. When you have more than 2000 points you will go to G2. G2 requires 4 wins to win a championship and when losing in the first round you gain nothing. 15000 points to go to G1 and you will lose 5 points when losing in the first round. I'm not sure how many points you need to go to GS, but what I have heard the pro's are in GS.
The Championship mode is much more forgiving than the Ranked match mode. In G3 it rewards the player 1 point when losing in the first round, it isn't much, but it does contribute to a slightly positive feeling. The feeling that might makes you decide to play more championships. Definitely a good design choice.
In Championship mode I currently have 9000+ grade points which makes me a top 5000 player, I used to be in the top 4000, but I haven't played any SF4 the last 3 weeks due to the over hours that I'm making in the studio for Sony's Eye Pet.

btw my main is Abel, one of the new characters. And one of the characters you don't often see people play with online.

The good

• Excellent graphics, vibrant colours, great special effects and good looking and humoristic behaviours of the character models, especially right before getting hit by an Ultra.
• Great use of the camera, whenever an ultra is performed the camera will move to a closer view to give a more detailed action and it makes the Ultra even more impressive.
• Nice game play, with Ultra's, Supers, Focus attacks, EX attacks and of course the special moves from each character. SF4 has a deep combat system which contributes to interesting fights. Some people might say otherwise but to me all characters are well ballanced with perhaps an exception for Sagat, who has always been strong in any SF game.
• Lots of unlockables, new players that can be unlocked, titles, movies, tags, colours.
• Online play, almost every console game should have online play now a days, rpg's might be an exception. Especially the Championship mode is very well done.
  

The bad
It's hard to find anything really bad about SF4, but there could be some improvements

• In the gameplay a player can perform a move called 'cross jump'. The move will make a player jump over the other one, but a well timed cross jump attack can attack some one in the back. The defending player has to press forward instead of backward to block that cross jump attack. Some players use this a lot to confuse the opponent. It can be blocked when you are an experienced player, but still I rather have it not in there, because it feels like a flaw in the combat system to me.
• Online ranked match mode can be less harsh when losing a ranked match. The ranked match mode can be more forgiving by making the losing player lose fewer points than it is now.
• Sometimes it is hard to find someone online with a good connection. Of course it depends on the time of the day, but it can really take minutes before you find someone who should not be laggy. I heard that in this new fighting game BlazBlue they have found a good solution for this.
• The anime movies for the characters in the Arcade mode, could have been animated much better. I just have the feeling that Capcom didn't want to spend to much money on the introduction and ending anime of the characters.
  
• Something that I do miss is a team up, like 2 vs 2 or 3 vs 3 or being able to create an online championship yourself and only invite friends to join.
  

Street Fighter 4 is just an amazing game. It does almost anything right. It's a game that definitely will be played by fans and Capcom also took in account for new players by making the control input detection better and more forgiving, which makes it easier to perform moves.
SF4 is one of those rare games that bring up emotions when playing: excitement, happiness, pride, relief, respect, but also anger, disappointment, arrogance and that all in just a few minutes. I don't often jump out of my seat and raise my hands cheering for myself in my own room, but it sometimes does happen with SF4 when winning a very exciting championship final against a high ranked player.

Usually when I write these personal reviews, I do it because I'm done with the game. For SF4 I'm not really done, I actually wanted to go to G1, but looking at the limited amount of free time it would probably take another 2-3 months before I reach G1. If I didn't have any other games to play it would have been fine to continue with SF4, but since I want to grow to a more producer kind of roll in the game industry, I have to keep track of other good games that are released. Since SF4 was released I haven't really played any other game except RE5 and Sing Star, I was actually almost done with Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops for the PSP, but when I got SF4, I instantly switched over.
It's been a while since I have played a game so serious for so long. I only play MMO games for this long period. SF4 is just that amazing!


9.5/10