Super Street Fighter 4 – Guest Review

I used to love Street Fighter. Street Fighter 2 that is. When the game first came out it was the only game that mattered. I would play it for hours destroying my brother in 80 straight matches breaking his frustration health meter. The game was magical at this. My friend Peter’s younger brother nearly gave me a black eye by flinging the SNES controller into my face after a particularly rough battle. Peter was a savant at the game and could destroy any foe anywhere. We loved the game and had all of the editions from Champions to Turbo to Super. But the franchise fell out of favor with me sometime around the time Super came out. The game got to fast for me and it reminded me of my own mortality every time I played it. It’s not a good thing for a 14 year old to realize that he is slowly dying. Anyway, our good friend Chris is back once again with another EXCELLENT review.

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Street Fighter 4 was released a little over a year ago and has since brought fighting games back to the forefront of gaming. With various developers releasing more and more fighting games like Tekken 6, Tatsunoko vs Capcom: Ultimate All Stars and BlazBlue, since SF4, the market has been dominated by new contenders. (Even XBLA has seen the return of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 an arcade classic.) Now, but with so much hype the reigning champion returns to the arena with Super Street Fighter 4, the definitive expansion to SF4. Will it be a love letter from Capcom to fans or simply cash grab from the powers that be?

After 25 hours of game play, I firmly agree that SSF4 is well worth the price of admission, making it a strong addition to the Street Fighter franchise. The game boasts 35 fully unlocked characters (about damn time!) including returning fighters from the SF universe like: Guy, Cody, Adon, Dudley, Ibuki, Dudley, Dee Jay and T Hawk, along with two new comers: Hakan and Juri. Hakan is a Turkish oil wrestler who pours oil on himself to increase his range and speed though it also leaves him open to attack. He’s also a great grappler. Then there’s Juri a taekwondo expert that seems to have a very high offense but little in any way of defensive techniques. These two new characters introduce two unique fighting experiences and time will only tell if they will climb the tiers and see any decent competition.

Titles, colors taunts and icons are back and can now mostly be achieved by playing as your character of choice though there are the rare exceptions where you will need to complete a character’s trial mode. The trial modes, along with the remaining challenge modes, have been cleaned up a bit and time trial and survival mode has replaced the old street fighter 2 bonus level of beating up cars and playing with the barrel. Trial mode is now 24 levels per character, starting with simple specials and ultras and then getting into more complex attacks. It will give both new and old players a good overall overview into each character’s potential. But as we all know, the only way to really learn is to face someone better then you.

The online has been redone and made better for all. You now have the option of playing ranked matches, endless battle and team battle. The ranked system of SF4 is SSF4 mostly the same, except that battle points and player points now hold different values. Player points still count towards your total score but battle points are judged based on your performance with a specific character. So, for example, this means that if you were to fight a Cammy with a player point of 1000 but a battle point of 0. This means either your opponent sucks with Cammy or never really plays as her.

Endless battle is where players (eight maximum) can watch 2 players duke it out will the remaining 6 spectators. The winner stays on and the loser is shunted to the bottom of the fight card. Though there is bound to be a bit of waiting around with 8 people in a room, this does offer a good way to scope out the competition for later fights and provides the great fighting atmosphere that fighting game fans crave. The team battle is pretty much 2vs2 3vs3 4vs4 at its core, where a fighter stays in as long as he still has health left, causing a tug of war battle and involving further strategy. This is mostly involved when you’re going to drop your stronger or weaker characters in a fight.

In what appears to be a godsend, Capcom has introduced hidden character selection in all online play. This finally eliminates the possibility of opponents waiting for you to pick your character and then choosing their counter. Such epic cuntery in SF4 ruined the fun. A player now has to choose a fighter along with their ultra to view their opponent’s characters. Two selectable Ultras are now included after character select, a homage to Street Fighter 3, where the idea originally came from. Another small inclusion is all characters have 3 costume choices in total, which though doesn’t change game play is a welcome addition.

A large feature that will leave most completion players drooling is the “replay channel”, where you can view uploaded player matches, broken into sub categories: alpha characters, turbo characters, SF3 characters, new characters and bosses. Though a specific character select would have been nice, the ability to view any type of replay is great and pretty much essential to getting better at this game. Wait time in-between fights in this mode are about 7 to 15 seconds; so, no real hassle on that point.

Along with all the above changes in the game, Capcom has been paying attention and has tweaked characters in small to medium size ways. To go over all these changes would be pointless since the game is way too new to know if any of the changes will make a significant change in the Tier lists. The one all around tweak put in to the game aside from Dhalism is everyone’s attack damage has been lowered, making matches go on longer, really making you work that win.

Tournament mode will not be out at release due to it being majorly upgraded and tweaked with all the bells and whistles. This mode will include brackets to see an actual tournament level of progression, as well as spectators and commenting. It will be a free DLC-like championship mode in SF4 and should be out by June 15. I’m glad it’s free but wishes I had it now.

The reason I love Capcom, among other reasons, is they never feel the need to gouge their fans for money and will only charge for products that have love and care put into them. Super Street Fighter 4 could have been a full price buy and fans would have still flocked to buy it, but at a measly $40, this is truly a love letter from Capcom to all the fans that enjoyed SF4. It’s a great game that does everything to improve on what was thought to be fighting game perfection.

[Ed. Note - Since Chris is from Canada we aren't sure if the prices he lists is in Canadian or REAL money. Though we can no longer mock the color of his moneysince ours is now purple. Also Paul made the sweet graphic.]