Got this game and reviewed it
Forward
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For a start most peeps by now know of my love/hate relationship with the Street Fighter series. I've played almost every game and there have been great ones and ones that make me want to burn Capcom's game studios. A lot of Street Fighter's games have had parts that make you go 'awesome!' and parts that make you just vomit. And for those uneducated people SNK and Capcom have a rivalry that has been going for years. SNK were first on the scene and made pretty much all the side scrolling fighters ever most of which America never released in their country and since we get their hand-me-downs we didn't get any of them either. I'm English BTW. Capcom was a low budget company that was trying to steal SNK's market and had failed to do so for years. However, when they took half the stuff out of their side scrolling fighter they inadvertently created a new genre, which has been popular world-wide ever since. In response SNK took the same elements out of their side scrolling fighters and made some of the best fighting games ever made even by today's standards. After Capcom started putting all their characters from all their other game series into Street Fighter SNK did the same but changed the title of their series from Art of Fighting to King of Fighters and so the long rivalry began.
I have to start with Street Fighter 1 i just have to OK. It was a pretty shit game. It was kinda like Fatal Fury but really really shit. Like a shit copycat of a great game series, which is exactly what the game was. Next there was Street Fighter 2 and boy that game couldn't be any different. SF2 was a fantastic game and I loved it. It was the first fighting game I ever played and it seriously rocked. OK the response was a little slow but the timing was great, the AI was great, the characters were so well designed, it played so beautifully and some of the fights you could get up to with your friends even by today's standard were just legendary.
Then it all went to fuck. They made that crappy Turbo game, which was just the same damned game but faster and with different color schemes for your characters. There is no way in hell I would have paid full fucking price for that shit. I might buy it if I hadn't bought the first SF2 but who in their right mind would have bought both. Then there was Super Street Fighter 2. Rather than make a new game they just added characters but I can't complain. The characters they added were alright. Dee Jay and Fei Long are still good and they are as worthy of being Street Fighter characters as any of the originals.
Then there was Alpha and this really showed where the series was headed. Rather than make a sequel they made a prequel and they started fucking around with the character's moves. They introduced Adon, Cammy & Tomahawk and even though Cammy was alright if a bit weird and disjointed in her moves the other 2 were just fucked. Adon was like a Street Fighter 1 character and all of those guys were seriously fucking annoying and Tomahawk had 2 moves an aerial move that charged downward and a standing move that charged upward. Every other move he does is completely useless. And even though Cammy's moves are nice and balanced, she has that stupid cannon ball move that travels across the whole screen and throws you. It's unavoidable and unstoppable and it's in every damned game.
Then after a few hits and misses came Street Fighter EX which had some great new characters but all the old characters played really strangely. Essentially it was like a whole new fighting game by Capcom with the original Street Fighter cast as extras in it. It didn't ever seem like a Street Fighter game and they would have done so much better if they just declared it as a new game series and left Street Fighter out of it. I'm not saying that Street Fighter didn't and couldn't convert to 3D well because just look at the King of Fighters Maximum Impact series, that converted brilliantly. But somehow when they made SFEX they tried to reinvent Street Fighter and the result was just terrible. If they just made Street Fighter in 3D it would have been fine but they just had to screw with the programming and characters.
After that came Street Fighter 3 and by this point we all thought it was gonna be another Street Fighter Alpha but surprise surprise Street Fighter 3 was actually really fucking good. It was so well balanced, well designed and well made it brought a tear to my eye. I felt like I had a son that had all grown up. No longer was their any daft ideas, bad design techniques and a game programming budget that would make B-movies look like they were made in fort knocks. I felt that Street Fighter had finally matured and I could at last rest in peace but then IT happened.
Old habits die hard and after making one of the best games I've ever played they decided to make slight adaptations bit by bit and charge you full price for each one. I was almost tempted to buy third strike but I will not tolerate such an underhand scheme to drain me of my money. Fair enough when they made Street Fighter 2 they kept adding bits but each time it was because they had just made that extra bit just then. With Street Fighter 3 they had made all the components of Third Strike but decided to give it to you in dribs and drabs so you had to pay full price multiple times.
