Tetsuo_Shima
In Cryo Sleep
Does anybody around here play this awesome game online at all? If so, how'd you like to spar a little?
(X360) Street Fighter IV
- Thread starter Tetsuo_Shima
- Start date
OMFG! TETSUO! Good to see ya!
I haven't got SFIV as I've not really been into fighting games since the PS2; somehow they haven't grabbed me. This one worth a look?
I haven't got SFIV as I've not really been into fighting games since the PS2; somehow they haven't grabbed me. This one worth a look?
waterproofbob
Junior Administrator
My boss just got this, was going to wait to see what he thought of it.
Also hey look it's Tetsuo
Also hey look it's Tetsuo
Tetsuo_Shima
In Cryo Sleep
Aye, here I am 
Well, I guess it's just the same as any other Street Fighter game, Ronin - incredibly fun, surprisingly deep and marvellously refined BUT only if you've got someone to play it with.
The first thing that strikes me about SF4 is how amazingly stylish it is, it literally oozes with sheen and cool. Since the dawn of time, there have only been two series of games that it's socially acceptable to be good at - Pro Evo Soccer and Street Fighter - and SF4 is by no means an exception. From the amazingly edited intro video to the last SHORYUKEN! before a KO, everything looks and feels and sounds like it was master crafted to perfection.
The realisation of the characters into 3d is better than any snooty SF2 anorak dare hope; their cel-shaded torsos and biceps and kimonos look razor sharp, and the semi-comical faces are bursting with expressions of anguish, delight, malice and obsession. The battle arenas have had no less attention paid to them, ranging from a suitably oriental-themed candlelit martial arts temple, to a grand, garish display on a cruise ship, to a breathtaking face-off in front of an erupting volcano; you won't go hungry for exciting locales to fight.
The sounds are equally impressive, familiar Sonic Booms! and Hadokens! and Spinning Bird Kicks! mingle with the stomping fight-music for an electrifying experience. Also of note is the fact that the fight intro voiceovers are not lip synched in the slightest, and I think that was deliberate. Either Capcom thought it was 'traditional' in some way, or they thought that fans would only care for the fighting and not for silly intros or taunts (at least, not enough to waste any time synching them to perfection). It's something to share a laugh about, but not in the 'Jesus, Capcom. That's awful!' way, more in a 'Now I know I'm playing a Street Fighter game!' kind of fashion.
The only thing that gets mildly annoying is the announcer's babble during the fight splash loading screens. There's only so many times you can appreciate him exclaiming "May the weak perish and the strong survive! WHO WILL PROVE THE OLD AXIOM TODAY!?!?!", then it starts to become weary. Actually, WHO WILL PROVE THE OLD AXIOM TODAY?!?! has already become a catchphrase in my mates flat
So, Capcom have definitely nailed the presentation down well enough to please Street Fighter fans old and new, but what about the fighters? Well, you've got your timeless favourites like Hadoken-spitting Ryu and Ken, button-bashing heroes E. Honda and Chun Li and basically all that old gang. Immediately you're drawn to your favourites from older Street Fighter games, and you're pleased to find that everything is the way it should be, including the fact that Shoryuken!s are still reassuringly difficult to pull off in earnest!
Now the sticky bit, there are 4 new characters available to you from the off - suave female secret service agent C. Viper (replete with barely-concealed jigglies), crazy cooking-obsessed El Fuerte, fat-yet-surprisingly-nimble Rufus (very annoying, though) and a-typical mysterious-past bloke Abel. Of all of those characters, only Abel has much promise of becoming a Street Fighter mainstay, in my opinion. His stereotypical nature and hardman cool actually work in his favour (plus, he's solid), whereas the other three are either a bit too bland (C. Viper), annoying (Rufus) or outlandish (El Fuerte) to have any chance of building up a fan base. Of course, I might be wrong (Rufus definitely has some potential to be devastating, in the right hands) but I guess that'll always be the way with Street Fighter - characters come, characters go, Ryu and Ken live on forever.
From a purely personal point of view, I'd really like to have seen Vulcano Rosso from the Street Fighter EX2 series given another starring slot, he was quite a popular character back then (and my favourite at the time). Still, with 16 characters initially available, and another 9 to unlock through arcade mode, you're spoilt for choice as it is.
