Dale Cantwell – LIVE from Leipzig GC:

Before getting into this its worth noting that I am a massive Street Fighter fan, ill try consider those who find the street fighter series has a very high entry point but you can count this as a fan opinion.

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!

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.

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