Like most beat 'em ups before it, Street Fighter IV, which first saw release on the 360 in 2009, has gained a rather hardcore following over the past few years, with a strong competitive scene blossoming around it. Having steered clear of the Nintendo platforms, with their broader audience base, Street Fighter IV found its home amongst the hardcore crowd - but now, it's coming for the rest of us.
For those who've never played a Street Fighter game before, the series is one of the most popular beat 'em up franchises of all time, where you go head to head in fisticuffs with an opponent from the wide and varied roster of Street Fighter characters. About as far away as you can get from a realistic fighter, Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition is all about being over the top, and that extends to its characters as well. From the electrical, green Blanka, who looks like a hairier version of the Incredible Hulk, to the limb stretching capabilities of Dhalsim, who can punch you from across the room, there's an eclectic mix of the weird and wonderful for you to get to grips with.
A real clash of the titans here - the Incredible Hulk look-alike, and Blanka.
A large part of the reason Street Fighter IV found such a home amongst the more hardcore of players was the amount of time you were required to invest in order to truly get good at it. While anyone could saunter through a few stages of the game by mashing buttons, if you wanted to get really good at the game - good enough to play and win online, or even finish the story mode - a lot of practice was required, mostly through learning the moves you can do.
Combos make up a key part of Street Fighter's gameplay, and can be performed by chaining together certain sequences of button presses and Circle Pad shuffles, which, up until now, have always required memorising from a move list in order to perform. While it wasn't too hard to remember one or two moves, remembering any more took a lot more doing, especially as you had such a short window to perform the harder combos. Take too long pressing one of the buttons, or wiggling the analogue stick in a certain direction, and you'd end up performing a completely different move, as the game decided you must have been trying to do something else.
Fan favourite Chun Li (on the right). Lethal with her legs.
With its debut on the 3DS, however, it seems that Capcom realised that something had to change, as for Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition, things have been simplified - a lot. When we went hands-on with the game at the recent 3DS event in Amsterdam, one of the first things we noticed was that the bottom screen now has four boxes on it - each of which related to a special move. Now, rather than having to remember huge combinations of buttons, and struggling to press everything required in the few seconds it gives you, all you have to do is touch a button on the touch screen, and the game will do the hard work for you.
You can customise which moves appear on your bottom screen too, making all the combos you could never perform manually suddenly accessible.
What this means is that all of a sudden, Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition is a lot more accessible. For people who're new to the game, there's a lot less learning to be done, as you can now pick up a new character, and pull off a lot of their toughest, and best moves simply by poking the relevant area on the touch screen. What really benefits from this, however, are the Combos. As you progress through the fights, you'll be charging a Combo bar with every hit you land - and when the bar's full, you can unleash an incredibly strong sequence of moves, performed in a typically over the top way, with the action usually slowing down so you can make the most of it. Instead of having to do your best to roll off the relevant sequence of buttons, now all you've got to do is touch the massive "Super Combo" area on the touch screen when it's lit up - and Bob's your Uncle.
In fact, we can see this having an even greater effect on people like us, who, although they've dabbled in Street Fighter in the past, never really got as stuck in as they perhaps should have. With each character's most powerful moves now being so easy to access, you're now almost encouraged to switch between characters and experiment with what's available, rather than sticking with the character you just happen to know a few moves for. For relatively new players, it levels the playing field, and takes Street Fighter IV away from being a game you've got to pour hours into, into one you really can just pick up and play - as we found out!
With both local and online multiplayer modes supporting the single player game, and the ability to send your friend a demo of the game, so they can play against you, Super Street Fighter IV is shaping up to be something very impressive indeed. More playable than it's ever been before, along with the similarly tweaked Dead or Alive: Dimensions, the battle to be the 3DS' best beat 'em up is going to be a close one.