Which brings me nicely on to one of the weaker points of the game - arcade mode. It's the same-old same-old arcade mode from yesteryear, basically six or seven straight fights against CPU opponents, then a rival fight and, finally, a fight against the game's final boss. That isn't too bad in itself, nobody was expecting a stellar single-player campaign in a SF game, it's just a shame that the bastardo final boss takes the fun out of it.
When you start initially there's a short anime reel unique to each character, detailing the 'story' behind each of the fighters and their reasons for beating up other people to a bloody pulp. They're vaguely interesting, but the shady dubbing removes any semblence of involvement you might have had with the characters' sympathies. After that it's your eight (or so) bouts with various characters, culminating in a Rival Challenge where you learn a little about the history betwen you character and your rival (for example, Ryu faces off against his old adversary, Sagat). After breaking his spine in several places and sending him off to hospital with third-degree hadoken burns, the final boss (Seth) rears his ugly (and shiny. Very shiny.) head. This is where any fun you might have had getting past the previous eight characters evaporates.
Unless you fiddled with the settings (which my mate did, changing it to one-bout fights to quicken character unlocks) there should be at least two bouts per fight, best of three. In the first of these Seth is a pushover, mostly since he doesn't use any special moves, but after knocking him down once he rises again, like the phoenix, except a hell of a lot fecking harder. All of a sudden the fight becomes a washout as Seth warps rapidly around the arena, swooping in from time to time to administer one of several powered-up versions of other characters' special moves. His version of shoryuken hits about seven bloody times, and it's almost impossible to dodge.
What it all amounts to is using about a hundred continues, watching your ass get thrown at you forcefully 99 times and then getting extremely lucky on the hundredth - and landing a punch. Then you repeat it another 500 times til you get doubly lucky, KO the bastard and then retreat to the four white walls of your kitchen for a healthy swig of strong spirits. After that, you are at liberty to repeat the process with the character you just unlocked. Hooray!
It's a crying shame, that, because in the battles leading up to the final you can get a really hard and fair fight out of the computer on easy or medium mode when you know your way around the character you're playing. Ryu and Guile's rival fights are really tense, hard-fought battles of wills which are a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
The only remedy to the problem is to bite the bullet (punch?) and fire the difficulty down to 'easiest', which is a total walkover but at least makes the Seth fight possible in one fight.
That minor grumble aside (and it is minor, because the chances are that, if you bought this game, you'll mostly be playing versus battles with your chums anyway. Am I right?) when you put the game to it's potential and get some buddies round with a few packs of lager, you can have a sensational night of fun just by trying to pull off the Ultra combos on each other, failing, complaining about the controller and then laughing about it.
I realise this is becoming quite the tome, so I'll summarise the rest of it in a few short ... paragraphs. Outside of arcade mode you've got a couple of other choices to make. You got your ubiquitous versus, where you can beat up your chummies to your hearts content, online modes where you can participate in ranked or fun matches (I haven't tried this yet, which was kind of why I started this thred in the first place. I hear the netcode is good, though), training mode for practicing those hard-to-master combos and then challenge mode for something a bit different. The challenges include time-trials and survival, but the most interesting (and useful) are the trials, where you get a chance to unleash your characters special moves and combos out on a poor, but (thankfully) stoic Dan. Really good practise that, handy for nailing down the more complicated pieces of finery you can pull off.
As far as the fight mechanics go themselves, it's just basically that same special-move centric Street Fighter premise they've been churning out for decades (hadoken, shoryuken, flash kick, hundred hand slap et al) but with a couple of exciting, and handy, additions. First are the combo/revenge gauges at the bottom of the screen. the combo gauge consists of four segments which slowly fill up with electric blue as you land attacks on the other player. Fill one segment up and you can use it to power up one of your special moves. Fill the whole thing up and you can unleash the powerful super-combo for each character. Super-combos don't tend to get used that much, since you end up continually using segments of the gauge to pull of the powered-up moves.
The revenge gauge, on the other hand, fills up when you take hits, and when it reaches at least halfway full you can unleash the devastating Ultra Combo for each character by inputting a suitably complicated and potentially spaz-inducing series of commands. Some are better than others (Ryu's Metsu Hadoken is both hard to land and not terribly damaging, whereas Abel's Soulless has the potential to remove half a healthbar from some of the weaker characters).
The other new mechanic is the Focus attack system, where you hold down the med punch and med kick buttons together to charge up an attack which can cripple the enemy. More importantly, whilst the attack is charging you can absorb one (and only one) hit from the opponent to negate the damage. It's a suitably flashy little move that can come in handy for those who have practised their technique (ahem).
