Street Fighter IV : PS3
I thought I’d already reviewed this; seems I was wrong. Street Fighter IV is the absolute king among 2D fighting games (though some hardcore players may disagree), and the reasons are simple: everyone can play, you have to be really good to be good, and everyone has heard of it. This is a game that rubbish players can pick up and have a go at without feeling walked on, but has enough depth that really, a good player is going to kill them every time and that’s important.
Playing against the computer is hard. Very hard. Saying I have ‘completed’ this game is a bit of a lie as I’ve never beaten it on anything beyond ‘medium’, nor have I unlocked every single character, but I have played it enough to know and that’s my criteria with fighting games.
Playing online makes playing the computer feel like a walk in the park. Online opponents all have something (or seem to have something) which I don’t: a joystick. See, here’s the problem; playing SFIV demands, nay requires, a decent input device. You can just about get away with a PS3 controller for Virtual Fighter V or Soul Calibur IV, but this… this is unforgiving. Moves are too hard to do with any level of consistency with a joypad, and the buttons, while well assigned, aren’t available in the right way. Street Fighter IV should really cost £100 more and be bundled with a joystick, just like Guitar Hero comes with a guitar. It’s an important peripheral and unfortunately for me, I don’t have one (yet!). This makes playing online a bit of a joke, and playing against the computer is hard.
That’s basically my problem with it. Imagine trying to play Guitar Hero with a joypad; it’s the same feeling. So it sits on my shelf more than it sits in the PS3, and when I do put it in, the sessions are short as after an hour or so, I start to swear at the controller.
All that aside though, this game is cool. It’s so stylish to look at and comes with the addiction level set to max. It even has really cool features like being able to play with all the energy bars and scores turned off, so that you can just sit back and appreciate the fight - a feature I hope many other similar games choose to copy.
People who don’t play fighting games won’t really be able to feel the subtle differences between this and other games in the genre, except for the graphical style and the fact you can hadouken people from across the room. People who do play fighting games already know why they should own this.
