Posts Tagged ‘Super Street Fighter 4’

« Older Entries

Mario’s cameo in Super Street Fighter 4

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

The Skyscraper Under Construction stage in Super Street Fighter 4 is my favorite not only because it’s cool to fight high up on a skyscraper being worked on, but the music is awesome with the guitars driving the fight.

Based on Final Fight and set in Metro City, you can see a Mike Hagger statue in the background and Hugo (Andore) carrying a huge beam while cheering with the other workers on another platform. The stage has some humor to it too, as the fight begins a man is about to take a bite out of his sandwich when he looks up surprised to see two fighters about to go at it, looks back and forth, and runs over to the cable to hold on while spectating and calling to his friends behind him.

If you look carefully at this man you can see that he’s wearing a red hard hat while everyone else is wearing a yellow one, and has big black eyebrows and a bushy mustache, resembling a certain plumber who began his video game career as a carpenter scaling red steel girders in Donkey Kong.

During the fight this Mario look alike calls to his friends behind him and if you look closely, one of them is wearing blue overalls and a green shirt resembling Luigi, while the guy next to him is wearing yellow maybe representing Wario. These references are just subtle enough that you can miss them if you didn’t take a good look at them, and are unexpected in a Street Fighter game. I always love finding little references like this in video games.

(Donkey Kong screenshot from vgmuseum.com.)

Tags: , ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

Super Street Fighter 4 Review (Xbox 360)

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Super Street Fighter IV is one of the most addictive video games I’ve ever played. With a constant stream of opponents online, 35 characters to play, and tons of cool moves to use, I just want to keep playing one more match.

I’m not a hardcore fighting game fan so I couldn’t tell you the nuances in the changes Capcom made to the game’s balance, but I can say that the game feels very good and its very fun to play, and that’s what matters. At its core, Super Street Fighter IV is technical enough for pros and very easy to get into for new players with its 2-D gameplay and Street Fighter II basics. Expanding on the trials from the previous version, Super’s challenge mode seems tweaked more for beginners as it takes you through step by step for each character’s special moves and combos. However many of the combos require very specific timing and the ability to see the computer demonstrate the moves would have been nice.

The graphics seem touched up since the last version, and the new stages are lively with crowds cheering on in the background. The skyscraper level based on Final Fight is my favorite because of its music featuring a rocking guitar to pump up the intensity of the fight. There weren’t quite enough stages in the last game, so the addition of several new stages was needed, though I wish there were a few more. They weren’t able to add character specific stages but you can unlock an arranged music option that plays the character themes during multiplayer matches instead of the stage themes.

Super Street Fighter IV

Super adds 10 new characters, with 8 returning characters like Cody and Guy from the Alpha series, Ibuki and Dudley from Street Fighter III, and 2 newcomers with Juri, a sadistic tai kwon do fighter, and Hakan, a Turkish wrestler that uses cooking oil to enhance his attacks. Unlike the previous version, all 35 characters are available from the start, with the only things to unlock being the player titles, special options, and the character colors and taunts that are earned just by playing matches. Having all of the characters available from the start is a nice change as learning all of the characters becomes the heart of the game.

Each character now has two ultras to choose from which are just as flashy as the previous ones, and I may be mistaken but the animation time for them seems to have been trimmed down. The animated story cutscenes in arcade mode are higher quality than last time, though the intro prologue movies are just still art images with a panning camera, and I preferred the light hearted scenes from the original. While the single player arcade mode is there and brings back the classic bonus stages (Oh, my car!), competing against others is the game’s main appeal.

The online portion has been simplified down to just a few modes with the 1 on 1 ranked battle, team battle, tounament mode (with a recent update), and the much requested endless battle, where you can take turns with your friends in a queue to play the winner. Endless battle is also a good way to watch how other players play along with the new ability to save and view replays of your own matches and download others. The blind character selection and not seeing your opponent’s ranking until the match starts is a nice touch so that players won’t bow out before starting a match because of a player rank. As I’ve said, playing online is highly addictive, and turning fight request on during arcade mode still seems to be the fastest way to find opponents.

If there’s one thing I could complain about, it’s the transitions to start matches compared to the shorter downtime in the original Street Fighter IV. While the game moves quickly from each menu, the extra animation to load the map select screen adds some unnecessary time to starting a match when most people will choose random anyways. (Xbox 360 users can reduce load times before matches if both players have the game installed on their hard drive.)

