Well here we are folks. Not even a year later and we have SUPER STREET FIGHTER 4 on PS3, 360, and this summer on PC! Now the question is this. Was it worth spending $40 for a whole new disc? Have they made the right changes to better balance the characters than the mess that was the “Vanilla” title? Well here are my thoughts and answers to these questions.
One of the first things you’ll notice going through the main menu will be your standard fair from the first game. Except when you choose “Challenges”. No longer do you have “Survival” and “Time Trial”. The only mode left at the initial load up is just the character “Trials”. For those of you who never got the first one. The character trials basically take you through a step by step of how a character works. From doing standard super moves all the way to some very advanced combos. After you run through the “Arcade” mode once you will unlock the bonus stages to play anytime under the “Challenges” icon. Yes you read that right the classic “Car” and “Barrel” bonus stages are back. So if you loved them you can play them to your hearts content. If you didn’t really care for them….after your first run through of “arcade” mode you are given the option to turn them off.
Graphics wise this is still the same game we got last summer. Not that it’s a bad thing. We have new stages that look awesome and reworked older stages. Both sets looking as good if not better than before. Two new color schemes have been added that are a nice little change. #11 giving you a DEEP color into the shaded areas of your character. Where #12 gives the character a very close approximation of the intro movie artwork. Now to use these two colors your going to need a “Vanilla” save file. Not the disc just the save. So if you traded yours in and deleted the save either borrow a copy from a buddy or go rent it. I say borrow from a buddy because the trade in on the “Vanilla” was so low everyone I saw on launch zero hour decided to keep their’s. ”What about the colors and costumes I unlocked or bought for the first one?”, you ask? Well fear not. Just go to your download archiver on either PSN or LIVE scroll till you come to the costume pack and re download. It will install into the SSF4 game data. As for the rest of the colors and personal actions? You just simply have to play with the characters. So if you want them back like now. Just simply go to Vs set yourself to a one round 30 sec match. to be even quicker set the other player to 0% health on the handicap bar. The secondary costumes for the new characters are being released in two different packs. With the first one already up. Now word is the full packs will be available for free on both PSN and LIVE for one day. So keep your eyes open and check the stores daily. If this is correct info it’s worth the time.
Sound wise there are a lot of changes under the hood. All the music has been revamped. And you now have the option to set each character’s voice to Japanese or English individually. Which if your like me is great. Some characters I like in Japanese and some in English. Just depends on what voice you feel best suits the character. You still have the option to play your own music from your hard drive. But now an extra bonus is that your custom soundtrack will even play online while you have voice chat enabled and on. For me this was a very nice little bonus.
Juri
Gameplay wise this is Street Fighter. Many of the original cast got tweaks up or down to better even out the gameplay. We have the entire returning cast with the addition of characters from older games including SF 3 and the SF Alpha series. From the Alpha series we have Adon, Cody, Guy. Returning from SF2 we have T-Hawk, and Dee-Jay. From SF3 Dudley, Ibuki, and Makoto make their presence known. With the addition of two all new characters. Juri a Thai Qwan Do practitioner that works for S.I.N. And Hakan a Turkish oil wrestler “and no not in the thong kinda way your dirty minds went”.
The online mode has been changed as well. We have Ranked and Player matches still. But we have lost Championship mode being that it was replaced with Endless Battle (EB) mode. On “Ranked” matches you have two different sets of points. Battle Points (BP) and Player Points(PP). The Battle Points are points earned when you win with a character. Player Points are the points you accumulate overall. So you can play someone using say Hakan that has 0 BP (because they haven’t won any matches with this character) but has 2500 PP. Which incidentally your ranking is per character and is based on your BP score. With a trophy that can only be earned by getting all the characters to rank C. EB is as close to the old arcade days as you can get online. Rooms can be set up for as many as 8 players. With the rotation taking a round robin style. Winner stays loser pays. Unfortunately this first week out the online is not as tight as the “Vanilla” was on day one. Lag issues abound causing the game to be unplayable at some points. The “Vanilla”s online was so tight you could play against players that had no bars and their signal indicator flashing and not have a bit of lag. While this kind of thing does happen, it is odd that CAPCOM has yet to release a patch to fix the problem. But that could be due to the servers being overwhelmed.
Now onto the main part of this review. Is this worth buying a whole new disc at $40 instead of getting it as DLC? That is going to depend on your point of view. For me it’s a yes and no type of answer. The change up in menu designs, audio, and online set up do constitute the need of a new disc. But some of the glaring issues I had with the first game are still here. Namely the broken nature of the throw system. Normal throws and command throws. Normal throws CAN grab you out of moves. Even super and EX moves. You cannot hold down or any direction at all except back, forward, or neutral to break a throw. So if you block a low attack that leaves your opponent close to you you can expect to be thrown. To me this is a glaring issue that should have been patched in the “Vanilla”. By limiting the options to break out of a throw it places too much emphasis on the high low mind games. And a few of the characters already have very intense high low games. The breaks should have been set to give you a chance to break a throw no matter what direction your holding. The characters with command throws are still just as annoying. With moves that can zone and stop just in front of you with touching and sending you back a little bit that the command throws can be buffered out of. Even if they hit your block most of the attacks will leave them right in your face and a buffered throw smacking you down before your character can come out of the block animation. And I mean before. Some of which (Geif) the command throws will actually cancel out the animation of a move. Not all the hits, just the animation of the move.
One of the biggest highlights of this game to me was the inclusion of a fairly robust replay mode. The game keeps a battle log of the action. Your online action. Unfortunately it doesn’t keep a log of your offline play. So if you want to be able to have clips of you and your buddies playing your still gonna need a cam set up. Hopefully we will get a patch that will fix what I feel is a slight oversight. Now the channel has quite a bit of options to it. You can look at and save the newest replays, highest scoring replays, and of course your saved replays. Also included are channels that will showcase specific character sets. You want to see only original Street Fighter casters? There’s a channel for that. Also channels for characters added to Super Turbo and SF 3. One for Alpha characters. And even one for featuring Boss characters.
This game does have a lot to offer. Tweaked characters, new characters, new moves, and new combo options. And steps in the right directions for a better overall balanced game. But timing of this iteration coming out less than a year after the first one, the glaring gameplay issues that still haven’t been addressed, and the fact that you have to pay for content already on the disc (New character secondary, Original character secondary if you didn’t buy them already and their third costumes” Are major detractors to this game. The economy may be turning around but for most of us in Go South this game is a hard sale money wise. But with the possibility of getting the new costumes free that does help sway favor in it’s direction. If you traded in your copy of the “Vanilla” and are missing the Fighting Street then this would be the better title to get. Reports on consoles is the “Vanilla” online is pretty much a ghost town. But if you and your buddies are still happy playing the original and don’t need the new characters stick with that.
This game gets a 3.5/5
