[AC] [360] [PS3] [PC] [3DS] [MOB] Street Fighter IV

[Jedah]

I understand your arguments, as I agree that my posts were not the epitome of innovation. I'm sorry for this, I was just trying to balance the negative but fair criticism, with a different point of view. I would never EVER try to put words to your mouth Icy, because this is impossible.
Also by "kicking others from the experience", I was not referring to us, but the companies. Nevermind, it's late and I've been working very hard lately. Good night.

[icycalm]

I'm sorry for this, I was just trying to balance the negative but fair criticism, with a different point of view.

What is your different point of view? "Lol guys this game looks sweet and I can't wait to play it on my 360?" As far as I can tell, you did not offer a different point of view on the matter under discussion. You did the same thing everyone else does on the internet: Some people are saying "bad things" about a game they are excited about, and they feel the need to do something about it, by saying "good things" about the game -- even if those good things are irrelevant to the current discussion.

I mean, I don't have a problem with you posting "good things" about the game in this thread. I DO however have a problem with you presenting these totally irrelevant "good things" as if they had some bearing on our discussion, and telling us to basically stop talking until we play the game.

I am sorry am being so hard on you on this, but I absolutely HATE this kind of mentality. I have been banned from many forums because of this shit. We are in a thread with Recap, say, being negative about ONE SINGLE aspect of a game or port (for example, the lack of true low-res in the Mushi or Ibara ports), and then we get 100 IDIOTS in who start swearing at us because "the game is still great regardless", and who then ask the admin to ban us for being "too negative".

I mean for fuck's sake OF COURSE the game's still great! Does that mean we are not permitted to bitch about the shitty visual quality of the ports?

Same thing goes here. We CAN and SHOULD be allowed to bitch for a hundred pages about SFIV's designers pandering to scrubs. Whether we end up liking the game once we play it is a completely different matter that has absolutely no bearing in the present discussion.

In conclusiong: If you feel the need to brighten up this thread then post some nice scans/pics/videos or whatever and go ahead and tell us about how excited they make you about the game. I would love to see this. But don't try to put an end to our discussion with half-assed irrelevant arguments.

[Molloy]

Making various special moves a bit easier to perform puts more emphasis on strategy and reading the mind of your opponent

It sounds to me like: "We are making the game easier and more accessible". Cant see how making move execution easier can make game deeper... What a bullshit

It's not really possible to make a fighting game more accessible than it already is. You press start, pick your character, and hit the buttons to attack your opponents with punches and kicks. How could this experience possibly be made any more accessible?

The existence of parrying or Roman cancelling or burst modes in no way makes a fighter less accessible. It makes HIGH-LEVEL PLAY less accessible -- or, to be more precise, it increases the maximum distance between worst and best possible players -- but for those who have no desire to compete this extra depth might as well not exist.

And indeed it doesn't, as evidenced by pretty much all fighting game reviews ever, bar the ones on this website.

I'm going to quote Sirlin again, hopefully this ones a little more appropriate.

Cammy’s Hooligan Throw motion is one of the most frustrating in the game in ST. Not only does it end in up/forward which results in accidental jumping sometimes, but it also closely overlaps the Spinning Backfist command.

New commands:

Hooligan Throw: quarter circle forward + punch
Spinning Backfist: quarter circle back + punch

Just the ability to do Cammy’s Hooligan Throw reliably makes her easier to win with. It’s a really good move (but not too good because most characters can just jab her out of it). Cancelling low forward into Hooligan Throw is now easy and pretty effective.

http://www.sirlin.net/archive/ssf2t-hd- ... t-6-cammy/

There are many characters in SSF2T that are unpopular in tournament conditions precisely because their moves are hard to execute reliably. In high level play you need to be able to perform moves with a 100% accuracy. I mean, you could have 12 buttons instead of 6 and require the player to hold the joypad upside down which makes things more difficult but doesn't really add any depth.

In Virtua Fighter you have a simple, consistent system where every move hits low, middle or high. In Tekken every move connects differently, and has different priorities so you have to learn off incredible amounts of information. Very few people can play high level Tekken but there are tons of world class Virtua Fighter players. Putting up more barriers to entry shouldn't necessarily be a virtue.