The original Street Fighter IV brought the series back to its roots with the essential gameplay of Street Fighter II over the more technical Street Fighter III, making this fighting game more accessible for everyone while still having a lot of depth. With the addition 10 new characters, new stages, and refined online modes, Super Street Fighter IV is a substantial update to the original release that makes this a more complete version of the game, and at the lower price of $40 it’s a great deal.

Grade: A

Buy: Super Street Fighter IV (Xbox 360), Super Street Fighter IV (PS3)

Tags:
Posted in General, Review | No Comments »

My Super Street Fighter IV player is repaired

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

It took about a week and a half for the replacement Xbox 360 to arrive after the simple process of submitting a repair for my console on which was under warranty on xbox.com, printing out a label and shipping it in a box. The replacement seems to be in like new shape, though I bet my previous console had a few less scratches by the controller port flap. It’s still funny that the DVD drive died after I barely touched the new Xbox 360 aside from playing a few installed games of Street Fighter IV and SoulCalibur IV and nothing until Super Street Fighter IV came out. Microsoft threw in a free 1 month Xbox Live card for the time it took to be repaired. I’ve had my Xbox 360 back for about a week now and once again I’m back playing Super Street Fighter IV.

My skills are getting slightly better as I’m becoming more proficient at the joystick using Daigo’s method. Lately I’ve been trying to play a bit more carefully and watching my opponent at first to get an idea of how they play before rushing in. Once I realized that chip damage from blocking special attacks slowly wore down my lifebar, I started dodging projectiles and find I have more life than I use to. At the same time I’m thinking about this when using specials on my opponents to knick their life down bit by bit if they’re difficult. Too be honest, I’m really not that great at the game but I have managed to persistantly play Cammy enough to get her to B rank with about 5,000 battle points, so now I feel a responsibility to continue to get better play well to respect the rank I have with that character. (Not that points mean much, especially in my case, and judging an opponent because of a low point score can prove to be wrong if they’re underestimated.)

SSF4 is so addicting to just keep playing match after match with a new opponent ready to go and a huge roster of characters to provide a ton of replay value. I’ve been alternating between a few characters online so I don’t suffer character fatigue from using Cammy way too much. I’ve actually gotten better with Guile and his flash kick charge move. I found holding down in one of the lower corners of the stick’s gate and rolling the stick up rather than moving it straight up feels mores naturally, the same with Chun Li’s spinning bird kick. Dhalsim is interesting to use with his slow movement, and I hardly see anyone use him online. It’s the characters I don’t usually see that give me trouble as I don’t know how to approach them, and that kinda seems to be the case with the few times I’ve played with Dhalsim against others. Gotta love his throw move where he whacks the opponent in a few times while saying “Yoga!”. While Ryu was my main for some time, Sakura is pretty fun to play with as a different take on Ryu’s moves and the weaker hadokens that can also be charged. I like how she’s so cheerful about fighting and she’s just a kid plowing through thougher characters with arcing shoryuken. Juri I still haven’t gotten the hang of.

Protect Me Knight by Ancient and Yuzo Koshiro has a demo up on XBLA under indie games. The intro screen starts with someone loading a Famicom cartridge and having you press A to blow on it after it doesn’t load up. The game is like Gauntlet and The Legend of Zelda, as you choose from 4 characters to protect the princess who is within a small fort as monsters like tan and blue pigs come from all sides and attack the wooden barricades. Basically you run around a single screen knocking out monsters that come flooding in and maintain blockades to stop the enemies from getting to your princess and hold out to beat each stage. The music and graphics are totally in an 8-bit style and for $3 I’ll probably get this retro tribute.

Tags: , ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

Daigo’s Arcade Stick Technique for Street Fighter

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

A short documentary on Japan’s Street Fighter champ Daigo Umehara has been translated thanks to Youtube user OxkeNzo. The documentary gets into what Daigo Umehara was feeling when he fought Justin Wong at EVO 2004, and how he got good by playing 363 days of the year. But most useful of all are the tips he gives on playing Street Fighter with a joystick.

At about 6:30 on the video’s mark Daigo Umehara explains how there’s two ways most people hold the joystick, covering from the top and grabbing it from the bottom like a claw, but that they’re not good for Street Fighter. He shows his method which he says is the best way, by putting the stick between the pinky and the ring finger and cupping your hand around the stick. By using this method, you will only enter the inputs you need to allow you to do moves much quicker than using the other holding techniques that make you overcompensate and input unnecessary directions.

