Leveling Down

Yes, I know that Sagat is arguably the best character in the game, but I don’t care. I need all the help I can get!

I picked up Street Fighter IV at launch last Tuesday, and have spent some time playing it. At first I was getting my butt kicked in the first few games I played online, and actually felt overwhelmed with the game thinking I couldn’t handle the kids these days. Part of the reason was because I didn’t want to play Ryu or Ken like everyone else, so I tried to learn Chun Li. I tried her out at a party I went to Friday night, but she didn’t do too hot. I felt like she needed to do so much work to do damage to the opponent. After talking/playing with my friend who’s been playing Street Fighter IV in the arcades for a while now, I tried out Sagat. The difference between Chun Li and Sagat was like night and day. With Chun Li I felt like I was just running around trying to get little kicks in here and there and slowly wearing away at my opponent’s life, but Sagat felt like a tank – slow, but outputting tons of damage. I realized the power of Sagat at the party that night, and have since gone on to do much better online with him.

Of the dozen or so ranked matches I played so far, it broke down about so: 2 Sagat, 2 Akuma, 1 Gouken, 5 Ken, 1 Dan, 1 Rufus, 1 Zangief, 1 Blanka, 1 Guile. Mostly shotos, although I’m surprised no one chose Ryu at all. The Dan player was a Japanese player, and when he was about to lose he disconnected. I think disconnectors still get a loss in the game so I don’t know why he did it – maybe to rob me of a win? Now that I’m actually winning some, I’m feeling pretty good about myself and the game. What a difference actually winning online makes!

My Background on Fighting Games
Like most of the guys in my gaming generation, we grew up with Street Fighter II as the first real fighting game. I didn’t really play it too much in arcades, but when it came out for Super NES my brother and I would sit and play against each other for hours. It’s crazy to think about it now how we’d just be mesmerized with only 8 playable characters but either we were just very young or maybe that’s a testament to how good the game was.

As the years went on, being a Street Fighter fan, I picked up the subsequent Capcom fighting games that continue to release on the Playstation: the Street Fighter Alpha games, Darkstalkers, etc. But the game that really piqued my fighting game interest was X-Men: Children of the Atom. Back in 1994 when Capcom released X-Men in the arcades, I was an avid comic book reader and collected all of those X-Men comics penciled by Jim Lee (and those freaking variant covers for X-Men #1). My family was overseas on vacation, and my brother and I ended up sinking several coins into Asian arcade cabinets playing as characters like Wolverine and Cyclops. Sadly, X-Men didn’t release to consoles until many years later, and was irrelevant with the much better X-Men vs. Street Fighter already out in Arcades.

While the older generation (maybe guys in their early 30s) remember sinking hundreds of quarters into Street Fighter II arcade cabinets, it wasn’t until the Capcom vs. games that had my brother and me often visiting local arcades looking for X-Men vs. Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter. It was a great bonding experience for us too, as those Capcom Vs. games would allow you to pick two characters and switch between them, and my brother and I would each use just one character so we’d physically switch who was playing the cabinet depending on the character out there.

I never owned a Saturn, so I never got to play the console versions of X-Men vs. Street Fighter (my favorite of the versus games) or Marvel vs. Street Fighter, but I knew a couple guys in college that had them and we played the games for hours when we should have probably been studying. Things didn’t get any better when I picked up a Dreamcast, and Capcom showed continuous fighting game love for the system with Marvel vs. Capcom, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Street Fighter III (and its three iterations), and Capcom vs SNK 1 & 2. I think after writing this up I now realize why I loved Capcom fighting games so much: the X-Men characters. In almost all of these versus games, I rarely, if ever, used a Capcom character except maybe Resident Evil’s Jill – otherwise it was pretty much Wolverine, Psylocke, Omega Red, or Cyclops.

Marvel vs Capcom 2 was perhaps the pinnacle of Capcom fighting games for me, as it had such a huge roster of cool characters and 3v3 combat. Since then, I could never really get into Street Fighter 3: Third Strike or Capcom vs SNK games because they left the flashy craziness of the Marvel universe and went back towards the technical gameplay of Street Fighter 2. Plus, by then I was pretty much out of college and didn’t have a steady group of friends to spend evenings playing fighting games against. Fighting games were pretty much either out of my life, or I was stuck playing offline only modes like Virtua Fighter 5′s extensive Quest mode.