FUCK THAT!
I think that was when I lost what remaining faith I had in the Street Fighter series as a whole. Fuck Capcom and fuck their asshole marketing team that they are so damn proud of.
And now to Street Fighter 4. Fair enough I expected the game to be terrible and judged it before I played it but I always give every game I have another chance and I couldn't resist seeing what the new Street Fighter had to offer.
It begins
First of all I was told Dee Jay, a new character called Hakan and Yun & Yang from Street Fighter 3 were going to be in this game and that the characters were totally complete and finished. So imagine my surprise when I found out that Capcom had lied to me. none of them were in the damned game. I got the game given to me by my brother who had bought the game so luckily i didn't have to pay a thing but I would have bought it. It's only after I found that they were planning to release the characters in the next Street Fighter 4 extension pack or game as Capcom like to call it.
I played through on easy to unlock my fav character Fei Long but ironically I had unlocked all but 2 of the character by then. That's when I found that they had changed half the character's moves in the game. Some moves that used to be pretty easy to pull off were replaced with stupid combinations like diagonal 3 quarter scrolls and hold a diagonal direction and then after a second hold another diagonal direction at 90 degrees to it. I wondered why they would do something so stupid and it didn't really hit me until I was talking to my Japanese friend and he called it Street Fighter EX.
Eyup, they are the controls from Street Fighter EX. The damned controls that sucked real bad when I played that game and lead me to use every character other than the Street Fighter ones in that game. Why bring back those controls. Everyone unanimously hated them. They were stupid, they made no sense and they were damn near impossible to perform in combinations. I can't begin to tell you how aggravating it was when I was using a character and they accidentally did some stupid useless move instead of a special or just do a punch instead of my ultra combo.
And I know this is going to sound like I'm being picky but I can't stand the zig-zag style scrolling to perform half the moves in Street Fighter. I don't think anyone who plays the game can intentionally get a shoryuken right every time. I bet most players, even the best keep doing hadouken attacks instead. It's a really unreliable system. But in the Street Fighter EX games your timing has to be so damned perfect it sickens me. And this game is no different. I can't tell you how many times i had to hold away for about a second before pressing toward and have my guy just do a heavy punch instead.
I tried slower and faster performances of the moves but I had to be so exact it was stupid. One millisecond out of place or just one tiny creep into a diagonal and my character just stood there and did all the wrong moves. I'm no button-basher but the controls of this game are retarded to say the least.
The new characters are alright. There's not really anything wrong with them except for Seth. Seth is just a great big pile of cheats and no substance. Anyone who uses Seth always wins and he's a bastard to kill because he just cheats constantly. Very very bad character design Capcom. Make more bosses like M.Bison instead because at least he's a decent character.
The challenge mode was fun but I could tell they have no sense of how difficulty should work in a game. It suddenly jumps from you Ultra-comboing everyone who stands in your way and getting 12 straight perfect victories to suddenly every enemy you fight using their slowest most time-consuming special moves and defending like a maniac while you are on a time limit.
The weird thing with this game is that the game really doesn't allow much room for cheating. It's pretty damn hard to cheat in this game and most times you have epic battles of skill but you can tell that the AI is trying it's damnedest to cheat like a maniac. When I get to the boss fight it must think that it's its birthday or something.
When I had unlocked all but 2 characters and done all the easy missions in the challenge I wondered why the hell have I not unlocked Akuma yet. So I looked it up online. It said that to unlock the last characters I had to get so many perfects. Not a problem, I can do that. But then it said I hadn't to lose 1 match. For most characters that sounds pretty fair but that would mean I'd have to beat Seth without dying once.
At that point I thought 'well fuck that' and decided to play a better game.
I just hope that I can get Super Street Fighter 4 cheap because I don't want Capcom getting any of my money. Even by proxy.
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