I must link to an article/interview that touches on this subject of input complexity but I'm going to post it in a new thread because it's about RTS.

[icycalm]

This is a really bad day for this forum. It's days like this when I feel like shutting it down -- and then I get angry at myself for even thinking about this, considering how much effort I've put into it.

First we get Jedah trying to "defend" SFIV from the charge of it being dumbed-down, which even its designer agrees that it is! -- then we get ashn0d starting a bullshit thread about if "professional gaming" is valid, and now this.

Molloy. Look at the posts you quoted. Then look at your reply. It is COMPLETELY UNRELATED.

What I was saying in the post you quoted was that mechanics such as parries, burst modes, etc. add depth without sacrificing ANY accessibility.

What you are saying (through Sirlin's quote) is that it's a good idea to tweak specific moves to make them easier -- sometimes (because other times this is a bad idea -- the more powerful moves SHOULD be harder to execute -- otherwise you end up with crap like Capcom vs. SNK EO).

But your statement is not a reply to my statement, as you wish to present it. It's not a counter-argument. It's not a "different opinion". It's something completely unrelated! I am talking about SYSTEMS and you are talking about SPECIFIC MOVES.

Guys, PLEASE try to focus when you post in this forum. This website's readers are reading it, and I have a personal obligation to them to maintain as high a level of quality in here as on the frontpage. Do not make my life harder than it is. For the last time, please.

[JoshF]

The saving system sort of sounds like parrying but the high-level potential in not there, that is to say, as a tool there will be less disparity in the way it is wielded by beginners and experts than compared to parrying.

Ono has stated that this system was incorporated in order to shift the emphasis away from combos and toward a more realistic system he has compared to boxing

Now why would he want to do that?

Along with the Super Combo, Ultra Combos are one of the only times the camera breaks from its normal fixed position to show a more dynamic, cinematic view of the lameplay.

Shoehorning FMVs, who does that cater to?

Also, not that Street Fighter continuity is sacred, but there's also a reason why they brought back all the old characters.

As for the fighting system itself, we simply can't argue about its simplicity or scrub friendly nature till we play it.

Well, the top IIX players mastered it in a day, the ones that would even play it anyway. Yeah they are top IIX players but, they mastered it in a day! This is probably a micro version of what will happen with the mid-level players. The novelty will last around a year, and then it's back to IIX, Z3, or TS. An ace in the hole I could foresee is SRK/EVO (which I think is partly funded by Capcom USA or at least share some of the same people) trying really hard to make it float with a lot of focus and are able to build a community of players for it, maybe new players who aren't so lucky when it comes to IIX or TS.

[Jedah]

What is your different point of view? "Lol guys this game looks sweet and I can't wait to play it on my 360?"

No, my point of view is actually "I'm not persuaded yet if the game is more scrub-friendly and we have to wait for it to mature in the gamers hands". I don't have a 360 yet, and even if I get one soon I will prefer to upgrade my PC for this game(free net play possibly).

As for the fighting system itself, we simply can't argue about its simplicity or scrub friendly nature till we play it.

Well, the top IIX players mastered it in a day, the ones that would even play it anyway. Yeah they are top IIX players but, they mastered it in a day! This is probably a micro version of what will happen with the mid-level players. The novelty will last around a year, and then it's back to IIX, Z3, or TS.

That's an interesting story. By mastering you mean they exhausted all new stuff by learning them in a day? Do these players acquire all the knowledge & execution needed to master the game in one day? How to you define "game mastering"? I don't have a single reason to not believe you, but you have to back up your opinion with more details and references.

[icycalm]

By mastering you mean they exhausted all new stuff by learning them in a day? Do these players acquire all the knowledge & execution needed to master the game in one day? How to you define "game mastering"?

I can explain this for you. When an easy Cave shooter comes out, Espgaluda, say, or Death Smiles, you always hear stories of expert players 1CCing it on the first couple of days of release. Obviously that doesn't mean they have maxed out their high scores or discovered every little thing in the games, but you can certainly say that the games are very easy and that these players "mastered" them in a day or two. This is in contrast to something like Mushihime-sama Futari, during the first location test of which no one managed to get past the third stage in ANY mode.