Finally (and I do mean finally), the controls. Well, I'm stuck with the X360's wholly unsuitable analog stick to pull off these crazy zig-zag charge manouvres, and it's really not up to much cop. I've gotten used to it a bit now, pulling off shoryukens and ultra-combos at will, but you will find that there are critical moments where you need to rely on precise controller movements to seal a combo and then fall flat on your face as you get that analog spin a fraction off the sweet spot. It's ok when your adversary is experiencing the same technical difficulties, mind you!
The only solution to this is to buy a control pad (or stick) you are comfy with. Arcade sticks cost a fortune, but are reputedly quite effective. There's a megadrive style controller from madcatz out as well for those who are used to SF2 style 16-bit move inputting. Since I've played both the 360 and PS3 versions, I can tell you that the PS3 pad beats the X360 one marginally by having a better directional pad and a stick with less travel and resistance. Not much between em, though.
OK, time to wrap it up. Basically, it is the next step in the Street Fighter franchise. It's got everything you could think to want from an SF, or indeed, any fighting game. The hit detection is refined to the point of being scalpel sharp, the visuals are just as easily liable to pare flesh and underneath everything it's got that undefineable Street Fighter aura which makes you feel like the happiest man (or woman) on earth as you land that killer, flaming Shoryureppa! to send your opponent into a spectacular, eye-searing KO. Maybe the most defining thing for me was this - my mate and I were playing last night at his flat, and we're both proficient enough at pulling off the moves and the deft handiwork to make the fight look good. And there were his other two flatmates sitting there spectating us, declining an offer to play themselves, not because they didn't like the game, but because they were so enchanted by the sheer awesomeness occuring on the flatscreen LCD in front of them they preferred just to observe. Oh yeah, this is Street Fighter alright.
P.S. This happens to be the first time in maybe a year that I've agreed with a Eurogamer 10/10 review. Check it out.
Well, I guess it's just the same as any other Street Fighter game, Ronin - incredibly fun, surprisingly deep and marvellously refined BUT only if you've got someone to play it with.
The first thing that strikes me about SF4 is how amazingly stylish it is, it literally oozes with sheen and cool. Since the dawn of time, there have only been two series of games that it's socially acceptable to be good at - Pro Evo Soccer and Street Fighter - and SF4 is by no means an exception. From the amazingly edited intro video to the last SHORYUKEN! before a KO, everything looks and feels and sounds like it was master crafted to perfection.
The realisation of the characters into 3d is better than any snooty SF2 anorak dare hope; their cel-shaded torsos and biceps and kimonos look razor sharp, and the semi-comical faces are bursting with expressions of anguish, delight, malice and obsession. The battle arenas have had no less attention paid to them, ranging from a suitably oriental-themed candlelit martial arts temple, to a grand, garish display on a cruise ship, to a breathtaking face-off in front of an erupting volcano; you won't go hungry for exciting locales to fight.
The sounds are equally impressive, familiar Sonic Booms! and Hadokens! and Spinning Bird Kicks! mingle with the stomping fight-music for an electrifying experience. Also of note is the fact that the fight intro voiceovers are not lip synched in the slightest, and I think that was deliberate. Either Capcom thought it was 'traditional' in some way, or they thought that fans would only care for the fighting and not for silly intros or taunts (at least, not enough to waste any time synching them to perfection). It's something to share a laugh about, but not in the 'Jesus, Capcom. That's awful!' way, more in a 'Now I know I'm playing a Street Fighter game!' kind of fashion.
The only thing that gets mildly annoying is the announcer's babble during the fight splash loading screens. There's only so many times you can appreciate him exclaiming "May the weak perish and the strong survive! WHO WILL PROVE THE OLD AXIOM TODAY!?!?!", then it starts to become weary. Actually, WHO WILL PROVE THE OLD AXIOM TODAY?!?! has already become a catchphrase in my mates flat
So, Capcom have definitely nailed the presentation down well enough to please Street Fighter fans old and new, but what about the fighters? Well, you've got your timeless favourites like Hadoken-spitting Ryu and Ken, button-bashing heroes E. Honda and Chun Li and basically all that old gang. Immediately you're drawn to your favourites from older Street Fighter games, and you're pleased to find that everything is the way it should be, including the fact that Shoryuken!s are still reassuringly difficult to pull off in earnest!
