Played on:
Xbox 360
It's been more than a decade since Capcom officially released their last major Street Fighter sequel. After the last ten years of innovations in the fighting game genre, where games got more and more complex, building upon massive libraries of literally hundreds of moves for each character, Capcom seems to have their finger on the pulse of what made fighting games so addictive in the first place. Sure, connoisseurs will easily understand and appreciate the depth present in many modern-day fighting games like Virtua Fighter 5 and Soul Calibur IV, but casual gamers shy away from these titles because they're so overwhelmingly intimidating. Just one glance at a move list will make your head spin, making it feel like you're undertaking computer surgery rather than beating the other guy's face to a pulp.
Capcom understands this, and has made Street Fighter IV exactly for the people who want to play fighting games but want to play rather than spend time practicing moves for months before taking on a real live opponent. It's accessible, it's easy, it pulls from your knowledge of the Street Fighter classics, and when you're ready, there's a ton of depth that you'll start figuring out once you start playing more and more. And with Capcom's fantastic online play, it's easier than ever to find that depth and share it - with a kick to their face, of course - with the other people playing over the internet.
Street Fighter IV is rendered in full 3D, but it still plays on a classic 2D plane. It's got all 12 of the game's original characters, as well as two of the four added in Super Turbo (Cammy and Fei Long are here; T.Hawk and Dee Jay are gone) along with several characters that are either pulled from the Alpha games or are entirely new. The roster adds up to a hell of a lot of interesting and fun styles, and plenty new to dive into while still allowing experienced players of classic games to get a good start. Yes, the Shoryuken is still forward, down, down-forward and punch, Guile's Sonic Booms are still how you remember, and M.Bison's Psycho Crusher is still here. But you'll find that as you start playing your favorite character, there have been many masterful and subtle balancing passes applied to the game - SFIV did spend many months getting hammered by expert players in American and Japanese arcades before its console release - that make this one of the most polished fighting games ever made.
That's not to say that every character is just as powerful as any other. No, in fact there is a level of purposeful imbalance here, which the expert players quickly will dice up into "tiers" - characters like the series' punching bag Dan are clearly bottom-tier, while Sagat, Ken, and Ryu inhabit the top two tiers. This is actually good for the game overall, as it means that without inducing an actual handicap function, a good player can pick a worse character to try and bring himself down to his opponent's level, and possibly humiliate an equal-level opponent as well. What's important is that most characters are at least close in power so that at least most are getting regular play most of the time. And so far, I've found that to be true.
One issue with the Street Fighter series is that the controls have never really worked that well on consoles. Very few console manufacturers since the 16-bit era have put together a well-performing controller with six buttons on the face, something that any serious player will agree is an absolute must for playing a fighting game more than casually. Look at the current generation of controllers: the 360 gamepad has four buttons on the face plus four up top, forcing the player to pick two attacks and assign them up there - plus, its D-pad is infamously inaccurate, something most people playing fighting games on Xbox Live Arcade have already figured out. The PS3's D-pad is better, but the buttons still have the same issue. Capcom has teamed up with MadCatz to fix the problem by offering new gamepads and fighting sticks, but they're not really budget-minded. My recommendation is to scour some of your favorite game stores and try and find a Hori Arcade Fighting Stick for around $50-60. (This goes for either PS3 or 360 - and a PS2 controller is fine, even on a PS3, if you use a standard PS2 to USB converter).