That's what 'mastering' means in this context: its meaning is relative.

Now as to how Josh knows about this, I am sure he can give us some links.

[icycalm]

Some comments from nothingxs, who generally knows what he's talking about (he doesn't like Arcana Heart though, so he doesn't ALWAYS know what he's talking about):

I played it at Evolution 2008 and thought it was fantastic. Street Fighter has always been a game that takes more pride on its grounded style of gameplay: footsies, spacing and control of space, poking and mind games reign supreme over easy and constant rushdown. The game feels like complete, classic Street Fighter through and through.

It feels like a mix of SF2 and SF3, as though all the good parts of each game were taken and put into a new one. We have some features of SF3's combo system with features of SF2's -- normals can LINK, for instance, which was something that was very lost in SF3, since almost no normals actually link in that game. In fact, linking kind of reminds me a lot of CVS2, which is a good thing: I used to hate the idea of linking moves, but playing enough of the game has made me realize that linking is pretty much how combos really should work: time it right and get rewarded. Things like crossup MK, c.LP, c.LK, c.MP into MK hurricane kick work with Ryu, and that's cool. That doesn't mean there aren't any chains, because some characters have gained or retained simple chain combos (AKA target combos), like Ken's close MP > FP target combo. And simple is best when it comes to SF, in my opinion.

Projectiles are good again, which is great because they blow donkey dick in SF3. Focus canceling doesn't render projectiles absolutely useless like parry did. In fact, focus canceling is mainly a method with which to extend your combos, capitalize on mistakes you've managed to catch and to make moves of your own relatively safe. This definitely adds a bit to potential mind games that can be played when it comes to things like wake up situations and trying to either get in on a character or push them out.

Also, the game is really, really good looking in person. It's a little rough around the edges, sure, but it definitely has its own charm. My only real complaints are that jumps seem to go way too high and that the game's pacing seems a little too slow. The game could benefit from a bit of a speed increase. Otherwise, I pretty much am in complete love with this game and wish I could play it more -- but, alas, there are no arcades in Miami that have it.

It's a somewhat pointless endeavor to compare Melty Blood or Arcana Heart to SF4. First off, if you want a game with similar gameplay to that, you need to look to Tatsunoko VS Capcom -- a game that seems to combine the Marvel VS series' gameplay with that of the current doujin-style of games such as Melty, EFZ and Arcana. Second, the games are aimed at wildly different types of players.

Most importantly, did you really expect a STREET FIGHTER game to majorly deviate from the STREET FIGHTER formula? The King of Fighters has kept its major gameplay pretty much similar year after year ever since they settled on the '98 engine as their base. Even 2003 and XI use the same basic linking, chaining and physics, despite whatever zany additions they use. Melty Blood has been roughly the same game ever since it originally came out.

As for Arcana? Arcana is and will always be an attempt to pander to numerous fetishes by having you play an okay fighting game hidden behind the most pathetic and sad excuse for a premise -- and cast -- ever. The game is nowhere near deep (or fun) enough to excuse its absurd popularity. I've heard of sex sells, but apparently featuring a cast comprised entirely of Japanese loli/pedophile boner inducers is totally cool as a theme for fighting games. Ugh. I'd rather fucking play EFZ.

http://forums.insertcredit.com/viewtopi ... 472#285472

To be honest, there's a lot that could be better about SF4, but it's mostly concerning the speed of the game. The game FEELS like it has first game syndrome, but I actually think this is the first time Capcom makes a first game that's actually competitively viable, fun and actually reasonably balanced. I can't see anything particularly broken about it yet except some of the absurd reach some characters get for doing kara throws (Ken).

http://forums.insertcredit.com/viewtopi ... 499#285499

[JoshF]

In SF3 you could link specials to supers, plus you had a complex juggle system. Special to super was a lot like chaining normals in II. But by IIX, only a couple characters could do this anyway.

Projectiles are good again, which is great because they blow donkey dick in SF3.

DICTATORSHIP OF THE FIREBALL, DESTROY THE RED PARRY MENACE!