Now the sticky bit, there are 4 new characters available to you from the off - suave female secret service agent C. Viper (replete with barely-concealed jigglies), crazy cooking-obsessed El Fuerte, fat-yet-surprisingly-nimble Rufus (very annoying, though) and a-typical mysterious-past bloke Abel. Of all of those characters, only Abel has much promise of becoming a Street Fighter mainstay, in my opinion. His stereotypical nature and hardman cool actually work in his favour (plus, he's solid), whereas the other three are either a bit too bland (C. Viper), annoying (Rufus) or outlandish (El Fuerte) to have any chance of building up a fan base. Of course, I might be wrong (Rufus definitely has some potential to be devastating, in the right hands) but I guess that'll always be the way with Street Fighter - characters come, characters go, Ryu and Ken live on forever
. From a purely personal point of view, I'd really like to have seen Vulcano Rosso from the Street Fighter EX2 series given another starring slot, he was quite a popular character back then (and my favourite at the time). Still, with 16 characters initially available, and another 9 to unlock through arcade mode, you're spoilt for choice as it is.
Which brings me nicely on to one of the weaker points of the game - arcade mode. It's the same-old same-old arcade mode from yesteryear, basically six or seven straight fights against CPU opponents, then a rival fight and, finally, a fight against the game's final boss. That isn't too bad in itself, nobody was expecting a stellar single-player campaign in a SF game, it's just a shame that the bastardo final boss takes the fun out of it.
When you start initially there's a short anime reel unique to each character, detailing the 'story' behind each of the fighters and their reasons for beating up other people to a bloody pulp. They're vaguely interesting, but the shady dubbing removes any semblence of involvement you might have had with the characters' sympathies. After that it's your eight (or so) bouts with various characters, culminating in a Rival Challenge where you learn a little about the history betwen you character and your rival (for example, Ryu faces off against his old adversary, Sagat). After breaking his spine in several places and sending him off to hospital with third-degree hadoken burns, the final boss (Seth) rears his ugly (and shiny. Very shiny.) head. This is where any fun you might have had getting past the previous eight characters evaporates.
Unless you fiddled with the settings (which my mate did, changing it to one-bout fights to quicken character unlocks) there should be at least two bouts per fight, best of three. In the first of these Seth is a pushover, mostly since he doesn't use any special moves, but after knocking him down once he rises again, like the phoenix, except a hell of a lot fecking harder. All of a sudden the fight becomes a washout as Seth warps rapidly around the arena, swooping in from time to time to administer one of several powered-up versions of other characters' special moves. His version of shoryuken hits about seven bloody times, and it's almost impossible to dodge.
What it all amounts to is using about a hundred continues, watching your ass get thrown at you forcefully 99 times and then getting extremely lucky on the hundredth - and landing a punch. Then you repeat it another 500 times til you get doubly lucky, KO the bastard and then retreat to the four white walls of your kitchen for a healthy swig of strong spirits. After that, you are at liberty to repeat the process with the character you just unlocked. Hooray!
It's a crying shame, that, because in the battles leading up to the final you can get a really hard and fair fight out of the computer on easy or medium mode when you know your way around the character you're playing. Ryu and Guile's rival fights are really tense, hard-fought battles of wills which are a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
The only remedy to the problem is to bite the bullet (punch?) and fire the difficulty down to 'easiest', which is a total walkover but at least makes the Seth fight possible in one fight.
That minor grumble aside (and it is minor, because the chances are that, if you bought this game, you'll mostly be playing versus battles with your chums anyway. Am I right?) when you put the game to it's potential and get some buddies round with a few packs of lager, you can have a sensational night of fun just by trying to pull off the Ultra combos on each other, failing, complaining about the controller and then laughing about it.
I realise this is becoming quite the tome, so I'll summarise the rest of it in a few short ... paragraphs. Outside of arcade mode you've got a couple of other choices to make. You got your ubiquitous versus, where you can beat up your chummies to your hearts content, online modes where you can participate in ranked or fun matches (I haven't tried this yet, which was kind of why I started this thred in the first place. I hear the netcode is good, though), training mode for practicing those hard-to-master combos and then challenge mode for something a bit different. The challenges include time-trials and survival, but the most interesting (and useful) are the trials, where you get a chance to unleash your characters special moves and combos out on a poor, but (thankfully) stoic Dan. Really good practise that, handy for nailing down the more complicated pieces of finery you can pull off.
