First impressions, I love it. It really hits the nail on the head for Street Fighter fans. What do we all love about Street Fighter 2? The characters! What does this have, all of the Street Fighter 2 characters (minus the new challengers). Street Fighter is very much about the characters; it’s not unreasonable to say that while a lot find Street Fighter 3 the better game (game play-wise) the characters we all love are from Street Fighter 2. This has them all, but it’s not without a cost it would seem. Where are the Street Fighter 3 characters? Where are the Street Fighter Alpha characters? There are a lot of big characters missing at the cost I believe of having the entire SF2 cast. Now before going on about SF4, I have not played with the new characters yet, so I can’t comment on them too much, ill update when I get some more hands on, which I will: D

The Capcom section looked well, mainly SF dominated with MotoGP and Bionic Commando also on show. We got first shot at the console version. There were no arcade machines here but a massive presence of 360s. The atmosphere was great, no lines so much, just a bunch of SF fans all over the section passing controllers around and looking for a good challenge. There where some Capcom developers there, and some hosts in excellent Street Fighter garbs and even better they all participated in the fun. Early complaints from others and a little from myself was with the 360 game pad. While it works excellent with most titles SF really needs a solid D-Pad. I can get over that and appreciate the game anyway. The fighting is very much SF2. No parry system and it keeps the straight 2D fighting style. There is a revenge meter and a EX meter. The revenge meter I couldn’t figure out but the Ex meter worked like in previous titles. You can do super specials which hit for massive damage or use the EX meter to power up standard special moves. The game was still slower than I was hoping for, fingers crossed the final build will have faster settings.

So the big points, graphics, sound, game play. Well, the graphics are solid, both background and characters. I should mention here that I think this is hit or miss. I’m perfectly fine with it, but I know a lot of fans and casual players are not. From a art point of view going for models is a great decision. I love sprite art, but its time consuming and this means we can see a lot of characters in updates coming out quickly. Now Capcom have dabbled with models in SF before. The SF EX series used models but they where very blocky and just plan ugly. SF4 gets the models down.

The audio was a little awkward to rate, I’m confident from previous SF games that the sound track will be great but due to so many machines so close together it was hard to hear. The sound from the main machine was played all around the section and from what I heard it sounded great.

The Game play was top notch. All the special moves where perfectly recreated, the characters I played with all played as I wanted them too. I can’t fan boy here though, we did experience slow down in a match between Sagat and Ryu when the fireballs where used, hopefully this is only in the test build.

So some complaints. We got the 360 console version to test. What was I hoping for, well the console exclusive characters. Dan from SF Alpha and Fei Long a new challenger in SF2 have been confirmed as the console exclusives but where not available to test. Now it’s fair enough they probably didn’t have them finished but it would have been nice. The controller was an issue as I mentioned, hopefully we’ll see a Hori Arcade stick coming out for it. A story complaint Id have to make (this is probably me being very picky here) Its a very strange move to place the fourth Street Fighter tournament before the third Street Fighter tournament, and because of this move there will no doubt be a lot of difficulty trying to bring this altogether. For most people though who cares, it’s a fighter.

Ok so to the point, SF4 will definitely be one for the fans. That is evident from Leipzig. I hope that it will introduce a lot of new players too; by removing the parry system new challengers stand a better chance with the button bashing technique. The one player story will hopefully be enjoyable and have some good story for each character, although without question multiplayer is where this is at. Fingers crossed that we will see some unlockable characters that have not been announced; from the anime teaser we can see Goken (Ryu and Kens trainer) so hopefully we can see him for the first time usable.

Other than Ressi 5 and MegaMan 9 this is the Capcom title to watch this year. Ill be back with updates on other character in the next few days.

Now back to getting some practice with my many copies of Street Fighter 2 :D

5 Comments

Otacon August 22, 2008 Votes: +0	Very nice piece Dale. This has put some of my worrys to bed. Getting very excited by this. BTW next time, instead of a pic of you, how about the booth babes? report abuse vote down vote up
Manic August 22, 2008 Votes: +0	Tremendous work, i just wish that the arcade scene was still thriving. report abuse vote down vote up
DaleCantwell August 22, 2008 Votes: +0	Update: I went back for a second helping today. Got some Dalsihm action, he looks amazing, has this real jelly effect and has some new great punches and kicks. I also had a shot with Crimson Viper. I got hammered by a Sagat player, trying to figure out moves and mess around. She has a great unique fighting style. She produces the power of electricity with her left hand and the power of seismic shocks with her right. She uses a tech suit that has jets hidden her boots for fiery kicks and extra high boost jumps. Overall seems like a decent character. A genreal Street Fighter update, Cammy a new challenger from SF2 has now been anounced as a character in the home version of the games. Also worth noting that Akuma has been moved from a PC exclusive to a regular character, apparently he is a hidden boss in the arcade version. report abuse vote down vote up
Ciancr August 22, 2008 Votes: +0	Nice Hands on piece.Very well done.. report abuse vote down vote up
Kinetic August 23, 2008 Votes: +0	Can't wait for this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! report abuse vote down vote up