When my brother visited me in the city months back, he wanted to go check out Street Fighter IV in the arcade since it was in Chinatown. I took him down there and was surprised how amazing the game looked, since it was running in HD and everything else looked like it was on 480i. I was shocked to see how bad my beloved Marvel vs Capcom 2 looked compared to the flowing graphics of Street Fighter IV. (I was also shocked to see that the Street Fighter cabinets were sit down, and only accepted $1 bills.) My brother played a few games and satisfied his curiousity for it, while I merely disregarded the game thinking “Maybe I’ll get it when it comes out for the 360 – but who would I even play with?”

Now I’ve actually picked up Street Fighter IV, a game that evokes a lot of Capcom fighting game nostalgia for me (as you have just read), so let’s see what I thought about it.

Hardware
Prior to picking up Street Fighter IV, I actually already had a Hori Arcade Stick (Dead or Alive 4 cover) for the 360 that I used for playing fighting games like Virtua Fighter 5 and Soul Calibur 4. When Street Fighter IV came out last Tuesday and I knew I was going to a house party Friday night, I decided to bring the game but realized that maybe I should get a second stick just so one player wasn’t stuck with a control pad. Since they’re out of print, I ended up having to do a lot of searching around town but finally found another Hori EX 2 Arcade Stick for $40 at a Gamestop. The Hori sticks are decent, but they have a square gate so the stick itself isn’t as “loose” as it is in the arcades. I certainly miss the loose feel of the sticks in the arcades that I grew up on, but the motions still work adequately on the Hori stick. The sticks seem to work best with 3D games that don’t require much motion on the stick itself, but seem fine for Street Fighter IV. The Hori sticks are also very good quality, and probably the best bang for the buck if you’re looking for a cheap yet decent arcade stick on the 360 and don’t want to pay the hundreds of dollars the limited MadCatz Street Fighter sticks are going for now.

People may wonder if this game is even playable on the 360 controller, since the 360′s D-Pad is not well ergonomically designed. The 360′s d-pad is too thick and not very responsive to fighting game motions so it gives you blisters after a while, unlike the PS2/PS3 controller. But you know, I tried playing Street Fighter IV with the controller and it’s honestly playable with the analog stick so you don’t have to kill your thumb. My biggest gripe with controllers over joysticks is honestly not the D-Pad, but the fact that there’s only four face buttons so two of your six attacks are always mapped to the L and/or R buttons. But I guess the advantage to having those L & R button maps is that you also have maps for all three punch and all three kick too. I played a few rounds and got used to the controller. I was doing supers with the analog stick with no problems. In fact, I feel like the smoothness of the analog stick on the controller works better than my Hori stick for doing the actual movement motions like double fireball, etc. but the arcade stick has the six big buttons. So really, it’s a trade-off – given the choice, I prefer to sacrifice a little bit of analog movement just so I can have my right hand over six face buttons, but if you’re fine with attack buttons mapped to L & R, you may want to just stick with the controller.

There’s also a fighting game pad from MadCatz out as well that is the size of a controller but has six face buttons like the Sega Saturn controller. I can’t use those things though because my thumb just can’t handle all six face buttons and I end up playing one of those things like a mini arcade stick by resting my actual fingers on the face buttons of the controller. Silly stuff – I’d rather just use a joystick in that case.

What I’ve played so far
So far in the Arcade Mode, I’ve beaten the game on Medium with Ryu and Sagat, and gone through the game on Easiest with all characters required to unlock the hidden characters – all except Seth, which requires all characters to have beaten the game. I’ve tried my hand at some of the Training challenges in the game, and have actually ended up getting stuck at a few of them. Also about halfway through the normal Time Attack and in a few rounds into the Survival mode. Finally, I’ve also played the game on versus play locally, as well as some ranked and unranked matches online. I’ll split up my thoughts on the things I liked and didn’t like from the time I’ve spent.

What I liked
Overall presentation
The game looks awesome. For Street Fighter 2 fans, this really feels like the next iteration of the game (and for some, like myself, think this should have been what Street Fighter 3 was). It has enough of the old school feel combined with an awesome new look that should pull in anyone that played Street Fighter 2 when they were younger. While the “pop music” for the intro movie and menu may annoy some, I felt pumped after watching the lengthy intro and wanted to get right into it. I wish there were more pronounced tunes though, as I fondly remember loving the background music on the Ryu, Guile, and Sakura stages in the older games. I think I heard Ryu’s classic background music once, but all the music is so soft that I had to really listen for it. A nice touch though is that you’re able to choose between Japanese and English voices for each character individually – so you can have Ken speaking English while Ryu speaks Japanese.

