Ultra Street Fighter IV

I skipped the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 generation entirely, but when I realized that I could play these games on my PC with Steam and a USB control pad that is almost identical to the Playstation controllers, I jumped on the chance to get Street Fighter IV. I had played it very briefly with my brother-in-law when I was staying at his house for a couple of days, and I had loved it. When I finally was able to get my hands on it, it was almost done; it was at the Ultra revision. There was one more revision that I got as a push after I had it, which was a half-hearted update to "Omega." I'll get to this later, but I wish that they had completely done this Omega update instead of just making a minor tweak or two but not really updating it from Ultra to Omega. That would be probably my one and only gripe about this game, which I otherwise think is quite possibly the best game in the entire Street Fighter series, if not the entire genre overall. As an aside, unlike the previous games in the genre, I don't really see the updates as new games, because since I have them on Steam, the updates were applied to the game automatically (the game was already at Ultra version when I bought it anyway; there was really only one update after I had it.) So while there was a Street Fighter IV, and a Super Street Fighter IV, and a Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition and finally an Ultra Street Fighter IV, they aren't so much separate games, like the updates to Street Fighter II or Street Fighter III or Street Fighter Alpha had been; rather, the game overwrote the previous version.

After years of not really doing anything much except slapping old sprites together in hastily patched together compilation style games, Capcom really went all out, abandoned the sprite model entirely, and came up with these 3D rendered (although in such a way that they looked very much like comic book animation) characters and 3D backgrounds, but retained the traditional 2D playstyle. They sometimes called this "2.5D" but, eh. The presention here is really top notch, and although Street Fighter V is on a newer generation hardware system (Playstation 3 vs 4) it doesn't necessarily look better, honestly. They also had some other artistic touches; ink splotches during super combos, etc. And while I really do love the presentation and the look of the game... quite a bit, in fact... what really matters most, of course, is that the game is extremely well made and fun to play.

The roster, at least at the end of the run, is kinda gigantic; 44 playable characters including everyone from the Street Fighter II series, a bunch of Final Fight and Street Fighter 1 characters, most of whom had been in Alpha 3 already, several of the Alpha unique characters, and even just about anyone from Street Fighter III who's worth trying to keep (and even a few who may not have been...) And, of course, it introduced a few new, unique IV characters, like Juri or Crimson Vyper. Actually, it introduced a good nearly a dozen new characters, a few of which are... well, a few, honestly are kind of retarded, like El Fuerte, Rufus and Hakan, but several others are really memorable and may well go on to be real classics, like Oni, C. Viper, and especially Juri. Some other characters are technically new, but have been around as NPCs or whatnot in other older games, like Gouken and Poison. Anyway, the point is that the character selection is (so far) the best for any Street Fighter title and nearly as good as anything else in any game in the genre. A handful of King of Fighters titles top it, but not by much. Since a Season V was announced for Street Fighter V recently, including the inclusion of five new (yet so far unidentified) characters, it'll pull in front by just one character. Some of the good news is that even though it has a lot of characters that are similar, this isn't as true as it was in the past.

By this I mean, for example, that Street Fighter Alpha 3 had Ryu, Ken, Akuma, and Evil Ryu who were all extremely similar characters. All of them reappear in this game, as well as a character that is a new "version" of Akuma named Oni, but they have been retooled to be more different from each other. This is especially true with the Omega version of the movelist; Ken is especially retooled here, for instance. This means that even relative to Street Fighter Alpha 3, they don't feel nearly as redundant and repetitive as they used to.

Another interesting presentation issue, or change: rather than the time-honored practice of each character having their own stage and music, there are a handful of stages each with their own BGMs, and they are selected (mostly) at random as you play. The character specific BGMs are in the game, but you only hear them in a few limited scenarios, even if you turn them on the sound options. In spite of the fact that these stages are no longer tied to specific characters, a few of them are obviously redesigned versions of classic stages. The Crowded Downtown, for example, is almost exactly like Chun-Li's Street Fighter II stage, and although it has a unique musical theme, it is similar in many ways to Chun-Li's. The Run Down Back Alley, on the other hand, looks a lot like Gen's stage from Street Fighter Alpha 2. Which isn't exactly a classic, but y'know. Ultra also introduced some of the stages that had been in the Street Fighter X Tekken game. In all, there are 28 stages, so more than half as many as there are characters. Some of them seem to "match" a certain character better than others; the solar eclipse in Africa seems tailor made for Elena, for example, and the Crowded Street Scene is basically Chun-Li's stage in spite of the slightly different BGM, and a few others are obvious (Dhalsim with the India stage, Akuma with the Killer Moon temple stage, etc.) but most of them are just stages and belong wherever.

