Street Fighter IV: incredibly pretty and refreshingly onliney, but a singleplayer mode tarnished by laughably long combo animations, a hateful boss fight, nasty AI and a seemingly total ignorance that some people haven’t spent the last decade playing every bewildering, ultra-hardcore derivation of Street Fighter to death. Boo.
Street Fighter II: Biff! Kerpow! Thwack! Spinning biiird keeeck! That’s the stuff. Pretend Street Fighter never stopped being The People’s Fighting Game with the surprisingly robust (and official) Flash version below. The baying hordes should, however, be aware that this doesnae support controllers, so it’s keyboard only.
Cursor keys to move, S,D,F for punches and X,C,V for kicks. There’s also a slightly higher-res version here if you like.
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I’m still waiting for a bloody demo for sf4. I’m not spending more than bargain bin money until i can get the feel for it.
The only demo SF4 will ever have is of the piratey sort. A free weekend on Steam might be possible, but they haven’t said anything to suggest so at this point.
You guys embed games now?! Wow. I have never felt more interactivated.
(wonders why WASD isn’t moving Ryu around, just punching.)
@DAN
I rage quit the embedded SFII when I discovered there was no option to invert mouselook.
Obscene!
I’d want a multiplayer demo to get the measure of the netcode, even pirating it wouldn’t give me a good measure. Nah, i’ll just wait til i see it in a bucket next to copies of sims 3 stuff packs for a fiver.
@Robyrt
Interesting analysis. I’ll look into VF again, though IIRC I tried a PS2 version a number of years ago and found it completely impenetrable. I’m not really a “fighting game” guy as you can probably deduce, so it may be that VF is just too complex considering the amount of effort I’m willing to put in to the genre. As a check, though, would you have a recommended point of entry for the series?
This is the SNES version in case anyone’s wondering. It’s just a Flash-based emulator.
The Ultra animations might be a bit long (when my fave character is Blanka I don’t find them much more useful than the Super or indeed normal spins, mind you), but I didn’t put in much time with any of the SF games before IV, and while I get my arse kicked in Ranked Online I enjoy the game. It’s certainly a lot more forgiving than I found the little I tried of Third Strike.
@Nick: The reason that’s significantly more impenetrable is that those those command combinations have nothing to do with what you’re doing.
There aren’t all that many of them? But they are not things one can figure out from playing the game. They are not the sort of moves that you’re likely to do by accident, because you’re already moving in the way that calls for them. They aren’t impossible to figure out, if you sit down and look things up and figure them out, but there’s absolutely no hint of what they are from the way the game presents itself to you.
It’s also probably worth bringing up that SC’s got the 8-way run. This isn’t a reason for it to be a better game, but it often means the sort of moves that get bound to different directions are similar to the sort of moves that are useful while moving in those directions. You circle clockwise around an enemy and press an attack button? You’ll execute a move that’s useful when you’re circling clockwise around an enemy. Attacking while moving counterclockwise will often do something similar from the other direction. Your attack buttons are “Vertical,” “Horizontal,” and “Kick,” which explains pretty clearly what these attacks do.
Oh, and, since you’ve got most useful attacks mapped to single presses of the 8-way movement commands, you don’t have to worry about fiddly timing. Even just knowing how to do an SF move is no guarantee of being able to pull it off, unless you’ve spent sufficient time sitting down and practicing until you can hit the proper timing from muscle memory. Yes, this shit gets easier once you can already do it. But when I have to spend a not insignificant amount of time sitting down learning how to execute the basic functions of the game (instead of, you know, playing it and picking things up as I go), that game counts as “impenetrable.”
To be honest, I’d rather want a straight port of SSF2T on PSN/Live than the HD version.
I mean, it’s like the Monkey Island remake. The art simply isn’t as good. Not even by a longshot.
Oh, and the combo animations being long actually makes sense for two groups: the n00bs and the hardcore crowd (if you ever been to (or seen) a tournament, you know what I’m talking about). Boring when playing alone, of course. But then again, I don’t really care, I play GG, BB and LB2.
What, so looking in the manual that came with the game was too impenetrable?
If I have to consult an external source to figure out how to utilize a game’s basic functionality: yes, that game is not doing a sufficient job of explaining itself.
I don’t mind looking up things regarding minutiae or precise explications of game mechanics or information on advanced tactics. But we’re passed the age where games are operating under harsh enough memory restrictions that they can’t include explanations for how the basic functionality of a game works within the game itself.
Noc, are you talking about SF4 or 2? Because the former most certainly has an in-game command list.
@pkt – And a lengthy Challenge mode, that walks you through most of the more advanced techniques, too. SF4 has a lot to learn, yeah, but it’s one of the more accessible fighting games out there, as each character only really has a handfull of special moves, and the trick is learning how and when to use them.
Blazblue, however, is a real beast to learn.
@Kakksakkamaddafakka – You can switch between old and new sprites at will, and you can pull up a straight port of SSF2T(ie- no tweaked movesets) within the Remix version by picking Classic mode.
While I’m determined to finally crack the secrets of SFIV, my personal preference though runs to Guilty Gear/BlazBlue for 2D fighters and Soulcalibur for 3D.