Super Street Fighter IV Review

9.5

Format Xbox 360

Developer Capcom

Publisher Capcom

Genre Beat 'em Up

12 Comments

Guile got shafted in Street Fighter IV. Crap hair, crap wishy-washy colours, no 'go home and be a family man', and a crap Ultra with wrist-cranking execution which made it so much less-than-useful that it went around the horn and became useful again as a humiliating finish to one-sided fights. Super SFIV fixes none of these massively important faults but that doesn't matter because now Guile can fight with his shades on. Aw yeah.

Down + HP + HK is the trigger to whip those shades out and fight in style, and the same again will whip 'em off for less style. Its awesomeness is only trumped by his awesome new Flash Kicks which actually work as semi-decent air defence and his awesome new Ultra which fills half the screen with a gigantic whirling Sonic Boom for idiots to land on while you're
backing away. It even dishes out decent chip damage if you're shit and don't whack it on the end of a little combo. Thanks, Capcom!

In Super Street Fighter IV everything is more awesome. El Fuerte gets better and more awesome, Sagat gets worse and more awesome, Dan is suddenly a viable character and more awesome, and Ryu's new Ultra Combo punches jaws over noses and makes him even more awesome. Tiny tweaks on SFIV's 25 characters have given almost everyone the tools they need to be contenders, and that was more than enough to earn SSFIV a 95 from us. But Capcom didn't stop there.

PUNCH HOUR
It's still the same game of one-on-one, best-out-of-three, fist-on-face, boot-on-balls, ultra-competitive Street Fighting you'd remember from last year, and very much the same game you'd remember from 1991 if you weren't such a youthful young buck filled with vim and vigour and the bullets of a dozen Xbox 360 shooters.

Those were the glory days when every night was spent fighting elbow-to-elbow and every day was spent arguing about who was the best. There were other fighters - Mortal Kombat, Samurai Shodown - but it was the annual Street Fighter update which gave every school playground on Earth something new to argue about for the next twelve months. Super
Street Fighter IV is one of those updates for a generation which has porn on e-tap and doesn't care if you can see Chun Li's pants when you pause the game, and one that takes 'arcade perfect' for granted. Today's gamer cares about bigger things - can you play with groups of friends online? Can you save and share replays? Can you enter online tournaments? Can you fight in teams? Can you play winner-stays-on fights with seven other players like it's 1991 and you're smoking with the big kids in the arcade instead of it being 2010 with your wife telling you to lay the table?

Yes, you can. Sure, SSFIV rebalances most of the bits you hated and gives new players ten more chances to not be Ken, but take the game online and it's a whole new world. Where SFIV offered up on-on-one fisticuffs, simple tournaments, and replays for the top thousand players, SSFIV is the game every online fighter should be.

Turn on the new Replay Channel and you can browse replays shared by your Friends List or by the best players in the world. You can browse by character and keyword and even put down your controller and leave the channel running while it selects fights for you to enjoy. SSFIV still does the traditional piss-poor job of explaining itself to new players endemic to all fighters, but in the replay channel you have the best tutorial imaginable. Pick your favourite characters and you'll see what they should look like when played by the world's best. You watch, you learn, you go online and batter your friends.

In Street Fighter IV you'd meet with a friend online and fight one-on-one, but fighting games are best with an audience so SSFIV has got you sorted on that front, too. Hop online and you can jump into eight-man lobbies, where two players fight and the other six watch; the winner stays on and the next man rotates in. Online is still the second-best way to play Street Fighter, just behind 'with friends in the same room' - but we're grown-ups now and so are you, and the last time we saw seven of our friends in the same place was our 21st birthday. When getting a gang together to play Street Fighter, cuss, and eat Wotsits, SSFIV offers up every possible way you'd want to play with friends at a distance, for the express purpose of simply being more awesome.

In its desperation to fix everything wrong with Street Fighter IV's online options, the Super update has scrimped on the single-player content and dropped most of the original's trial games. There's nothing to rival Alpha 3's RPG-style world tour mode or Soul Calibur II's adventure game, and there's nothing to touch the original's Time Trials and Endurance challenges either. The old Training mode returns, now broken down into smaller
slices so you'll never get stuck on a single combo, but it still doesn't show you what the combos should look like and still spends most of its time on flashy tosh you'd never use in a real fight. It's like being taught martial arts by Jean-Claude Van Damme - sure, you can do the splits above an electrified floor but you're rubbish at getting out of the way when someone tries to nut you.

PUNCH DRUNK LOVE
The Arcade mode gets all-new and all-rubbish animated sequences which you'll skip past and never see, and two new bonus games you'll play once then disable in the options menu forever. The computer still plays a monstro-cheesy game and Seth is even tougher and cheaper than he was in SFIV, only serving to remind you just how little you should be playing Street Fighter IV alone. Any fun you manage to have on your own is just a bonus - Arcade mode is lonely self-pleasure; multiplayer is hardcore sex Tiger Woods-style, and SSFIV has the multiplayer bases covered in a way SFIV never even attempted.

This is a better game when you're all squished into the same room too, what with all those tweaks to the original cast and the ten new faces. Ripped straight from Street Fighter II, III, and the Alpha games, the new crew offer even more options when you're picking your guy. Ibuki and Dudley have more two-hit target combos than Mike Tyson, T. Hawk has been massively upgraded and given a fireball counter or two, Adon is Cammy with an overhead and a huge Jimmy Hill chin, and Cody has the most annoying special move in videogame history with his Zonk Knuckle. Meanwhile, actually new-to-Street-Fighter fighters Hakan and Juri are exactly what modern fighting game characters should be. They're both entirely unique and ridiculously flashy show-off types who don't require tonnes of ultra high-end execution to make look any good.

The best fighting games of the last couple of years are undoubtedly Street Fighter IV and Blazblue, with Blazblue scoring points by feeling hyper-modern and Street Fighter chalking up its own points by feeling so sturdy and robust - or 'old' if you're being mean. Newer guys like the Third Strike and SFIV newcomers El Fuerte, Rufus, Viper, and Juri show what a fighting game character can be like even within Street Fighter's ruleset; they're all modern characters who all feel like modern characters in a game whose 'rules' are almost twenty years old.

And that's why Super Street Fighter IV is as outrageously awesome it is. It's a fighting game tested to destruction by every gamer who lived through the nineties, dragged up to date and near perfected for 2009, then loaded with even more characters, stages, and online modes in 2010. It's been around forever and brings with it everything you'd expect from a true classic - bags of polish, a brilliant community, and a huge dose of nostalgia.

It's still the one fighting game even non-fighting gamers can enjoy. There's something instinctive and natural about Street Fighter that most fighting games never even touch. Where Tekken and Soul Calibur defy your expectations with their motions, animations, and fighting systems, SSFIV feels right so that when you hit forward, down, down-forward and any punch, you know what the result will be every time. It's consistent, it's measurable, and it's the best fighting game ever* - but now even more awesome.