By Alec Meer on August 7th, 2009 at 12:28 pm.
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.
Oh nice, Ryus combos are the same as in SFIV.
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God, anyone remember the port of SFII to the Spectrum….
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I don’t think you need to have spent “last decade playing every bewildering, ultra-hardcore derivation of Street Fighter to death.” to enjoy SFIV. I agree that the AI is quite harsh though, and Seth a the end is just irritating.
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For people who don’t find hand cramps to be awesome might i suggest downloading x-padder and assigning the button presses to the keys.
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Might as well just go with GGPO. Also, there’s always Joy2Key for gamepad support.
Complaining about long combos in SF4 seems rather silly, since the way damage scaling works there, chaining 2-3 moves is usually your best bet. Surely that’s doesn’t qualify as laughably long?
Also, they put in Trial mode so you could learn the moves and combos of every character. You might feel that’s not a sufficient tutorial, but you can hardly call that ignoring newcomers.
The AI is really rather poor, though (too easy), and the boss is indeed hateful. You can get him just by jumping in with a HP repeatedly, though.
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No I have to agree with the article, i’ve been playing games all my life and i’m pretty good at them if I do say so myself. Street Fighter IV on single player just annoyed me, it was far to hard… maybe I should just practise more.
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Street Fighter 2 was my first PC game. I didn’t have a soundcard at the time, so the sounds were delivered in glorious PC speaker and I used to play it with a flight joystick (occasionally keyboard).
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I would hardly call Street Fighter IV’s combo’s laughably long. Excluding what amounts to auto-combo’s like the supers and ultras (combos that only require 1 command input) the average practical combo in SF IV is only 1 or 2 hits longer than the combos in SF II. Nothing like the madness of say Marvel Vs Capcom 2.
As for a hateful boss fight, I’d agree to a certain extent. Seth was certainly annoying at first with his annoying teleports, but after a short while you can figure out his attack patterns, and learn methods to punish him. I no longer finding him challenging even on the hardest difficulty.
I would not label the A.I as nasty either. If you want nasty A.I that basically reacts to all your control input, play the most popular iteration of SF 2 (Super Street Figther 2 Turbo or ST for short). Even on the easiest of its 8 difficulty levels the pro players have nightmares about it. SF IV on the other hand allows you to simply spam standing hard kick with nearly all the characters on the easy difficult levels and breeze through the game. Hell pick Zangief and hold fowards and spam his triple punch Lariat move and even on hardest difficulty you will beat all both two characters.
I’d suggest the ignorance is on your part if you think its an unusally hardcore fighting game. In single player at least SF IV is no more complex and challenging than any other fighting game. All the fancy things such as kara throws, long flashy combo, focus attacks etc are not really required to beat the game in single player. The game is amazingly complex and deep in two player but as I said you don’t have to worry about that in single player. Simply stuff will see you through.
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Fighting games always have extremely difficult single player modes due to what is commonly called “button reading”. Since the computer can’t make predictions in the same way a human can, it just responds to whatever button you press with a higher priority move. Also saying Street Fighter has “laughably long combos” is laughable itself. Try BlazBlue, Guilty Gear, or Marvel VS Capcom 2 if you want to see what laughably long combos actually look like. Seth is indeed cheap as the CPU, but frankly if you only play a fighting game for the single player you’re probably wasting your time. Incredibly hard bosses in fighting games aren’t anything new though.
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Monchberter, you mean this?
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I totally suck at this game, I’ve never been good at fighting games.
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Oh my god does this have the car level?
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(By laughably long combos I mean the laughably long wait for ultracombo animations to play out while you sit and watch.)
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Man, Championship Edition is hilarious. Balance is NOT this version’s middle name. If you’re not playing Bison, Guile or Ryu, you’re probably going to lose.
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Wow, thats a pretty nice port! SFII was only the people’s fighter though in terms of single player. It was a pretty punishing multiplayer game, particularly if the older, cigarette smoking kids in the arcade knew how to play!
RE. SF4
Yes, Seth is a pain and the single player can be weirdly punishing. The CPU’s psychic timing makes it easy for it exploit certain moves over and over so some match-ups are horrible. The SF4 toolset is broad enough though that you can learn how to beat cheap CPU Abels and whatnot with most characters, but learning to beat the CPU this way results in playing the game in a weird distorted way that prepares you poorly for multiplay.
The trials are sort of redundant imho, given that there are some random difficultly spike in their that will stop even fairly competent players in their tracks. For me anyway, they were an odd inclusion. I don’t really see how being able to fluke a move or difficult combo once is good practice. If you skim SF4 forums you will see a lot of good players admitting that they gave up on this or that trial but that it turned out not really to have much to do with “real” play anyway.
If I’m playing SP I mainly play survival mode, which scales much less annoyingly, imo.