I also thought it was cool how the camera zooms in when you pull off a super move. If it connects and takes down the opponent, the screen flashes in a blaze of fiery glory and it commands attention. One guy I fought at the party I was at over the weekend beat me two rounds to one, but one girl was like, “Even though you lost, the one round you beat him in was with a Super Combo finish. That was awesome!” (Sorry guys, she’s already taken.)

Icons and Titles
While there’s no single player quest mode in Street Fighter IV like the Virtua Fighter games or older Soul Calibur games, Capcom has instead decided to push for online personas. And that’s kind of a decent consolation to me. As much as I am against online play for fighting games, I’m in the minority. Part of me just feels uncomfortable playing 1v1 against a complete stranger. It’s not like we’re playing together and we should be friendly so that we can work together, but instead, we’re trying to kill each other. That’s just awkward in my opinion and why I never put on my mic when I play online versus games. What do you say when you’re winning or losing against the other player?

Anyway, I kind of went off on a tangent there, but the Icon and Title system actually is almost a breadcrumb trail to getting me to want to get better and playing online. This is because at a very simple level, it’s like the Call of Duty 4 unlock system. Every player online is able to sport a customizable icon and title, but the only ones you can choose from are unlocked based on your accomplishments online and offline. All of these come from either playing and winning matches online through various outcomes or completing the Time Trials/Challenge modes of the single player game. It works to really lengthen the game from a multiplayer and singleplayer standpoint because you are being rewarded with new custom icons and titles for every little accomplishment you do in the game, lengthening it considerably. I’m guessing if you wanted to unlock all of the Icons and Titles from just offline play, you’d probably have to put in several dozens of hours and learn every character.

What Could Be Better
The Online Setup
While it may seem like I have several “dislikes” of the game, they’re all honestly minor compared to this major one: the online. In this game you’re allowed to play online through either Ranked or Player Match games. Player Match games allow you to continuously play against the same player as long as both players want, while Ranked forces you to quit right after the match (probably to prevent boosting). One innovative feature to this game is the ability to set your status to “challengable” when you are playing single player, so you can still play while waiting for a match instead of just waiting at the lobby screen.

I’ve probably played about 20 matches online so far, and what I could never understand was the matchmaking algorithm. When my friend wanted to play an online match on Friday night at about 9PM, we weren’t able to find any games on Ranked or Player Match. He ended up accepting a 1 bar latency match, since that was the only thing that showed up after several minutes of searching. After that one match that stuttered every second, we decided to just forget our hopes of playing online. But then when I played over a dozen matches last night online, everything was perfect.

The difference was that when I was with my friend we were actually looking for a game through Custom Games and we found basically none. Yet when I played last night, after I set my flag to challengable and went into single player, I kept getting challenged by other players and had perfect lag free matches. So what gives? Are the two pooling from different groups? Am I only fighting against other players that set their rank to challengable too and not from the players that are simply creating rooms and waiting? Part of me suspects yes, because when I get challenged, most of the time I’m the 1P side, so I’m the host, but every once in a while I’m the 2P side when I get challenged, which means I joined someone else’s game. Maybe there really is some sort of matchmaking algorithm in place.

In any case, based on the time I’ve spent playing online, I would recommend skipping the custom game or quick match searches and just flagging yourself as challengable in either Ranked or Player matches. That way you can just keep playing the Arcade mode while waiting for people to challenge you. I got challenged by 7 players in a row before I even got to beat my first AI opponent last night, before the stream of challengers stopped. I wish I could be challengable when doing other stuff, like Time Trials and Survival, but Arcade mode is certainly better than just waiting around in a lobby.

I also desperately hope that Street Fighter IV eventually supports 4-player lobbies like Dead or Alive 4, Street Fighter HD Remix or Super Puzzle Fighter. In those games, four players can join a room, and while only two play against each other, all four watch and can talk and take turns playing winner, making each room an online virtual arcade. Street Fighter IV does not have any of that. That’s the biggest thing that annoys me right now about online. I want to play with my friends! Several of my friends got it but none of us can even share our time together since we’re forced to only play 1v1 at a time. There’s no social online element to the game, and for those that just came right off of Street Fighter HD Remix, it’s probably even more of a letdown.