Another interesting aspect of the switch to digital, 3-D polygon character models is that you can switch what they look like significantly. With hand-drawn animated sprites, your only option to change the look was to do color pallette swaps, but now you can put completely different looks on the characters, and they have, in fact, done so for most of them with alternate costumes that often change their look significantly. Some of them were purchasable downloads, and some of them are... ill-advised, let's just say. About half of the vacation pack costumes are terrible, almost all of the wild pack "dress like a furry" costumes are super cringey and gay, and maybe half of the horror pack variants are cool at least as a novelty look, and the other half are stupid. There's also an odd tendency to make big, floaty ribbons around many characters, or super-gigantic bows made of super thick rope that looks like it's designed to moor cruise ships to the dock. And the old 50s Gene Autry style cowboy Ken is just pretty embarrasing too. But good or bad, having loads of options that are actually significantly different is fun. With some characters, I can use a wide variety of looks and be happy with the result, and with others the selection is more limited in terms of what I can stand to look at, but it's still welcome. With every character, there's at least one look that I really, really like. The real shame, of course, is that some of the alternate outfits look better than the default outfit. They should have updated the character to the coolest of the outfits as a real change. They kind of did this for at least some Street Fighter V characters, and the "standard" look was either the Story costume or the Nostalgia costume. Although, naturally, they didn't touch Ryu or Chun-Li, sadly. Of course, because I have the game on the PC, it's possible to mod it by inserting someone else's versions of costumes to replace those I don't like, or stages, or whatever. However, I've been reluctant to do that for various reasons.

The game also changed significantly in the terms of it's "ism", to use the term debuted in Street Fighter Alpha 3 or Groove, to use the term from Capcom vs SNK. There's only one super combo meter, rather than the three-part one from Alpha, but the super combos are actually a little bit underwhelming most of the time relative to the Ultra combos. (Technically, the bar is split in three, but you can only do a Super Combo if it's all the way full. The splits are for EX power-ups of special moves.) These charge in a completely different way; when your character takes damage. If you play really well, you'll never get the chance to use an Ultra combo, because you'll never charge up your meter enough. If the match gets really tight, though, you could in theory do as many as two of them per round, but more likely one. The ultra combos do a little bit more damage if there's more charge here; a fully charged ultra meter will do half again as much damage as one just barely charged to enable one combo. Normally, your character has to pick one of two ultra combos and then stick with them for the entirety of the game, but you can choose to pick an option that allows you to do both, although the damage will be reduced.

Interestingly, the two bonus games from Street Fighter 2 were brought back; the crush the car, and break the falling wooden barrels. The crush the car scene doesn't look like the Street Fighter 2 stage (although the bonus game itself is identical) but curiously looks like an updated version of stage of the crush the car bonus game from Final Fight. They should have made those two bonus stages selectable stages in versus. I mean, they made the training stage selectable, so why not these? They look just like stages, as near as I can tell.

The final update to the game gave us an Omega movelist. Some of the characters had a few changes to their moves (as mentioned above, Ken's are particularly notable) and everyone got at least one or two new moves. In Omega moves, you can't pick the option to use both Ultra combos, and have to stick with one, as the original version of the game intended anyway. Omega also removes the Red Focus attacks, which is a kind of armor breaker move (although it's slow and you're vulnerable if the opponent is smart enough to not just sit there watching as you telegraph the attack.) Sadly, the Omega moves was a very half-hearted update. The movelist in game does not list them, and you have to get an offline PDF of the changes, which is a huge pain in the butt. Also, the Omega moves are only usable in a couple of different modes; notably and disappointingly, they are not selectable in Arcade mode. One side effect of this is that I don't play arcade mode all that often anymore; I usually go to versus CPU and randomize my opponent and stage. This is actually kind of fun; I'll go through the entire costume and color pallette of a single character before giving him up, but to keep it fresh, I'll have two or even three characters that I'm doing "simultaneously" tag-teaming between them as I finish one of the alternate costume sets in all colors. But I'd really like to play Arcade mode with the Omega versions of the characters. The Omega move update was supposedly done by a different team; in fact, the one who was working on Street Fighter V, and it telegraphed in very broad form some of the directions that the new game would go in terms of emphasis on different types of moves, etc.

And really; would it have killed them to really just kind of finish this Omega version of the game? It feels a little bit like the last update was curiously a beta test of a new mode that they never really completely did. I really think they should have finished it by making Omega selectable in all modes, had the omega moves listed in the movelist if you're in omega mode, and while they were at it, why didn't they adopt the Mike Haggar character who was in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 to Street Fighter IV and add him as a last character as part of this "Omega update." It's actually kind of cool that they made him playable in UMC3, but he more rightly belongs in a Street Fighter game, and it's a little bit odd that he's arguably the most iconic character from Final Fight and he's one of the only ones (besides a couple of bosses; Damnd, Edi E. and Belger), color swapped characters (i.e. Roxy is a color-swapped version of Poison) and the lowest of grunt thugs who hasn't made the jump into the Street Fighter series. And they brought a bunch of stages from Street Fighter X Tekken; they should have brought the rest of them too. It couldn't have required all that much code to do this.

In spite of this gripe, I still think Ultra Street Fighter IV is a contender for the best game in the genre, and certainly in the series. If we had had Omega Street Fighter IV really completed, it'd be a full-on shoe-in.