(Super) Street Fighter IV

[Whinehouse]

That's a question for everyone who owns the game! Stop elevating me, I don't want all the forumers gunning for me.

 

Man, I'mma get my lead pipe and balaclava, jump you and Kingpin your joystick hand...

 

Take him out!

 

That way I can finally beat the 50/50 spread and prove myself Champine!

 

Incidentally, you might want to opt for more than a balaclava now. If JLM is assaulted by a balaclava clad assailant, people might point fingers in your direction. Just saying...

[JLM]

If the Simpsons has taught me anything, it's that I need to injure my hand, then your crowbar attack will fortuitously pop it back into place just before I head into competition.

 

I like how you tell me it's going to be you but wear a balaclava anyway so you can pretend to be a ninja. Can't buy that kind of commitment to the role. Or will you actually wear a sombrero to throw everyone off the scent? I am now scared.

 

Whinehouse, you will never be supreme champine! Never! Except for those games where you're vastly superior. Like Rival Schools. But other than that, NEVER!

[mattshutter]

INDEEEEESTRUCTABLEEEEEEEEEEEEE dooo doo doo dooo doo doo doooo

[FLips]

Like Rival Schools.

 

Fun fact here, when I was younger and played the likes of Theme Hospital and Theme Park, I longed for a "Theme School" game. I had a chipped ps1 and we used to get a list of games to order and I saw Rival Schools and thought it may have been the game I was looking for. Durrrrrr

[Carbomb]

A few questions, as I've not seen anything of this:

 

Are the graphics, going from the descriptions, similar to those of Guilty Gear?

 

The characters seem to be largely just everyone from the Street Fighter Alpha/Zero series - how many new guys are there?

 

Are my best characters ever, Adon, Dan, Gen, Remy and Eagle in there?

[FLips]

A few questions, as I've not seen anything of this:

 

Are the graphics, going from the descriptions, similar to those of Guilty Gear?

 

The characters seem to be largely just everyone from the Street Fighter Alpha/Zero series - how many new guys are there?

 

Are my best characters ever, Adon, Dan, Gen, Remy and Eagle in there?

 

SF IV Overlord JLM is your man for this, but Dan and Gen are in there.

[Au]

Fun fact here, when I was younger and played the likes of Theme Hospital and Theme Park, I longed for a "Theme School" game. I had a chipped ps1 and we used to get a list of games to order and I saw Rival Schools and thought it may have been the game I was looking for. Durrrrrr

A more fun fact is that when I was a kid, I used to write short stories called "Rival Schools: blah" and even did some some (very poor) drawings for a 2D fighter game based on them. I've never actually played Rival Schools.

[JLM]

Nah, not like Guilty Gear at all.

 

It's 3D but with a stylised cel-shaded effect to make them look more cartoonish. Also there's an uber-sexy calligraphy pen effect when you use charged focus attacks. The projectiles and stuff look beautiful, with heat distortion as they travel and other flashy goodness.

 

Don't worry about the 3D by the way. It's not like Streetfighter EX and it miraculously manages to play with the same immediacy and fluidity as 3rd Strike. How they've pulled this off I don't know.

 

Trust me, it works, but if you don't believe me at least King of Fighters XII and BlazBlue are on the way.

 

The gameplay is absolutely 2D. No dodging into the screen, no plane-shifting, just straight-up 2D fighting as it should be.

 

The roster breaks down like this:

 

Arcade roster is the classic Streetfighter 2 dozen:

 

Ryu/Ken/Guile/Blanka/Honda/Chun Li/Dhalsim/Zangief and the four Grand masters Balrog/Vega/Sagat/Bison.

 

These are joined by four entirely new fighters:

 

Abel - French, looks like something between an amateur wrestler, mixed martial artist and footballer. Somewhat similar to Alex from SF3, but also has some fairly unique stuff.

 

Crimson Viper - American woman with red hair and wears a business suit with gadgets in it that make her special moves happen. Looks extremely SNK-styled and reminds me a bit of Iori, a bit of Vanessa and a bit of a few others here and there. Has a fairly unique fighting style, though one of her specials is very Terry Bogard. I'm assuming you understand all these SNK references bombcar, I'm sure you mentioned KOF/Garou fandom at some point.

 

Rufus - Morbidly obese American dude who wears an ill-fitting Bruce Lee Game of Death/The Bride from Kill bill outfit. He has a hypnotic jiggling gut. He's deceptively agile and his fighting style is vaguely reminiscent of Yun and Yang, but his moveset itself is mostly unique.

 

El Fuerte - Mexican luchador/chef. Looks and plays like you'd expect. Fast, jumpy, sprinty, command throws etc. He's not easy to get to grips with but he's good fun.