I never got this argument. Are people upset that opponents now have options to deal with fireballs instead of falling into the same traps EVERY time? It's not like it's a done deal either, you still have to time it right. I mean, no one complains about the sidestepping in KOF, so why this? Maybe Capcom fans feel they're entitled to a free shot every time.

Here's a video of Umehara playing SF4. Not sure if this game is going to be played at this years Tougeki (has it already happened?) but if it is you can look forward to it being destroyed. I don't mean it will be broken, you actually have to try and raise the bar and attempt complexity for that, instead of putting the bar on the ground, and rolling it back to 1993. Hey, maybe that can be seen as a plus, just by not trying they already made a better competitive game than Hokuto no Ken.

[Jedah]

EDGE Review 9/10

EDGE reviews an arcade game after years of pretending there's no point to review them. If anyone interested, have a look at it. Focuses on the shift from high to lower execution timings and the "focus attack".

[icycalm]

I'd say it focuses on verbose generalities and empty hyperbole. It is impossible for me to read it* -- I only skimmed it for 20 seconds and I could almost quote every single sentence with a giant LOL beneath it. I'd even take Tim Rogers' BS over this shit.


*except perhaps if I got paid to do it

[JoshF]

Possible infinite discovery:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3X0RAPgUSo

[Jedah]

This video is circulated around forums for some days now. I saw a post that had a link on Capcom's response:
Capcom replies about this in Eurogamer

[milkycha]

Galaxy World on George St, Sydney got this in a week or so ago and I was so excited I set a whole day aside just to go play it. As I pumped my first credit in, the excitement of finally playing a new SF rushed over me; I was wide-eyed and grinning like a fool.

Then I played it.

It played like SF2X - not a bad thing per se, but it didn't feel new at all. It feels slow. Really slow. The focus system is simplistic and lame. The backgrounds look lovely but the characters look silly(especially their faces).

No one else even wanted to play; just a small crowd of onlookers narrowing their eyes and rubbing their chins as I beat the boss. Utterly disappointed, I returned to the masses huddled around the Tekken6 cabs and managed to level up my Bob to the rank of Brawler(finally!)

My hopes remain high for KoF XII.

[new_pornographer]

I finally had a chance to play this at Rebirth last weekend, and I'll have to concur that the actual pace seems to have slowed down a tad. However, the concensus at the event seemed to be one of approval. I asked ShoDragon (NeoEmpire) what he thought of it and he simply said 'Very...very,very good' whilst grinning like a loon. There was even an impromptu tournament after the GG/KOF finals and was fun to watch, as well as encouraging to see the variety of characters chosen as opposed to Sagat, Sagat, Sagat etc as apparently Sagat is the 'go to' character for this iteration.

[Macaw]

I've been hitting this on and off for a bit now and am one of the top players in my area. Messed around with the entire cast (Able and Guile being my mains), explored every aspect of the system, etc...

All I can say is, I still hate the way the game looks. It just fuckn pisses me off, everything is drab and boring. SF2 has incredibly charismatic backgrounds and overall just looks great, the SF3 series is always stunning to look at thanks to some of the most incredible sprite work ever. SF4 though is....well 3d, but it isn't good 3d, Tekken 6 is better looking even. Perhaps I am being a little too harsh because this is Street Fighter and I expect more, but seriously how can anyone who wasn't already a fan of street fighter watch a video of the game and be impressed. Ugh.

The system however is damn good, and is whats kept me playing. Super Turbo mixed with some 3rd Strike is pretty much what it is, and the new focus system and all the complications that arise from it adds enough for the game to feel quite different from the rest of the series.

If the game got the same treatment as the new KOF is getting (High res 2d with incredible animation) then I would be insane crazy for SF4. As it stands though, I'm really only half into it at the moment.

I'm gonna keep playing SF4, but really I just cant wait for KOF12 to hit.

[catalyst_nc]

We've made a bunch of new revisions to this Street Fighter 4 guide.

http://www.eventhubs.com/guides/2008/jul/08/street-fighter-4-strategy-guide-hints-and-tips/

You'll find move listings for all of the characters, along with combos, unlockables and a ton of more stuff.

