The original review for this game was lost. Yes a whole review. The program I used to write it crashed. So I decided an effort to be spontaneous I would write a whole new review. Which is great, but in doing so, I find myself thinking about the game in different terms than I did when I began the first review.
First and foremost, if you haven’t all ready heard how awesome Super Street Fighter IV is head over to Giant Bomb’s Review page for the old style traditional 5 star review. But once you’ve done so, come back here. We have some shenanigans we need to discuss…
Super Street Fighter IV follows in the tradition of other similar Street Fighters. There are fireballs and sonic hurricanes. But there are also oily Turkish wrestlers and Feng Shui Engines. The game has a crazy cast topping out at around 30 fighters. Some old, some new, it’s crazy. Why would ANYONE want to play such a complicated game? Where is the Street Fighter of old, where there were 6 fighters and most people could play any of them. Even in the last game with 25 players there were a fair amount of folks hitting the Random choice when the character select screen came up. But these days with over 30, is that even an option any more? Are people going to be able to master ALL these fighters? Were they REALLY able to master the last 25? Not very many I’m sure. People outside of professional tournament players probably picked Ryu and Ken, then probably one other fighter that they remembered from the old days and beat the arcade mode and maybe messed around with their friends a little then put a toe online to discover everyone was really kicking butt and put the game on the shelf until this one came out. Why do I believe this? Well, I was pretty terrible at Street Fighter IV even though I’d spent probably around 40 hours playing it in the first couple months after it had come out. I was trying to unlock Seth and for some reason even after I’d beat the arcade with every other character he still wasn’t unlocking. Whatever the reason, whoever I’d missed I decided I would go back and go through all 25 characters and try again. But before I did that I went online and found even after just a couple of months the only people online were FAR better than me. Also, when I jumped on recently with SF4. only really good people were still playing; so much so that even though I had around 45 battle points I was still playing people who had hundreds. Because there just wasn’t anyone else.
So after all this, I REALLY got excited about Super Street Fighter IV coming out. So I went online and watched many hours of video of the professional tournament players, playing SSF4. I would say I sat there and watched around 40+ hours of the game. I am MUCH better than I was. And even one of my friends who can thoroughly kick my butt on SSF4 even now, was having to take me to a third round before he could beat me. Which is major progress. But I was still losing… And sure I can beat people now that I could have NEVER even come close to beating before. But I am not the average person, even if I don’t have the average amount of skill for someone who lived through the Street Fighter years. I was a Mortal Kombat Arcade rat, I hated Street Fighter back then.
But does the average person go online and watch a full time job’s worth of videos to make them better at a video game? Will that average person continue to watch and grind on said game to get even better? No, they won’t. When they reach the point where they cannot beat ANYONE, they will just stop playing, right? I mean it even happens with Modern Warfare and Halo. The people playing at the beginning are more than double or triple those playing just before the sequel comes out. This isn’t because people have fickle tastes. It’s because they don’t like to lose all the time to people who make it their business to play at least a few hours a day every day.
So what does this tell us? Well, that there is a serious possibility that by the time the hype dies down for Super Street Fighter IV there won’t be anyone who isn’t a professional tournament player or diehard playing it. So why do we bother?
I’m not sure. I decided I wanted to get extremely good at the game. Kind of like I got committed to getting really good at Starcraft 2. It’s a decision. Like a new year’s resolution or something. But the people I’m beating online, why do they play? I don’t know. One guy I fought on the PS3 version couldn’t do any of Hakan’s special moves. He just kept trying to throw me. I beat him pretty quickly even though I had not spent much time with the new Madcatz arcade pad, that I got specifically for the PS3 flavor of SSF4. But why was this guy playing online? Did he think there were hundreds of other people out there who hadn’t spent more than a few minutes with the game and were itching to play online? I don’t know…
I don’t want anyone to think that this is in some way an indictment of people who just want to play and have fun and don’t care if they win or lose. I certainly have been that person. Usually with my friends though, not with a bunch of complete strangers. I certainly love Super Street Figthter IV and think that everyone should grab a copy of but I also think that if you REALLY want to play online you should probably at least have an idea of how to play your character. Just a suggestion.
This is certainly the best fighting game to have come out in quite a while. There is only one other fighting game announced for this year, that is BlazBlue Continuum Shift; according to Japanese Arcade fighting fans, this game is seriously good. But will it be better than Super Street Fighter IV? Hard to say, but it’s doubtful. I’m pretty sure that Super Street Fighter IV will be my Fighting game of the year and probably has the potential to be in the running for my game of the year. I’m looking at you Halo Reach, but that is a story for another article.
Just as a neat ending to this little review. The PS3 version and the XBOX 360 versions are incredibly similar and both work perfectly online. If you have either system and like fighting games you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy. It is only $40 after all…
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