 

On top of that there's Seth, the final boss. He does moves from other characters (his gimmick is that he's assimilating the data of all the other fighters in the tournament), so he does sonic booms, has stretchy arms, does spinning piledrivers and uber dragon punches etc. He also has some of his own moves and a normal set that reminds me of Gill/Urien from SF3. He's a cheap fucker but there are ways round it.

 

On top of that, the console version has the following:

 

Cammy and Fei Long from Super Streetfighter 2

Gen, Rose, Sakura and Dan from the Alpha series amongst other places

Akuma from SSF2 Turbo and nearly every other SF game since.

Gouken - Ryu and Ken's master, Akuma's brother, legendary character making his first in-game playable appearance.

 

 

Nobody from Third strike aside from Ryu/Ken/Chunners unfortunately. Rumours of Downloadable content suggest Dee-Jay and T. Hawk, but more intriguingly the producer is desperate to include Ibuki (his favourite character), which could pave the way for more Third Strike characters. I hope this materialises.

 

The story places it just after the events of SF 2. Bison is down, Seth is a Bison underling/project who appears to be running things his own way in Bison's absence under the assumption that he isn't coming back.

 

The gameplay is deeper and more complex than SSF2T, on a par with Alpha 1 and 2, but not as in-depth as Third Strike or with the amount of variations of Alpha 3. You have EX moves, everyone has one super like in Super Turbo. There are also Ultra combos, which are on a separate meter, and again everybody just has one of these. This is the revenge meter, which fills up as you block or are hit by opponent attacks. They are exceedingly powerful for most characters and can turn a round on its head very easily. The exception to the "one ultra, one super" rule is Gen, who has a separate super and ultra each for his two stances.

 

The trade-off with ultras is that they have an exceptionally long "coming out" animation, which means that you really have to work to hit a lot of them. Some can be busted out on wake-up, but others need to be chained or just totally take the opponent by surprise. It's almost a mini cut-scene when you bust them out, so they are easily telegraphed. Ryu's in particular is absolutely ridiculous. You can't change state (ie go from attacking to blocking) during the wind-up itself, but as soon as it actually fires you're allowed to do what you want. Because Ryu's takes additional time to get to you once it's unleashed (it's an uber-super-duper fireball as you'd expect), it ALWAYS gets blocked unless you're extremely clever with your usage. Poor Ryu.

 

Parrying is gone, but there's a "focus attack" which gives you armour akin to a parry for one hit. This can be charged for up to three stages, with the armour period covering more of the move depending on the stage. Also hitting someone with a fully charged focus attack makes them "crumple" like in Virtua Fighter, setting them up for free hits if you're very quick. You can do "EX focus" which cancels selected moves at the cost of one chunk of your super bar. And you can Focus attack dash cancel, which is using your focus attack for the parrying property, but then cancelling whatever your focus attack normally is by dashing, allowing you to follow up with whatever you want. Throws are pretty similar to third strike, activated by LP and LK together.

[JLM]

As for Eagle, that'd be far too obscure an inclusion if they didn't even let any Third Strike characters in. He's been in what, two games ever, and one of them is Streetfighter 1, which is absolutely dump. He's pretty good in CVS2 I'll grant you.

 

Also, everyone should play rival schools. You haven't lived until you've seen a violinist beat the shit out of a synchronised swimmer on the field of combat.

[Chest Rockwell]

You can do "EX focus" which cancels selected moves at the cost of one chunk of your super bar.

 

 

What's this?

[KFR42]

INDEEEEESTRUCTABLEEEEEEEEEEEEE dooo doo doo dooo doo doo doooo

 

Ugh, don't. That song is terrible. Prime example of modern japanese video game music though!

[JLM]

Waitin' for this moment all my LIIIFE it's my Deeestiny. CHOOOOOOOON. It's up there with Third Strike's opening rap.

 

As for young Grasshoper Rockwell:

 

An example of an EX focus attack:

 

Do a Hadouken with Ryu. He does a Hadouken. Hooray

 

Do a Hadouken with Ryu, but press both mediums while it's happening. He'll flash yellow, cancel the hadouken animation and immediately switch to a focus attack. This costs you one bit of super bar and is known as an EX focus.

 

Why do this? Because you can follow up from the Hadouken with the focus attack instantaneously, surprising the opponent with it when you'd normally have to either cancel into a super or just wait for him to finish his Hadouken animation.

 

 

To get even more confusing, here's another thing you can do:

 

Stand still and do a focus attack (medium punch and medium kick together). Your character does a focus attack. Hooray.

 

Stand still and do a focus attack, but then quickly dash (double tap a direction) while your character is winding up the attack. Your character will stop winding up for the focus attack and do the dash, leaving you ready to do whatever. This is called focus attack dash cancelling, which does what it says on the tin but sounds more confusing than it really is.

 

Now, for something spicy and finger breaking, combine the two methods above to do the ridiculously named Ex-focus-attack-dash-cancel.