[icycalm]

Some great commentary from Sirlin:

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2009/2/22/a- ... ter-4.html

Street Fighter 4 is finally here, with several perfect 100/100 reviews. Here's a few things I noticed about the game.

In ranked matches, you can see the opponent's name before the match and kick them or reject the challenge. This allows you to cherry pick who you fight and negates the entire purpose of a ranked match.

In ranked matches (well, all matches) there is no double blind character select. This means the optimum strategy is often to wait until the opponent chooses first so you can counter-pick. This is a very annoying situation.

When lag inevitably happens in an online fighting game, there are different ways to handle it. Some SF4 matches I played had large input delay, maybe as high as 15 frames. This is the time between your button press and seeing the effect happen. Adding input delay is really the worst way to handle lag. GGPO's amazing netcode shows that avoiding input delay and hiding lag in other ways is the way to go. That technology has been readily available for years, so it's disappointing to feel input delay in an online match.

The button config screen is "the wrong way." The right way is for the screen to list functions, then you press the buttons you want to assign. The wrong way is to list buttons, then you scroll through lists of functions to assign. The reason that one way is right and the other way is wrong is pretty clear when you watch people try to configure buttons. I've had to watch what must be thousands of people do this over the years in all the tournaments I've helped run (not to mention local gatherings). When the config screen says "Jab" and requires you to press the button you want, you just press the upper left button on your stick (or whatever button on your gamepad). This is a one-step process. But if the screen lists "X" and then requires you to scroll through functions until you find jab, it requires a two step process. You have to know which button on your controller is labeled "X." When this screen is the right way, no one has to know if the upper left button happens to be X or A or B or whatever else.

If you think this is negligible, you have never seen people set buttons. The wrong way turns what should be a 3 second task into a fairly confusing affair. Yes I know the wrong way allows you to have lots of functions in your list, but this can be done the right way also.

On to gameplay issues. The jumps have strange acceleration to them. While that's subjective, look at Zangief's jump that seems to have the acceleration of a flea. (Incidentally, why does his splash not stay out the whole time in the air?). Also, getting hit out of the air is extremely floaty, which means it takes unusually long to get back to a state where you can actually move again. This "moving in jello" feel is reinforced by many throws that have dead time at the end when it seems like you should be able to move (see Vega's for example).

The size of the stages is extremely large relative to the size of the characters. This helps runaway tactics.

Optimizing for the 1% rather than the 99% case. There's two examples, the first is tech recover (quick get up from a knock down). 99% of the time, I want to get up fast, but this is the action that requires button presses. Why not admit that getting up fast is the intent and make it default, unless the player holds down some buttons to get up slow? That's how it works for Robo-Ky in Guilty Gear, by the way. Incidentally, don't the two kinds of get up timing only lessen the importance of knockdown by allowing you mess up the attacker's timing a bit? Like the decision to have large stages, this seems not to favor offense.

Next is the 2-button throw, a bad idea in fighting games with 2D gameplay. 3D Fighting games are different beasts, so they are excused here, but note that even Dead or Alive offers a macro to turn its 2 button throw into a 1 button throw...and maps that macro to a face button by default. Anyway, 2 button throws solve a non-problem that no one has ever actually had. That's the problem of accidentally throwing and being sad about it. Street Fighter 2, Guilty Gear series, and Street Fighter Alpha 2 all demonstrated that 1 button throws work just fine and don't actually create any problems. Adding a second button press just adds complexity where it's not necessary, and helps nothing. (Edit: it does add a throw whiff which could be a good thing, but simpler is still better...)

Other non-problems we might solve in 2D fighting games would be to make blocking 1 button and jumping 1 button (each are traditionally zero buttons). We certainly could add those button presses, but it would make more sense to reduce the button presses to as few as possible: zero to jump, zero to block, and one to throw.

It's especially unfortunate that Cammy's hooligan throw requires a 2-button throw in the middle to complete it. Why exactly is this necessary, rather than one button?

2 button throws actually introduce the problem of kara-throws, a bug from SF3 that we now have again in SF4. This is when you cancel a forward moving attack a frame or two into it with a throw command in order to greatly extend your throw range. Do the designers want a long throw range or do they not? If they don't kara throws shouldn't be in the game. If they do, then base throw ranges should be extended for all players, not just the ones who input a difficult command.

