Street Fighter IV
For gamers in their mid-twenties and beyond, one name and one game alone is synonymous with the one-on-one fighting genre: Street Fighter 2.
Following the game’s gigantic success in the arcades in the early nineties, it went on to glue itself to Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive console cart slots in literally hundreds of thousands of homes around the world. Ryu and Ken are as representative of the videogame medium as Mario and Luigi and Sonic and Tails and even if your parents couldn’t name Chun-Li, Guile and Dhalsim, chances are they might at least recognise them.
Since Street Fighter 2 the series has tumbled its way through a huge array of releases with increasingly convoluted subtitles, from the fast and frantic Street Fighter Alpha spin-offs to the terrifyingly complex grace of Street Fighter 3: Third Strike. These releases may have intensified the competitive intricacy of the franchise (indeed, Third Strike is a firm favourite in the cash-prize competition circuit) but every single addition to the formula has shrunk the pool of players who feel confident with the game.
In response to this, Street Fighter 4, released into arcades and onto Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC later in the year, is a return to the simplicity and wonder of the second game. Air blocks and parries have been removed to simplify things. Virtually every combo and counter works as they did back in the day. As a result gamers with latent muscle memory will be immediately at home with the game, slipping into moves and complex joystick manipulations as if they were a pair of comfortable old slippers.
That’s not to say that there are no new features, just that they build on the original’s template rather than redefine it. For example, tapping two buttons at once will use up a quarter of the Super Gauge with an enhanced special move such as a double fireball, resilient enough to pass through other projectiles. The ‘Super Cancel’ is harder to execute, requiring the player to input the exact same button sequence used to instigate a special twice in a row, in order to cancel the first and trigger a second, even more impressive attack.
‘Ultra moves’ can only be triggered once a certain amount of life has been lost but these offer the biggest payoffs, dazzling the player in a flurry of close-up angles and particle effects, emptying the rival’s life bar in doing so. With a slew of new characters (including new boss character Seth, CEO of M. Bison’s new weapons division) plans for downloadable content as well as, of course, online play, Street Fighter 4 promises a beat ‘em up revival the likes so which hasn’t been seen for many, many years.