 

So you

 

1) Do a Hadouken

2) Immediately press both mediums to EX focus, which turns the Hadouken into a focus attack.

3) Immediately dash to cancel the focus attack, which turns that focus attack into nothing at all, leaving you standing still in a neutral position, either closer to or further away from your opponent depending on which way you dashed.

 

Why?

 

Well, a practical example is what a guy did against me earlier that was nifty. You know if Ryu does a fireball and you're reasonably close to him, you can jump over it and kick him in the face because he'll be stuck in the fireball pose? This guy had a trick to fuck with my head using the above manouvers.

 

He let me get into jump range and did a fireball, then cancelled it into a focus, then cancelled that using the dash, putting him back in a neutral standing position.

 

So I end up jumping towards a Ryu who should be about to get kicked in the face because he's fireballing, but it ends up that I'm jumping and he's just standing there waiting for me. So I get Dragon punched. And he laughs. And I feel stupid. And I love this game.

 

Of course, on HD remix Ryu simply had "Fake fireball" in his move set, but in the absence of that, you could use these methods to invent all kinds of advanced trickery. Can't wait to see how the professionals put this stuff to use, because right now it's still mind-boggling to me.

 

I also read about a Guile player who fired a slow sonic boom, then cancelled and followed it accross the screen, ending up right next to the opponent as they blocked the projectile for MAXIUM PRESSURE. Those caps lock should tell you how serious that situation is.

[Carbomb]

Nah, not like Guilty Gear at all.

 

It's 3D but with a stylised cel-shaded effect to make them look more cartoonish. Also there's an uber-sexy calligraphy pen effect when you use charged focus attacks. The projectiles and stuff look beautiful, with heat distortion as they travel and other flashy goodness.

 

Don't worry about the 3D by the way. It's not like Streetfighter EX and it miraculously manages to play with the same immediacy and fluidity as 3rd Strike. How they've pulled this off I don't know.

 

Trust me, it works, but if you don't believe me at least King of Fighters XII and BlazBlue are on the way.

 

The gameplay is absolutely 2D. No dodging into the screen, no plane-shifting, just straight-up 2D fighting as it should be.

 

Sounds great - I've always been dubious of 2D games in 3D graphics (although I loved FF: Wild Ambition), so it's good to know that it's still "pure".

 

Crimson Viper - American woman with red hair and wears a business suit with gadgets in it that make her special moves happen. Looks extremely SNK-styled and reminds me a bit of Iori, a bit of Vanessa and a bit of a few others here and there. Has a fairly unique fighting style, though one of her specials is very Terry Bogard. I'm assuming you understand all these SNK references bombcar, I'm sure you mentioned KOF/Garou fandom at some point.

 

Yep - massive fan, so I get those straight away.

 

Rufus - Morbidly obese American dude who wears an ill-fitting Bruce Lee Game of Death/The Bride from Kill bill outfit. He has a hypnotic jiggling gut. He's deceptively agile and his fighting style is vaguely reminiscent of Yun and Yang, but his moveset itself is mostly unique.

 

Sounds like their version of Cheng Sinzan.

 

On top of that, the console version has the following:

 

Cammy and Fei Long from Super Streetfighter 2

Gen, Rose, Sakura and Dan from the Alpha series amongst other places

Akuma from SSF2 Turbo and nearly every other SF game since.

Gouken - Ryu and Ken's master, Akuma's brother, legendary character making his first in-game playable appearance.

 

 

Nobody from Third strike aside from Ryu/Ken/Chunners unfortunately. Rumours of Downloadable content suggest Dee-Jay and T. Hawk, but more intriguingly the producer is desperate to include Ibuki (his favourite character), which could pave the way for more Third Strike characters. I hope this materialises.

 

Some good-sounding stuff there. I'm furious there's no Adon, though - my absolute favourite evar.

 

As for Eagle, that'd be far too obscure an inclusion if they didn't even let any Third Strike characters in. He's been in what, two games ever, and one of them is Streetfighter 1, which is absolutely dump. He's pretty good in CVS2 I'll grant you.

 

He's actually been in three - Streetfighter 1, which is crap, and he's unplayable in that (as is Birdie, Adon and Sagat), CVS2, in which he's amazing, and in Streetfighter Alpha/Zero 3 for the PSP (which is infuriating - the controls are ridiculously unresponsive on that console).

 

Manchester Gold~

[Chest Rockwell]

Young Grasshopper? Dammit, you're younger than me. But I admit I do still have youthful good looks.

 

 

Thanks for dropping science one more time. So, new plan... I'm gonna get my lead pipe and sombrero, and Misery you and have your broken legged ass sat in my living room until I'm good enough to beat you at this game. And I'll know if you're letting me win!

[JLM]

Adon features in Sagat's prologue cut-scene if it helps? He gets Tiger destructioned in the face after giving Sagat too much sass. It's a beautiful thing.