Another similar bug is the chain combo cancel bug. As an example, consider Sakura. Low short does cancel into special moves. But if you rapid fire the low short (do it 2 or 3 times quickly each one cancels the last) then you CANNOT cancel the last hit into a special. I'm not saying this is a problem at all, necessarily. This restriction is there for good reason: to prevent the game from degenerating into low short -> big damage stuff. It would make more sense to give players a reason to start combos with bigger moves sometimes. Guilty Gear does a great job of this by reducing your entire combo's damage by 20% for each low short. (Hey Guilty Gear players, I know I'm simplifying there.)

Ok so what's the problem, sounds good that you can't do low short, low short, special move, right? But you can do it. If you make the last short a link rather than a chain (do it slowly, but not so slow that it doesn't combo) then you can cancel it into a special move. So really, you can get around this restriction if only you have high dexterity skills. Now, this is also true in ST and SF HD Remix, but that's not so much intent as what we were stuck with. For an entirely new game, I'm surprised to see this still there. I'm even more surprised to see combos that use this in the challenge mode, meaning the developers know about it and accept that low short is really this powerful. SF4 Sakura, for example, can low short, (link), low short, ex shoryken, ultra. She can do a lot more than that, but you get the idea.

This issue of rapid fire moves using a bug to cancel into specials is actually minor compared to the next topic though, a topic that will dominate much of the game: link combos in general. The game is filled with difficult 1-frame links. These are moves that just barely combo into each other with 1/60th of a second timing. In high level play, players will master these and they become common. So Sakura doing low jab, (link), low fierce, short helicopter kick, (link) low short, ex shoryuken, ultra for 50% will be common. One friend of mine already does this combo in real matches after only 2 days of playing, as well as other scarily damaging combos off low short that involve hard links.

Other examples, Ryu can now link low short, low jab, low forward. He can also link low strong, low strong, low roundhouse. Linking is the name of the game, which actually makes the game closer to CvS2 than to 3s or ST. The effect of all these links is to hide the actual game behind an impenetrable wall of execution. If you practice (ie, develop 1p skills unrelated to strategy and unrelated to interaction with the opponent) then you gain access to the real game, a game of high damage off small hits, but only for the dexterous.

Of course some level of this is inherent in just about every fighting game. It's a question of how far to turn the knob towards 1p activities and away from strategy. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo has dexterity requirements of course, but winning tournaments while using zero or very few link combos is entirely possible. That simply isn't the main focus of the game. The existence of many, many new links in SF4 shifts the focus toward that though.

Next up, we have ultras. All I'll really say here is that in real matches I find myself having to pump qcf x 2 over and over looking for the right moment to do the ultra. When I find that moment, I have to complete the qcf x 2 command with PPP. Let's hope I don't press PP in those moments, because that command gives me a super, which is an entirely different move. I'm not sure what qcf x 2 + PPP is doing in a "casual friendly game" in the first place.

Then there's focus canceling. The idea of paying half your meter to cancel a move is taken from Guilty Gear where it was called roman canceling. It's a wonderful mechanic in Guilty Gear, by the way. The command in that game is press any three buttons--I use PPP. This is actually pretty natural because when using a joystick, your right hand's natural resting position is on those PPP buttons usually. In SF4, the roman cancel command is medium punch + medium kick, then tap forward, forward. This is really awkward and a whole lot of inputs for one decision (the decision to roman cancel). I wish I could map this command to PPP or something, rather than having to do button presses AND double taps. There's many combos involving this that you'll need to be able to do to be competitive, so I'm not sure why this ended up requiring so many extraneous inputs.

When I read about the 100/100 scores, I see again and again how "simple and elegant" the game is. Two super meters, a 3-tier focus attack system, and all the complications above seem to fly in the face of that. Even more though, I hear how "casual friendly" it is. This is deeply mysterious and I'm not sure why this so often claimed. Not every game has to be casual friendly, so it would seem more honest to just explain how casual unfriendly all these things are. Qcf x 2 +PPP all the time, extra button presses to throw, extra button presses to roman cancel, and many, many extremely difficult link combos work in concert to create that impenetrable wall of execution between you and the actual game (the interaction between you and your opponent). I wish we could get rid of all this stuff and focus more on the gameplay itself.