That said, most of the meat of the game in SF4 is in the multiplayer. Its built to be a competitive game and SP is something of a sideshow.
The cpu has some annoying tricks but once you learn how to beat them there is very little challenge left there. As mentioned above there are a few sure-fire ways to beat Seth for instance, and once you get the hang of it he ain’t no thing. (Sorry watching the wire at the mo).
On the other hand, there are so many good players online, with so many different play styles that learning how to play your character well enough to overcome them all is a much deeper & more rewarding challenge imo. Well, once you get past all the flowchart-kens that is.
That said, I suppose multiplay SF4 has the same problem that all multiplay games have in that its fearsomely hard when you start out. I don’t blame 8/10 players for not bothering to play online capable games online, given that even for fairly seasoned players picking up a new game at multiplay level usually involves having your ass handed to you about a million times. I suppose if more people played online then the first step up to competitive play might be less steep, but then more people won’t play online if competitive play is pretty punishing to begin with – which it is. AAAAAAAAA PARADOX!!!!!!!!!!
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I agree with the Ultras being too long. Its boring after the 10th time or so and really boring after several thousand.
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Alec, try landing one of those ultras on a tough opponent online – if you do every moment of those crazy animations will be punching the air awesome!
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Depends on the character, if your a good player playing someone like Blanka, Honda, Guile, Bison you won’t be landing your ultra too often against decent players. If your playing Ryu, Sagat, Balrog ,Rufus on the other hand then you will be able to land it almost every round.
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One of these days Simon is going to Shoryuken RPS towers like Ryu does at the end of Sakura’s arcade mode.
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http://xpadder.com/
(gamepad to keypress thingier)
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And upon reading the commends I see Helio got there first.
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And by commends I mean… fuck it.
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Nice to see the oldboy is now browser based, less nice to see my memories of M. Bison psycho-psycho-psycho crusher antics were not some deluded childhood exaggeration. Seth is pussy cat by comparison.
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Woah, Street Fighter is not the only tasty game in that site:
Snow Bros! Zero Wing! Aero Fighters! Toki! 1945!
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use xpadder to map kb to xbox controller (or arcade stick) – volá
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i always liked the VS series (xmen, marvel sh, xmen vs st, marvel vs st, marvel vs cap, marvel vs cap2) a hell of a lot more than vanilla ST, (the ST Alpha series is also better btw)
in regular ST it feels like you always doing the same 3 or 4 moves and repeating them all the time, you dont have that much space to “change tactics” without superjump, easy cancels, lots of moves and the ability to switch characters
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And I’m reminded how little I like side-on beat-em-ups. Yawn!
On the plus side, I am one of the few people to ever have owned the original Street Fighter. It was rubbish.
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Jeff says:
I would hardly call Street Fighter IV’s combo’s laughably long. Excluding what amounts to auto-combo’s like the supers and ultras (combos that only require 1 command input) the average practical combo in SF IV is only 1 or 2 hits longer than the combos in SF II. Nothing like the madness of say Marvel Vs Capcom 2.
It’s not that the combos are long, but that the time frame for linking or canceling are extremely short. In VS games you could do them almost leisurely and they would work.
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Yeah, I had the original Street Fighter on the Amstrad CPC. Sagat was the boss IIRC and you only had one character. Also it was rubbish.
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Wor. This strikes me as the sort of thing RPS might be getting paid for. I genuinely hope they are, as someone who is too A Student to subscribe. The thought of Alec eating cold beans from a tin, or shivering beneath an unstuffed duvet cover keeps me awake at night. No, not like that. Guttermind.
Ahem. More on topic, then – fighting games: The RTSes of the 2D gaming world?
(apart from actual 2D RTSes)
(I’m rubbish at both)
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We don’t do advertorial or in-post adverts, Bob. If, heaven forfend, we ever did, the post would be clearly marked as such.
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That girl is doing something to that guy in the background of the picture, right? Or is my mind just dirty?
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Well, I appreciate the clarification; I’m not really sure why I felt it necessary to broach the subject. Exposure to the internet seems to encourage the inner troll.
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[New! InexplicablyPoisonousTroll-Begone! Works like magic!]
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@Tycho
Its worse when its animated. Welcome to my puberty.
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I’m not a troll, Alec. I’m asking you to explain how you’re not generalizing, with statements about how SFIV is ignorant of people who haven’t played every SF spinoff. This statement is itself ignorant of fighting game fandom.
But go ahead, keep deleting comments, if you don’t have a real counterpoint.
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Stiff, awkward, combo-memorization-based fighting games just don’t hold up that well for me ever since I started playing the Soul Calibur series. I guess I’m spoiled.
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Hell yeah I was generalising somewhat, Cedge – but I wasn’t doing it with insults and belittlement attached, as you’ve often done in our threads. Disagree with what/whoever, but don’t be so needlessly unpleasant about it.