I had been holding the joystick between my middle finger and ring finger (and other weird ways), and once I used Daigo’s method it was like playing with a dpad for me. Suddenly I had so much more control over characters, dashing back and forth, cancelling out of focus attacks, quickly blocking after moving forward, and easily pulling off supers as tightly as a dpad despite the loose feel of the Sanwa joystick.

This is such a basic tip to know that it should be included in an instructional manual. Definitely try out this method if you’re like me and you’re learning how to play fighting games with a joystick.

Tags: , ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

Random and Arranged in Super Street Fighter 4

Monday, May 17th, 2010

As I continued to put more time into Super Street Fighter IV, I somehow unlocked the arranged music option after I finally set an icon and title for online matches, so I’m not sure if it was due to that or if I had just played enough. Arranged Music allows you to listen to character themes instead of the normal stage theme, based on the character your opponent chooses in online matches. Character themes in the original Street Fighter IV could only be heard during rival matches in the single player mode, so they seemed to have addressed one of the minor shortcomings of the previous version. Listening to character themes is nice for a change and feels relaxing as its one catchy song the whole time instead of the stage themes that change and become more intense as the rounds progress and the health bars decrease.

By picking random in ranked matches I’ve forced myself to use other characters than just choosing Cammy all of the time. Since I don’t know the majority of the cast, it’s fun to play random and learn a character on the fly, trying different input combinations to figure out their special moves. This means I have to get back to the basics of normal attacks if I want to win and concentrate on looking for openings and blocking because I don’t know the character very well. It’s cool when I start getting the hang of a character by the second round and start putting up a decent fight.

I think of all the characters I’ve sampled, Juri has been the most fun with her bad girl personality and confusing moves like the one where she taunts her opponent to attack to get on the other side of them. Her fireball move shoots in 3 directions, doubles as a short range attack with the initial kick, and I just discovered you can delay releasing the kick button to hold back on kicking the fireball right away.

The strategy guide was given to me as a gift and I read something about not attacking to block, and with this in mind and choosing random characters I’ve started playing smarter. If keep inputting attacks, then I use up my input to block, so I’ve been holding back on mashing the buttons too soon to react and be able to block my opponent’s attack. I’ve been trying to react more to my opponent and worked on character spacing. By moving myself just a little bit I can get just out of the intended range of my opponents attack or set up better space for my own attack, instead of falling into the same old movement like being on a track. And since I’ve been playing on random and playing against different characters, I’ve been anticipating opponents attacks more and sizing up how much space I need to defend from an attack. Like Ibuki’s sliding grab, where I anticipate the player using this so I try to block low to stop it, as I really hate grab moves!

I’ve still been playing sessions with Cammy and one night I tried a different approach and become more aggressive and moving fast. It seemed to work as my player points went up after winning constantly, though I feel like I’ve gotten a bit reckless.

A note to Xbox Live players: Please install Super Street Fighter IV to your hard drive. It makes loading online matches so much quicker.

Tags: ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

Progression in Online Games

Friday, May 7th, 2010

The problem with playing online games is that unlike a single player game, there’s no progression. I’ve been playing match after match online with Super Street Fighter IV, and I’m not earning anything but practice and points on my online rank. If I beat a level in a single player game, I’ll have my progress saved on my file and feel like I’ve accomplished something on my way to beat the game. I’ve only stopped once to play through the single player mode with Ryu and unlock the voice language options. Playing online is never ending, and while I spend time doing that, I have other games that are going unplayed.

Speaking of beating games, for my last challenge in Retro Game Challenge I’ve beaten Cosmic Gate (with the 64 shot warp gate cheat), Haggleman, and Rally King. The challenges this game gives you to beat for each game is exactly what I was talking about previously on putting time into video games to beat them. Retro Game Challenge’s challenges for each game have you play through small portions of each game, moving from game to game as you complete them. As I’m going for the final challenge of playing through and seeing the ending for each game, the previous challenges were only practice and now I feel like I’m playing Arino’s role from the TV show Game Center CX that Retro Game Challenge is based on. Except of course I’m not sitting in a room for 10 hours to beat an old Famicom game and can close my DS at anytime.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

« Older Entries