Sunday, February 15, 2009

...But I'm Also Fair and Balanced

Now that my initial Street Fighte IV mania has cooled a bit, I see that my Thursday night post doesn't mention any of what I don't like about the game. So here's a quick list:

  • As cool as it is to be able to set the language of each character's voice (during both fights and cutscenes), the English voices are consistently bad.
  • I still feel like there aren't enough moves for each character, especially supers.
  • Nitpicky, but when Zangief does his big spinning piledriver to finish a fight, the victim's humorously exaggerated expression of agony usually isn't visible at the K.O. moment. This wasn't so in the arcade version.
  • The Xbox 360 controller makes it pretty much impossible to do Guile's ultra combo, and there's no way I'm buying one of those monstrous arcade sticks
  • Some of the in-game move lists are incomplete and/or inaccurate.
  • The title theme song is annoying, although I guess I can forgive that because it's performed by well-meaning J-pop giants EXILE (of "Choo-Choo Train" fame).
  • The animated scenes that bookend each character's story mode are some of the worst anime I've seen since Samurai Shodown: The Motion Picture.
  • No final boss should ever be called Seth, unless he's hell-bent on making this the best Chrismukkah ever.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Those are fairly minor gripes. Especially since this is a such a major redesign for the game, a lot more could have gone wrong. I can deal with a few bad cut scenes. And the English voices are cool, but I wasn't planning on using them anyway.
But your post just reminded me that the Samurai Shodown Anthology should be coming out soon (March, if it doesn't get pushed back again). The next few months are going to be murder on my bank account. So many good games...

Jesse Jace said...

Tell me about it. Resident Evil 5 isn't going to help my finances, either.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I figure I'll just boycott Resident Evil 5 because it's racist. Not only does it save me money, but I get to feel like a better person as well. ;)

And now that I've played SFIV for a good amount of time, I can agree with most of your criticisms. The anime is terrible, but Blanka's English dub for his cutscenes were priceless. He sounded like an older, sadder Grover.
They're still pretty minor problems though. It's by far the best/most balanced fighter I've played in years.

Now I begin the long wait for Tekken 6.

carey said...

so...if we get an xbox360 and streetfighter4, can you and ben play each other? Even though you'd likely waste him, of course... :-)