Street Fighter 4

I have a long and patchy history with fighting games... I never really liked them for a long time - mainly because learning special combos is quite high on my list of things I have no time for.

This all changed at university when I discovered Super Smash Brothers and Soul Calibur 2. Leaving SSB on one side, let's look at soul calibur 2.

I love several things about that game.

1) It's in 3-D
This means that you can block and dodge - they're two different moves. So if you want to avoid a strike, you can move back. This means the game is far more tactical than most others as you can just avoid most attacks and then chose when to strike.

2) There are hundreds of special moves.

The down side of this is that none of the special moves really feel that special. However, what it does mean is that it's incredibly easy to perform them. It's also fairly intuitive as different combinations of buttons generally mean the same thing.

3) Button bashers will always lose out to skilled players.

This is because skilled players know when to dodge, when to block and when to attack. These three things are far more important than the actual moves being performed. I like that.

4) The characters are all genuinely different.

Each character has a weapon and each weapon feels different. They all have different ranges, strengths and weaknesses. I know most fighting games have this but in the Soul Calibur games the weapon is a fantastic illustration of this.



So, with my parameters stated, what do I think about Street Fighter 4?

Plus points:
1) It's quite pretty.

Negative points:
1) It's not in 3-D so you can't dodge.
2) The characters all feel very similar to each other
3) You have to learn special move combos and they're much more powerful than the normal attacks so if you can't be bothered to learn them, you're fucked.
4) There seems to be very little strategy


It really does seem to be the anti Soul Calibur. It's what I hated about every bloody fighting game from Mortal Kombat to Marvel Vs Capcom. And it's got a metascore of 93. Now, I get that some people might like this sort of thing. If you like your fighting games to be about learning special moves rather than choosing when to attack and when to defend, it's probably very good.

I don't think this. I think it can fuck off.