After the debacle with Final Fantasy VII, I was rather
miffed that I wouldn’t get to see the game through to the end and therefore
felt the need to kick something’s ass. Hence the choice for this week’s game:
Super Street Fighter
IV: Arcade Edition
Another free download from XBL Gold, Street Fighter is an
intellectual property that few are unfamiliar with. Most of us have played an
iteration of Street Fighter II back in the mid 90s. Some have even seen the
films; Street Fighter: The Movie is probably my favourite film for “so bad it’s
good.” But I haven’t played a full Street Fighter game since then.
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| Not managed to beat anyone playing as Fei Long yet... |
I have heard that, out of the fighting games on the Xbox
360, Street Fighter IV was the most technical. Certainly the set combos are
hard to do, which means I probably won’t do very well with the challenges in
‘Trial’ mode. I’ve mainly been playing Arcade
mode, and of course online. I’ve been having good fun with both, in Arcade I particularly enjoy the cut-scenes at the start
and end of the game depending on who you’re playing. Some of the characters
aren’t too familiar to me and it’s good to get a bit of context with each one.
While I don’t very often win Online, (I’m around 40% wins at this point,) I
think I’m competent enough to offer a challenge to all but the most hardcore
players.
That being said, I’ve noticed a couple of small but
significant ways in which Street Fighter IV is different to the other fighting
games I’ve played on the Xbox 360:[1]
Firstly, Street Fighter differentiates between fast and slow
attacks more than any fighting game I’ve played. Normally, a character’s faster
or slower moves would be a standard part of the move set, but Street Fighter
actually has buttons for the different speeds of attack that offer a balance of
speed and power. This can result in some technical situations where you have a
split second to counter a slow move with a fast one; it’s risky, but it can be
done – more so than with the other fighting games.
Secondly, the controls are difficult. The basic controls
work OK, but the combination of directional waggles and buttons needed to do
the Super and Ultra moves are really hard to do – and that’s if you can even
remember them. Of course, there’s a reason for this: If you look at other
fighting games for the 360 you’d find their control system optimised for its
controller. Street Fighter, on the other hand, was very much designed for an
arcade stick. Some of the moves, for example, require you to do a 360 degree
rotation of the analogue stick – quite hard to do with just your thumb. And
some of the moves require you to use all three punch or kick buttons. They’ve
tried to get around this by mapping this function to the left bumper and left
trigger. When you get a combination that requires you to make two complete
rotations of the left analogue stick then pull the left trigger with the same
hand, it’s nigh on impossible.
I’ve only played as four characters so far: Ryu; Ken, E.
Honda and Ibuki. The first two are good all-round characters and stand a
reasonable chance against anyone, but I’ve really been enjoying E. Honda. He
was actually my favourite character from the earlier games and not much has
changed! He’s easy to underestimate because he’s fat and slow, but his strong
kicks have a surprising amount of reach and do a lot of damage. And if he gets
in close, he can do a lot of damaging combos as well. Plus, his diving headbutt
provides him with some much needed speed in the game. He’s got me my highest
proportion of online wins so far! Ibuki, on the other hand, I haven’t been
enjoying so much; she relies too much on speed in what is already a very quick
game and doesn’t fit my play style at all.
Of course, this being a Capcom game, I’ll have to download a
lot of DLC in order to complete the game fully and earn all the achievement
points, which isn’t going to happen for a while. Now that I’ve completed the
game with four characters, I’ll probably mark the game off as complete and move
on to something else next week.
[1]
Which for the record are Mortal Kombat and Injustice: Gods Among Us.
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