Back around the mid 90’s fighting games were big with titles like Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat leading the genre. I played a lot of both games, but personally was a bigger fan of the Mortal Kombat franchise and it wasn’t due to the blood and gore. I thought the characters were better designed and looked a lot cooler, special moves were easier to do and remember, there was more of a story and then of course there was the blood, gore and finishing moves known as fatality’s. I started to lose interest in the Street Fighter II franchise because almost every year they were releasing a new version of the game with new features, characters and modes to make the fighting faster. There was the original, followed by Turbo, Championship Edition, Super Street Fighter II and Alpha, so I just got sick of all the rereleases and since then never cared about a Street Fighter game again, not even when they released Street Fighter III, but when they announced Street Fighter IV and I saw pictures of it I thought I would give it a try and see if it had that original Street Fighter II feel to it.
I was very impressed to see they included all the original characters from Street Fighter II plus a few new characters; I was even more impressed on how well the models of the characters looked. A lot of detail went into designing them. Even more impressive was the design of the backgrounds. I sometimes lost focus of the fight because I got distracted by what was happening in the backgrounds. A lot of the stages may look familiar if you have played Street Fighter II and they try to recapture the music that went along with those stages but they failed big time, none of the stages have those catchy themes that are remembered from the early 90’s games. While on the matter of sound, one thing that annoyed the hell out of me was the announcer of this game, he reminded me of the announcer from the Pokémon Stadium games. I think there is an option to turn him off but I am not completely sure yet.
The controls of the game are what you would expect from a home version of Street Fighter or in that case any fighting game. I am really bad at fighting games, but I picked up on the controls really fast. All of the classic Street Fighter II characters have their same special move controls, (example Ryu’s Down, Toward, Punch does a Fireball) the only problem I have on this game (and on all fighting games) is doing combo moves. My fingers are not fast enough, and I don’t have the memory to remember a long button combo.
There are many different difficulty settings to choose from in this game ranging from Easiest, Very Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard, and ect. So once you find a setting you can deal with the game can either be a very fun quick beat em up, challenging game, or a pain in the ass game that you never want to play again. Since I am not very good at fighting games I stick to an easier setting and even then it can give me a run for my money. However even on the easiest setting I feel that one character is really over powered over the rest and is given an unfair advantage, Zangief. Even in the most recently released Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix that was released on the Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network I felt he was overpowered on the easiest setting.
Despite me not being very good at fighting games I thought I would go on Xbox Live and see how multiplayer worked. To my surprise finding matches was very quick and easy to set up. There was no slow downs at all and felt like I was playing someone that was sitting right next to me instead of someone hundreds of miles away, only downside was almost everyone only was really good and I got my ass handed to me each time.
Conclusion: It’s really hard for me to recommend this game at a full $60 price tag right now. If you liked playing Street Fighter II back in the 1990’s and you just heard about this game and your thinking about picking it up because you heard that it sort of plays like and reminds people of Street Fighter II, I would say hold off until it drops in price. Instead look into purchasing Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix which was released in late November 2008. It is the classic Street Fighter II from the 90’s but redone character models, backgrounds, music, and it’s all done in HD but all the game play is still the same as it was in the 90’s. It has online matches so you can play with your friends and best of all, it’s more half the price of Street Fighter IV at only $20 and you can get it now on the Xbox Live Arcade or the Playstation Network. So I would recommend that until Street Fighter IV comes down in price because it is basically the same game, but I still think the classic Street Fighter II is better.