Edit: I forgot to mention two more things. First, the unlocks. I'm very surprised to see basic functionality of the multiplayer game--the characters--locked behind tedious 1p tasks. I had to pay a tax of fighting the computer on easiest for long time just to get the core features of the game. (I did this picture-in-picture while watching episodes of Frasier.) I'm fully aware that casual players love unlocks, and that's why non-essential content like costumes, movies, icons, and titles are all perfectly fine to give as rewards for playing 1p content. But the *characters*? This steps on the toes of those wanting to play the multiplayer game by making our first experience with the game a very boring one. I wanted to hire a MMO gold farmer to do this for me.

And the last thing I should have mentioned here is that despite all these many problems, there is fun to be had in the game...

This could easily be half of a great review. What I especially like about it is how he unmasks all the casual retard reviews that rave about the game's "elegance" or "accessibility", etc. As if there ever was a fighting game that was not accessible! You press punch and you punch. You press kick and you kick. WTF could be more accessible than that! A Jet Li movie?

So yes, one more example of paparazzi trying to reviewing games based on preconceived public opinion instead of their own expertise. I'll call it the "Treasure Syndrome". Perhaps I should write an article about that.

On another note, I wish all the SF fans would cotton on to the fact that the game's title is "STREET FIGHTER IV" -- not 4. There's even an entire subforum on SRK that has the game's title wrong. Talk about attention deficit disorder!

[El Chaos]

I always thought of the 2-button press throw as a means of nerfing the move and not as a means to avoid accidentally throwing the opponent, and perhaps the kara-throws are a way of regaining that lost power in a different way by extending the range. And the funny thing is, I'm not even sure if it's a game feature or a bug. It definitely looks like the latter in 3rd Strike, as it slightly breaks the balance between kara-throwers and non-kara-throwers (of course, I mean the characters, not the players). I can't see why base throw range should be extended in the same fashion, though, as it would once again promote poking over other grounded offensive approaches.

On the Saving/ Focus cancelling motion issue, I could say it's a much bigger window for command input than most if not all roman cancels, but it is indeed pointlessly complex to perform.

[icycalm]

[new_pornographer]

So they're the people I keep running into online that disconnect and rage quit on me!

[icycalm]

Are there any kind of rankings in this game? If there are, are you getting the win? If so, you shouldn't have reason to complain. You're better off looking for a better opponent than keep wasting time playing someone who doesn't even think he can win.

More fun:

If you've been playing the hordes of red Ken players online in SFIV (why are they always red?), hopefully this will make you LOL as much as I did.

If you ARE one of those Ken players, or are just aspiring to be, this flowchart is full of helpful tips!



Update: check out the Dan flowchart as well!

http://www.capcom-unity.com/s-kill/blog ... _flowchart

[Archonus]

When a player disconnects in the middle of a fight, they don't lose and you don't win. The fight is essentially rendered a complete waste of time.

It's annoying to say the least.

[icycalm]

Yes, but what is annoying is that there is no ranking, not that people are pulling out.

This is YET ANOTHER misconception I need to clear up. In RTS online ranked matches, for example, if someone drops out the remaining player gets the win. This is especially nice when you are playing some weak player, and he drops out instead of forcing you to spend half an hour going over the entire map to wipe out every single last soldier of his. Instead of doing this tedious job, you get your win straightaway and go back in the lobby to look for someone else who can put up a better fight.

So really, people should be whining about the lack of online ranking. In the arcades this is not necessary (though it would be nice!) because whoever gives up loses his credit, so there is a penalty for dropping out, which makes people give every inch of what they've got in order to avoid it.

Bottom line: it is wrong to blame people for dropping out of a fight. People will always be dropping out of fights for various reasons, and there is nothing anyone can or should do to try and stop them.

[Archonus]

I'm not blaming the people, I'm blaming Capcom's retarded decision to not give the remaining player the win during a drop-out.