Street Fighter IV rocks on PC

Street Fighter IV

Street Fighter IV came out a few days after I left to visit fam­ily and I've been chomp­ing at the bit to play it ever since. I came back home yes­ter­day, and it was the sec­ond thing I did after step­ping off the plane (the first being grab­bing some fish tacos at El Siete Mares).

Hav­ing played the ar­cade and 360 ver­sions, I knew what to ex­pect. You get a lot of your fa­vorite old char­ac­ters, in­clud­ing all the orig­i­nals from Street Fighter II and in­tro­duc­ing four new to this game. Game­play is a lot like Street Fighter III, with a big focus on strat­egy and the abil­ity to pull off dev­as­tat­ing but fin­ger-twist­ing com­bos. A new fea­ture I re­ally like is a chal­lenge mode that teaches you the spe­cial moves and com­bos your char­ac­ter can do, which re­ally helps when you're try­ing to learn how to use one of the new char­ac­ters or just re­fresh­ing your­self on an old one.

The only part still miss­ing is the World Tour mode of the home edi­tions of Street Fighter Alpha 3. As you fought through the ros­ter, the points you get would let you level up. This let you up­grade your char­ac­ter to shift be­tween a focus of power or de­fense, and let you se­lect power-ups that let you do longer and more com­plex com­bos. It cre­ated a more un­fair form of game­play com­pared to Ar­cade mode and prob­a­bly would have been too un­bal­anced for com­pet­i­tive game­play, but it was still a lot of fun and would have been great to have in IV.

One thing I was wor­ried about was how good the game would run on my sys­tem—from past ex­pe­ri­ence, games ported from con­sole to PC tend to run amaz­ingly slug­gish. With a sigh of re­lief, I put those wor­ries to rest when I saw the game not skip a beat when run with all the set­tings maxed out. The game even has a spe­cial PC-spe­cific set­tings screen with loads of ren­der­ing tweaks in­clud­ing the new Ink, Wa­ter­color, and Pos­ter­ize vi­sual styles.

I've been hav­ing a lot of fun in IV be­tween all the var­i­ous modes of play. It doesn't top Alpha 3 as my fa­vorite of the Street Fighter se­ries, but it's up above every­thing else!

Posted on July 20, 2009 in CAPCOM, Gaming, Street Fighter, Street Fighter IV

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