The Street Fighter name has been stretched pretty thin since Capcom started releasing spin offs and long titled updates until they ran out of Supers and Turbos to stick on their games. Over these years the audience for the Street Fighter games has dwindled along with the rest of the fighting genre. As the difficulty rose, it became even harder for new players to even get started. Street Fighter IV is the first completely fresh title to hit the streets in over ten years and it works hard to bring in a whole new generation of players without alienating the existing fans and tournament players.
Since the downfall of the arcades, fighting games aren't what they used to be. Perhaps this is due to the lack of any major innovation in the genre compared to the RPGs and the FPS'. A quick glance at the main controls of Street Fighter IV confirms this and you'll feel like your back in the 90's: Three Punch buttons, three kicks, quick rotations and a 2D fighting area have all returned from the past games you may remember. For those who've not played or seen a Street Fighter game before, it is a one-on-one fighting game with over two dozen characters battling to knock each other down in a series of best of two out of three rounds. It's simple on the surface, but Street Fighter is widely regarded as the pinnacle of technical fighting games. Despite the initial feeling of simplicity, these basic building blocks have many layers of complexity built on top of them: combos, super combos, focus attacks and more give the game a "Quick to learn, a lifetime to master" feeling. Sure you can start a game with little knowledge and begin flailing away like a beached fish and still do quite well, however going toe-to-toe with an experienced player can be a brutal learning experience. Past Street Fighter games have had a quality to them that pushes you to improve. Fortunately this quality is as prevalent in Street Fighter IV as it ever was, perhaps even more so.
While the basics of Street Fighter are in place to greet older players with open arms, you'll find that there are a some new features in Street Fighter IV that make all the difference. Super combos are nothing new to Street Fighter, perform attacks, build your meter then pull off a devastating blow once your bar is full. Now we also have ultra combos and they function a little differently. With an ultra combo the revenge meter builds up as you receive damage. This keeps fights a little more balanced when the looser has a tool to quickly turn the tables, providing of course their opponent doesn't block and return with an equally deadly counter. Speaking of counters, Street Fighter III's parry system has now been removed and only lives on as a special move for one of the new combatants, Gouken. Another new system is focus attacks, holding both medium attack buttons charges the attack and allows you to absorb damage from one hit (depending on the attack). If you connect with a focus attack that's been charged for a second, you'll knock your opponent off his feet. The focus attack has to be the most technically game changing aspect of Street Fighter IV. Being able to focus through an incoming jumping kick then knock your foe off balance and follow up with a super combo really puts a greater emphasis on moving, especially as a focus attack can not be blocked. Finally, special moves can be powered up using your super bar and also canceled into focus attacks, a technique reserved for the higher level players. All of this can be very overwhelming at first, but unlike games such as Virtua fighter, you can become rather proficient without having to learn everything at once.
Street Fighter IV comes with a wide selection of unlockables and to begin with the nine glaring blanked out spaces in the character selection screen begging to be set free will force your hand towards the arcade mode. It's unfortunate that a game that lends itself so well to multiplayer should force you to play through the arcade mode no less than twenty four times so you may unlock the full selection roster, but at least it gives you practice. The arcade mode itself is pretty typical with the exception of the different Japanese anime cut scenes that play at the beginning and end of each character's story. The cut scenes are a little reminiscent of the Street Fighter animated movie from '94. While they are rather short and do vary in quality from okay to bad, they do fit together into a larger story they are a nice bonus for those who follow Street Fighter lore or enjoy a little manga. While playing through the arcade mode you can also be interrupted by ranked or unranked Xbox live matches (if you so choose). It's an interesting break from fighting a computer opponent but the arcade mode feels like it's mostly there to unlock characters and as you can't set the arcade requests to friends only, it can feel like an interruption to your progress.
In addition to unlocking characters through the Arcade mode, there's also other challenges to be had. You can also unlock taunts, alternate colours (not entire outfits), titles or icons. There are three modes to choose from, but trial is a good place for anyone to start. The trial mode gives you tutorials on how to handle your character all the way from a standing kick to a sequence of motions that have to be performed with near inhuman split second precision. It does seem a little strange that the tutorial mode is hidden under challenges rather than being right out there for new players to spot but at least it's available. The other two challenges are time attack and survival mode. Difficulty here varies as vastly as everywhere else, from laughably easy to scarily impossible. Unlocking colours can be nice to vary things up a little, but the unlocking of taunts seems a little redundant. Who has the time to preen yourself when there's an electric Brazilian beast rolling towards you? With over four hundred titles and over two hundred icons, you do get some uniqueness to your online profile.
Online, or at least multiplayer, is where you'll get the most gameplay out of Street Fighter IV. The AI doesn't quite cut it compared to the 'fairer' challenge of fighting a human opponent. There's a few less multiplayer options than you may expect. In fact the options don't expand further than selecting handicaps, rounds and time limits. It's unfortunate that there's no tournament play or any options that can keep you in a game longer as when playing a single round match online you'll likely find yourself looking for a match for as long as you're actually playing one. Matches can be found using a battle point system, scoring when you win and reducing when you loose. The battle point system does a reasonable job at keeping you fighting other players which are close to your skill, so things stay interesting. If you find a player who closely matches your skill you can always start a private session with them so you're not taken back to the online menu after each match. One major victory for Street Fighter IV is the robust connection stability, after several matches across a rather low connection strength I never witnessed any bad syncing or connection problems, leaving you with little to blame but yourself or the controller.
Street Fighter has gone into the third dimension before with the EX series. However, the EX games also had a 3D arena to fight in, unlike Street Fighter IV's choice of keeping the 3D graphics but throwing out the 3D arena that you'll find in most other recent fighting games. The 3D characters animate superbly and their movements not only reflect their personality and fighting style, but you can even catch changes in their facial expressions at the right moment. The audio is also kept at a similar high standard. Your usual screams of "Haduken!" and "Sonic boom!" are all present along with voice overs for the cut scenes. If you have a dislike to Ryu talking in American then you have to option of switching to his Japanese voice, as you can with every other character individually (after completing the arcade mode once). Each stage is also accompanied by it's own music, nothing terribly memorable but it sets it tone well enough. The big audio crime in Street Fighter IV is the title music, goodbye hard rock guitar cords, hello English J-pop. Now I'm not going to get onto a rant about J-pop here, but I'll say this: No matter how much you hate it, either in general or where it's used here, it's also responsible for some of the most catchy tunes around. Street Fighter IV's title music "THE NEXT DOOR -Indestructible-" by Exile being is exception and you'll find yourself singing the tune and cursing it within a few hours.
Capcom has announced that they won't be bringing any new characters to the game through DLC, however the current roster is already very solid and varied with several more characters than the arcade version. The six new combatants fit in naturally with the existing cast and while some have been dubbed as over powered, they are far from unbeatable. If you are looking for DLC then you can purchase cosmetic changes to the fighters. If you want Zangief to look like Mike Haggar from Final Fight and have the money then Capcom has you covered. Street Fighter IV has already proven itself to be a huge success both on consoles and in the arcades and it is an easy recommendation for anyone who has fond memories of the original Street Fighting games or has any love at all for one-on-one combat. You can be sure that Capcom