As far as the fight mechanics go themselves, it's just basically that same special-move centric Street Fighter premise they've been churning out for decades (hadoken, shoryuken, flash kick, hundred hand slap et al) but with a couple of exciting, and handy, additions. First are the combo/revenge gauges at the bottom of the screen. the combo gauge consists of four segments which slowly fill up with electric blue as you land attacks on the other player. Fill one segment up and you can use it to power up one of your special moves. Fill the whole thing up and you can unleash the powerful super-combo for each character. Super-combos don't tend to get used that much, since you end up continually using segments of the gauge to pull of the powered-up moves.
The revenge gauge, on the other hand, fills up when you take hits, and when it reaches at least halfway full you can unleash the devastating Ultra Combo for each character by inputting a suitably complicated and potentially spaz-inducing series of commands. Some are better than others (Ryu's Metsu Hadoken is both hard to land and not terribly damaging, whereas Abel's Soulless has the potential to remove half a healthbar from some of the weaker characters).
The other new mechanic is the Focus attack system, where you hold down the med punch and med kick buttons together to charge up an attack which can cripple the enemy. More importantly, whilst the attack is charging you can absorb one (and only one) hit from the opponent to negate the damage. It's a suitably flashy little move that can come in handy for those who have practised their technique (ahem).
Finally (and I do mean finally), the controls. Well, I'm stuck with the X360's wholly unsuitable analog stick to pull off these crazy zig-zag charge manouvres, and it's really not up to much cop. I've gotten used to it a bit now, pulling off shoryukens and ultra-combos at will, but you will find that there are critical moments where you need to rely on precise controller movements to seal a combo and then fall flat on your face as you get that analog spin a fraction off the sweet spot. It's ok when your adversary is experiencing the same technical difficulties, mind you!
The only solution to this is to buy a control pad (or stick) you are comfy with. Arcade sticks cost a fortune, but are reputedly quite effective. There's a megadrive style controller from madcatz out as well for those who are used to SF2 style 16-bit move inputting. Since I've played both the 360 and PS3 versions, I can tell you that the PS3 pad beats the X360 one marginally by having a better directional pad and a stick with less travel and resistance. Not much between em, though.
OK, time to wrap it up. Basically, it is the next step in the Street Fighter franchise. It's got everything you could think to want from an SF, or indeed, any fighting game. The hit detection is refined to the point of being scalpel sharp, the visuals are just as easily liable to pare flesh and underneath everything it's got that undefineable Street Fighter aura which makes you feel like the happiest man (or woman) on earth as you land that killer, flaming Shoryureppa! to send your opponent into a spectacular, eye-searing KO. Maybe the most defining thing for me was this - my mate and I were playing last night at his flat, and we're both proficient enough at pulling off the moves and the deft handiwork to make the fight look good. And there were his other two flatmates sitting there spectating us, declining an offer to play themselves, not because they didn't like the game, but because they were so enchanted by the sheer awesomeness occuring on the flatscreen LCD in front of them they preferred just to observe. Oh yeah, this is Street Fighter alright.
P.S. This happens to be the first time in maybe a year that I've agreed with a Eurogamer 10/10 review. Check it out.
Awesome. Thanks for that review, Tets.
I'm not getting much chance to play on the 360 just now but after I've moved house (beginning of April) I'll check this out.
I'm not getting much chance to play on the 360 just now but after I've moved house (beginning of April) I'll check this out.
Tetsuo_Shima
In Cryo Sleep
Nae probs. I did forget to mention, though, that Street Fighter IV actually has a retail price of ~£30 as opposed to £40. I think play.com are even a cut under thirty, and at that price it's a really, really good deal.
By the by, if anyone plays any other games online on their 360 give us a shout. I got a new wireless adapter, see, and it's a really swish bit of equipment. Expensive, but swish.
By the by, if anyone plays any other games online on their 360 give us a shout. I got a new wireless adapter, see, and it's a really swish bit of equipment. Expensive, but swish.
decky101
In Cryo Sleep
Hey Tet! How's it going mate? I have to be honest, Wireless adapter is around top of my list of new shiny things that I'm after, at which point, I'm fairly sure I already have you added as a friend on Xbox Live, but in case I don't I'll look you up and we shall find something to spar in! I don't have SFIV at the minute, but I perhaps sometime in the future .
.