“Good electrocute, green arse.” “Good spam kick, thunderthighs.”
I feel poorly done MS paint drawings always enhance articles; too bad my shitty Mac doesn’t have it. I had to hand draw. I did one that was meant to be funnier of Dhalsim’s extended wibbly arm bitch-slapping Chun Li but it ended up looking like a kid with learning disabilities had tried to line-draw an Escher picture. Excuse me. Anyway.
So this is it, Street Fighter IV. I feel like I should really dig into this game more cynically, but after several attempts, I just can’t. I find Street Fighter too full of joy to care about any flaws that may be around. IGN and Gamespot seem to share my joy, but I am aware that they would give Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare seven out of ten for “wanting to be good”. So I apologise, and appeal to your better natures. You can have at me like you’re Raphael of Soul Calibur II should you want to. (He curiously reminded me of David Bowie.)
Street Fighter always has been a spiritual experience; a fluorescent catharsis. There are those boxers who say when they get in a ring they feel their own humanity; I think a fraction of that feeling comes into play in SF4 when you reach the ultimate humiliation of being Perfected by a series of E. Honda face slaps.
For me, the Street Fighter series is the king of beat-em-ups; Street Fighter has grown up, in my mind at least, into a kind of mythical behemoth of sentimentality. Not only is it a lodestone of my childhood but it’s also a symbol of my generation – a generation who likes to use virtual, neon-coloured stereotypes to beat the crap out of other virtual, neon-coloured stereotypes. If that isn’t pop culture at its best, I don’t know what is. In Japan, ‘natsukashii’ is applied to the playing of old Street Fighters at arcades; it too means ‘sentimental’. The Famicom is also ‘natsukashii’. You can really give it to the Japanese on the getting emotional about videogames thing.
He was more attractive pixellated, sadly
Street Fighter IV retains everything good about what I remember of my childhood button-mashing, and retains a few new characters from Street Fighter’s history after the landmark of SF II. My favourite retention has been the very balance of the game; how responsive, how easy, and at the same time how difficult the game is.
I know that sounds like a huge contradiction, but I think if you’ve played it you may agree. The more you know about this game, the more difficult it gets for you. At the same time, it is so easy to pick up, and so easy to find yourself hoarse from yelling at your opponents all night because you couldn’t bring yourself to get away from the joystick.
There is a moment, in every Street Fighter, when you know that you are going to land the winning blow and earn that sweet slow motion scream of your nemesis. The moment, of course signified by an opponent’s almost entirely depleted health bar, can often be drawn out for more of a thrill if you are good, but for what you might call a ‘casual’ gamer like myself, this moment is often brief but intensely sweet. Sweet and sharp, with a kind of urgency. The Moment can be taken away from you, if you become complacent, but once you see that tiny strip of colour left on their bar, and your play has been solid, you just sort of know that it’s over, and you feel pretty good inside. If only you can keep it together…
That moment is still on show in SF IV, but it has become faster, smoother, and easier to turn the whole fight around. Four has a kind of obvious flow in bouts, where if you have a whole health bar and your opponent has hardly any suddenly they can be beating you down in a winning streak second to none. But then, you can be equally as likely to fight back, and then it’s anyone’s game. I think that’s great games developing. It’s fast, and nice to look at, and the new technicalities hardly seem like chores at all. Rarely do games deliver on looks as well as play. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed playing a game for the game’s sake – perhaps it was Soul Caliber – and that doesn’t look half as shiny. And the KO lines are stupid.
Being Scottish I personally was hysterical over the SF4 level intended to depict a whisky distillery in good old Caledonia; ginger men in tartan dresses move large barrels around whilst sheep look in from the outside. Whilst we do have gingers, whisky, and sheep, I am pretty certain I have never encountered a man in a tartan dress there; and if I do, I may renounce my nationality, become one of the dreaded English and put on a more-English-than-English Gwyneth Paltrow accent. Perhaps in the nine months I have been away the Scottish National Party has started issuing orders that men must wear tartan dresses in distilleries. I also have it on good authority that Scotch Eggs are now currency. But that’s another story. Anyway, thanks Japan. I do love your views on my country, very cute.
On an incidental note, a monumental shift in favourite character has occurred; Chun Li is no longer the master of the Streets – in IV I swapped her in for a (not really that new) newer model, Cammy, who is even more hilariously antsy than the Chun-face. Chun Li still wins for me on II Turbo, but in IV, for some reason Cammy is my lucky number 7. Although she really needs to do something about the costume. It must be inconvenient getting that Brazilian every other day just because you have to fight someone on a street. Perhaps MI6 has a Cammy Bikini Wax earmark fund to keep up appearances. I must organize a fund raiser; our troops in Iraq need boots that don’t melt. And why hasn’t Cammy been dispatched there yet to unleash hell et cetera? Lazy bint.
PS I am now aware that Ryu has become a gay icon. Most of the images of him can be found on gaygamer.net. I am not really surprised, but I’m becoming aware of a kind of possessiveness within myself. Oddsfish. (Word courtesy of Disney’s Peter Pan.)
