The Video Game Revue

Street Fighter IV

I sat down to play Street Fighter IV yesterday thinking that I'd get in an hour or two before moving on to something else... some Warlords III: Darklords Rising, some Final Fantasy VII, some Skate 2, some Bully... something else. My gaming focus has been spread out of late. But it turns out that Street Fighter IV had other plans for me: I played pretty much four hours straight.

Initially I was put off by SF IV's visual style. It didn't look as good on my home TV as it did when I first saw trailers of it on the web last year. But the solid gameplay was enough of a hook that I stuck with it, and as the hours went by the visuals bothered me less and less. They've even started to grow on me.

Two massive hooks kept me glued to my Hori Fighting Stick EX2 last night: the first was the variety of play modes available, and the second was how rapidly I found myself climbing the learning curve. Initially I tried playing a standard Arcade game on Normal. I have some Street Fighter experience--although not a lot--so I figured I could handle it, but I was wrong. In order to beat the final boss, I had to dial the difficulty back to "Very Easy," which was discouraging.

Once I got warmed up, I decided to try the online play. SF IV has a great idea on how to manage online matches: you can configure the options to let you play a standard Arcade game and interrupt you when an online opponent is available. These options are accessible using the RB button from the main menu, and at first I was rather confused by them. Turning this mode on basically means "interrupt me every 10 seconds with a new online match," although it did once happen that I went about 15 minutes without a new match coming up, which made me wonder if the matchmaking servers were experiencing an outage.

I also found that going into the Xbox Live Game menu and trying to join an existing game lobby was futile. Every game I tried to join was gone by the time I selected it, which suggests to me that most of the players online are in this menu hammering away on existing game lobbies rather than using the option to play Arcade mode while they wait for an opponent to challenge them.

The other thing I found, unsurprisingly, is that there aren't a lot of Street Fighter noobs on Xbox Live, at least not by my rather low standards. Out of about twenty matches, I had about two opponents of clearly lesser skill (these would be your basic noobs), and maybe five others of comparable skill (relative noobs). All of the others beat me easily.

After the online play, I ventured into the Challenges mode, which is really where I should have started. The challenges essentially teach you how to play the game, with the lowest level ones being extremely easy. A combination of it being bedtime and finding myself losing my focus stopped me from playing challenges for what could have easily been another couple of hours.

The most frustrating thing about stopping is that I was just getting good enough to be able to beat Arcade mode on Normal difficulty.

In other news, I borrowed a copy of Bully: Scholarship Edition, which is great because I've wanted to try it but find it hard to justify buying since I already have the PS2 version. Scholarship Edition is roughly the same excellent game, but at higher resolution and with a better framerate. Bully really is a terrific game: the writing is excellent, the concept is novel, and the gameplay is as solid as GTA IV's. It has that "just one more mission" quality that keeps me playing for hours, and in some ways I find the smaller setting (compared to GTA games) and carefree theme (schoolyard pranks) to be a liberating change of pace.

Bully is also a good length. I've played maybe 10 hours of it and only finished a third or so of the game. By the time I've hit 100% completion--if I even get that far--I'll be ready to shelve it indefinitely. I will be nagging Fritzkrieg to play it, however. :)

posted by Parappa @ 11:08 AM