Now – back to the game(s).
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Monch: I remember the SF2 Spectrum port. The multiload frmo hell.
KG
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Sega MegaDrive nostalgia aawww yeah…
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My fists have your blood of them. Indeed.
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Am I the only one completely incapable of doing dragon punches using a keyboard?
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@Vinraith: There’s a whole lot more to memorize in a Soul Calibur or Tekken than in any Street Fighter. And why is it stiff and awkward?
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I dunno, Soul Calibur doesn’t require terribly much memorization.
This is mostly, I think, ’cause you tend to have a lot of useful variety just from basic directional attacks, which in many cases do about what you’d expect them to. There are a lot more moves available, but the fact that they’re so intuitive means that you can often translate what you’re trying to do into character action without having memorized how to perform that specific move.
All the characters perform in slightly different ways, but one can pick up their quirks mostly just from playing with them a bit, without even glancing at a moves list. And even then, combos tend to be pretty basic, and relatively easy to pull off. There ARE a handful of more difficult and fiddly moves? But you can play perfectly well without even attempting them.
Contrast to 2D fighters (and even Tekken, though it’s a little more forgiving) where your input commands don’t necessarily have any obvious relationship to what your character does, and you have to actually sit down, learn the moves, and practice them enough to be able to perform them reliably in order to use any character effectively.
Soul Calibur may have numerically more moves, but its learning curve is a hell of a lot shallower. 2D fighters, on the other hand, are a hell of a lot more fiddly and impenetrable.
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I recall doing VERY well with just a keyboard when I played Sango Fighter back in the day. I’ll have to get this a try.
As far as 3d fighters go I love the X-Box DOA’s they added a lot of interesting things that other games I’ve played don’t have (like catching attacks and countering instead of just countering by hitting the other person in the middle of their attacks) It lead to some of the most realistic fighting I’ve seen and you could play online too! Oh yah and fantastic boob physics are nice too.
My wife liked Soul Calibur series but I never really enjoyed it very much other than the single player Campaign games where you can earn diffrent weapons. Really it just ended up driving me insane with the end boss fight that I lost 99% of the time no matter how good I got. I never understood the need to have a boss at the end of a fighting game unless it is in an arcade setting (and in the arcade it is there to screw you out of 25 of 50 cents over and over again)
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I was able to pull off dragon punches, hurricane kicks and hadokens on the keyboard, the dragon punch was the least reliable to actually go off what with having to hold down and towards at the end.
Fandoms… yeurgh.
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Wait wait wait.. Streetfighter 2 impenetrable? Arf. Most of the moves are either: back then forwards and a punch/kick button, down then up and a punch/kick button, repeatedly pressing a punch or kick button. The really ultra complex ones are a half circle from down to towards or away from your opponent and a punch/kick button. Or the dragon punch, which is the only slightly tricky one in the game (towards, down and down+towards and punch).
Its not exactly rocket surgery.
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@Newblade
Pretty much what Noc said with regards to the move set. As to stiff and awkward… well if you can’t detect that from having played both of them there’s nothing I’m going to be able to say that will make you understand it. Motion in Soul Calibur is fluid, motion in most other fighting games (be they Tekken or Streetfighter) is very discrete. One move is distinct from another move, there’s no sense of flow.
I’m not saying one is fundamentally better than the other objectively, and indeed I suspect there’s more depth to plomb in games like Streetfighter and Tekken because of the complexities of the move set, but having experienced a fighting game where attacks were intuitive and movement was fluid I personally find it very hard to go back.
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I found that I couldn’t go back to chess after having experienced the intuitive attacks and fluid movement of a bar brawl.
…Well, I’m sure there is a point in there, somewhere.
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What you’re seeing as “fluid” versus “stiff” is Soul Calibur’s longer startup and recovery times for moves – it looks smoother because there are actually twice as many animation frames.
What you’re seeing as “awkward” versus “intuitive” is the relative importance of easy moves (SC) versus difficult moves (SF). Both games have lots of junk moves for each character, it’s just that Street Fighter is likely to put the awful moves on the 6 face buttons and Soul Calibur is likely to put them somewhere like Forward+A+K.
If you like the Soul Calibur style, check out Virtua Fighter, because it shares those qualities.
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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.
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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.
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You guys embed games now?! Wow. I have never felt more interactivated.
(wonders why WASD isn’t moving Ryu around, just punching.)
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@DAN
I rage quit the embedded SFII when I discovered there was no option to invert mouselook.
Obscene!
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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.
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@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?
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This is the SNES version in case anyone’s wondering. It’s just a Flash-based emulator.
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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.
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@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.”
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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.
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What, so looking in the manual that came with the game was too impenetrable?
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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.
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Noc, are you talking about SF4 or 2? Because the former most certainly has an in-game command list.
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@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.
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@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.
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