Super Street Fighter 4 – First Impressions

So we’ve only had the game a few weeks now, but for anyone that played the first one, this game takes all the great parts of SF4 and expands on it. If you’re standing there looking at it on the shelf you might think of it as overpriced DLC, in my opinion you would be quite wrong.

Yes, there have been additions to the original, new characters, new stages, etc. That’s really nothing special if you ask me, that’s just meeting the minimum expectations. Capcom clearly listened to fans when putting this together, so many of the things we talked about and wished we had when playing the original are here now.

• “Endless Mode” – This is akin to quarter mode, or spectator mode.  For fans, seeing a good match is not a bad way to pass the time when playing with your buddies
• “Team Battle” – So you and your friends can team up and take on another team in single elimination.  Teams with players who know multiple characters have an edge here.
• “Replay Channel” – This seemed so halfway implemented in SF4, but they didn’t fuck around this time, basically every match you’re in is recorded and you can review and save them, or watch them with friends later.
• “Rebalanced Gameplay” – This one is important.  In online play for SF4, players gravitated to a very small pool of characters.  Now that things have been reworked, I have been seeing people playing all sorts of characters – we will see how long that lasts.
• “DLC Carryover” – DLC like alternate costumes from SF4 is unlocked here.  Not really what I expected, seemed thoughtful

I am a bit sad to see some of the other challenges gone like time trial and survival mode… I love going for high scores.  I played about 2000 matches in SF4, hell we were playing it the week before this one came out, and I don’t expect to play this one any less.  Super Street Fighter 4 made a very good first impression making it the definitive SF title for me unless someone wants to play HD Remix.