Seth
The are a lot of complaints and frustrations with regards to the boss in this game, Seth. Honestly, I don’t necessarily agree with all of the complaints since I do think the boss of a game should be difficult or borderline cheap so when you beat him it feels more like an accomplishment. But what I don’t stand for is how he’s still ridiculously difficult even on the easiest difficulty settings. I beat the game on Medium difficulty first, and then decided to go through it on the Easiest difficulty with all of the necessary characters just so I could unlock the hidden characters. Boy was I in for a surprise with Seth since I was simply coasting my way through all of the other characters. It’s almost like his difficulty is not changed at all. But still, you learn to deal with him with enough time.

Training/Challenge Mode
The Challenge mode is pretty cool in that it shows you unique moves and combos for each character, but what I didn’t like at all was that there was no explanation or even video of how to do the moves. I’m stuck on certain moves in the Challenge Mode just because I don’t understand the timing of the combo and/or its relevance whereas in Virtua Fighter 4 and 5, I was taught when to use particular moves and I could always hit the Replay button to see the timing behind each move/combo. And the worst part is that you can’t move on to the next move to try to learn just because you’re stuck on a particular one. This Challenge Mode in Street Fighter IV really is just a challenge mode, and not a realistic way to learn how to play a character. Now I have to resort to watching YouTube videos to understand what I’m supposed to do for the challenges.

Difficult Supers
I wonder if one of the reasons most people end up playing the shoto characters (Ryu, Ken, etc.) is because their moves are the easiest to pull off. Fireball motion and shoryuken motions are not bad and can honestly be used pretty often. Then there’s several characters that are charge based, like Guile and Chun-Li where you have to either hold back for two seconds and then hit forward, or down for two seconds and then hit up. Granted, maybe there are players that are good at dealing with those inputs, but I just find it a hassle that you have to struggle with the controls to perform a move that you want to do. It gets even worse with super moves – several have simple double fireball motions followed by pressing all three punch buttons, but even then that can get out of hand. Half the time I was pulling out EX Shoryukens instead of an Ultra Combo, which frustrated me since I didn’t think I should be struggling with simply trying to get the moves out. And for the supers of the charge based characters – forget it. Check out Guile’s super: Down-back, Down-forward, Down-back, Up-forward. What is that? Is that at all intuitive to use? It would have been much easier if Street Fighter IV captured the Marvel vs. Capcom Super control set, which was one single fireball motion and all three punch buttons instead of two fireball motions. It’s not like the single fireball motion and three punch buttons is even assigned to anything else in Street Fighter IV, so it could have worked! (I would probably assign the Super move as a fireball motion with the Light Kick and Light Punch). Still, this is really just a minor gripe of mine and not that big of a deal.

The new characters
I’m a little bit disappointed with the character design of the new characters – C.Viper, Sean, Rufus, and El Fuerte. They just don’t seem to fit in well with the rest of the Street Fighter crowd. I didn’t find any of them interesting to play as, and I remember reading somewhere that someone complained that they were rejects out of an SNK game or something. I couldn’t agree more.

I’m also annoyed that Dee Jay and T.Hawk were not included in the game. They include Fei Long and Cammy but leave out the other two characters from Super Street Fighter 2? It’s awfully nice of Capcom to say that they will bring those characters to the game if there is enough demand for them. Of course, I won’t be paying for them just like I don’t pay for any other DLC publishers charge for these days. *Sigh* Capcom is already charging us for alternate costumes for the characters that are already physically included on the disc as well.

Parting Impressions
While it seems like I’m complaining more about the game than applauding it, the honest truth is I like the game a lot. I spent several hours last night playing it and didn’t want to stop. Some of my complaints may not necessarily be reasonable (like the ‘Difficult Supers’ one), but there are all sorts of niggling little things that add up to make me feel like it’s not as good as it could have been – the 4-player lobby being a big example. In any case, it’s definitely playable online and I’m actually enjoying this game a lot more than when I bought Soul Calibur IV. If you are a Street Fighter 2 fan and are curious about whether this game is good or not, it’s unquestionably great and worth the purchase. For those on the fence, realize that while the gameplay is a little more accessible than other fighting games out there, it’s only going to be worth getting if you think you want to play it online. Most of the time you’re expected to spend in the single player affair is actually devoted to learning every single character, rather than just getting good at a particular one. If any of you also have the game, please feel free to share your thoughts too!

Be Sociable, Share!

•