After playing SFIV for the last few years, it is only now after getting into 3rd Strike, that I realize how wrong SFIV feels in almost every way.
With the exception of parrying, I was able to pick up 3rd Strike pretty fast. It just all felt so fluid and responsive. After playing nothing but 3rd Strike for a while I went back to SFIV. By comparison it felt like I was controlling some kind of clumsy oaf trying to fight in a pool of molasses. Everything just felt so wrong. It’s kind of difficult to put my finger on exactly why this is. There is just something about the rhythm and pace of SFIV that feels off.
Does anyone else feel the same way or have any specific insight into what makes SFIV feel so unresponsive by comparison?
I tried at one point to like it, but always felt like I needed a shower when I got done playing it…Alex walked in on us…“Ah Alex come on! It was a fling, you know they don’t mean anything to me! You’re the one I want! Ah don’t be like that Alex come on, open the door!”
What makes SFIV clumsy for me is the the really poorly designed hit boxes that dont fit the animations of the characters. The hit boxes are always short of the person’s hands or feet or some shit for normals where you have to always readjust your footsies for the fact that your normal may not hit in a situation where it visually looks like it would. The walk speeds in that game are atrociously slow for no reason at all so characters with short normals and and slow walk speed (like half the cast) have an immediate footsie disadvantage against those that can just walk forward and back and hit buttons. In 3S maybe like 2 of the bottom 4 characters in the game have that problem but in SFIV it’s like half the god damn cast.
There’s just like a set of the cast that’s meant to do nothing but like dash in like an idiot and somehow get in a position to do mix ups. The pressure and mix up in the game is based around landing a hard knockdown (which is why everything causes a hard knockdown) and then going for a safe jump with an OS. Everything else that you can normally be creative with in any other SF game gets blown up by backdashing or safe DP mash. Throws are hardly scary at all with the long tech windows also. Unless you got a command grab you are not throwing people often.
It just doesn’t flow like the any of the older SF games for me.
Yes. It’s not just you, alot of people, myself included, feel this way.
3rd Strike just has an incredible feel to it. It’s just the right speed, it’s fast fluid and fun. I agree exactly with what DevilJin described regarding game speed.
I really was into 4 for the past couple years. I have a good Rufus and I played in lots of tournaments. But after getting into 3rd Strike again for the last 2 months… there is no going back, for me anyway.
i wouldn’t say sf4 sucks. i mean, i’d rather play 3s or Hyper Fighting than sf4 but i’d rather play sf4 than all these other xbox games that are coming out all the time. it’s in 3D, HD, and very slow in a lot of ways, like dashes suck ass for example. i’d say that’s why it “feels” unresponsive when actually it is responsive. the problem is how defensive it is compared to 3s. lots of ground options after a knock down are ass because of 5 frame reversals. and if that wasn’t a wide enough window, there’s a shortcut that helps you input dp’s that makes mashing even easier. there’s also invincible back dashes, and focus back dash that makes something simple like a jump in or a meaty attack useless unless you use the never ending amount of option selects in the game.
unfortunately if it wasn’t for these things i just mentioned, sf4 would not be a different enough experience from other sf games. it’s catered towards new players but it also has some hard shit in there for those that are hardcore or want to keep learning something so they don’t get bored. it’s what the fighting game industry needed so that we have a lot more people back into fighting games. now they’ll be more interested in the classics but hopefully sf5 (if that ever happens) will be a little faster and a little less noob friendly and have some kind of parry system instead of a pseudo parry like the focus attack.
I just want to say, before SFIV came out, you had people saying that 3s was ass because it didn’t “feel like a Street Fighter game”. It handles differently than most other games in the series. The funny thing is SFIV handles even stranger still.
3s feels more “responsive and fluid” because it isn’t overly defensive, slow as balls and the animation is nice.
To be fair, 3S isn’t the only game that could have made you realize this fact. CvS2, Marvel 2, ST, they all have the same type of fluid controls and responsiveness, not to mention the pacing is faster and not just set to super defensive mode.
Still, I’m glad that 3S has helped you realize this.
this is true. some people like the pace and defensive play of sf4, and there’s nothing wrong with that. they can’t help it if they enjoy it and find it interesting. no one needs to write long ass articles trying to convince others to stop liking a certain game just because they themselves do not
capcom had no choice but to make sf4/ss4 move like that, because they wanted to attract new players. third strike, though loved by its fans, was a financial failure. personally, i started the street fighter 3 show on the first sf3 (which i hated and played for 1 game then quit), and by the time third strike came out i was in college and the arcades were dead (mostly). anyway, like sirlin said a while back, it’s the stages in sf4 that mess the game up, they’re just too big. yeah, there is some weirdo priority hitbox crap, but those are all capcom’s decisions. they do this crap because they don’t want new players to get destroyed in 40 seconds, lose hope, and quit.
that’s what would happen to you back in arcades, but it was magnified even more with sf3, and what really made it worse was the parry. i used to hate the parry system, but now i love it. see the thing is, back in the old school days if you got destroyed you could say “ok, i got destroyed, but i’ll come back and at least i got a few hits in.” . you couldn’t do that once capcom implemented parries. with parries, not only would new players get raped, but they’d get raped, parried, perfected, ridiculed and they’d leave the arcade feeling utterly demoralized, so much so that it made many not want to play the game ever again. like me, back in 1997. lol.
the street fighter 4 engine is a gateway game to fighting games in general. capcom is trying to ease long lost fans and new players back into the genre; and i bet when street fighter 5 is released it will amp up a few things, slightly, just to get everything moving forward again. it’s also why street fighter 4 chronologically precedes sf3 third strike–storywise. yes, sf4 is slow, and third strike is fast and elegant. no, the focus system isn’t as rewarding as the parry system. but i’m pretty sure that once street fighter 5 is released–probably for ps4–it will be something very interesting.
but i like ssf4 a.e., and i like third strike now. if they could just make a frankenstein version of those two titles for street fighter 5…
On a related note, Ono said the only way forward (for now) is to split the series into games which cater to the hardcore crowd and those which cater to casual players instead of trying to create games which cater to both.
In any case, I always find it strange how many new players have never tried the older titles. It’s understandable that some guys may not have played the titles before SFIV, but if you’ve been playing SFIV for a while, how come you’ve never tried the older games?
sf4 would be alot better if it wasnt for all these short cuts and lenient shit in the game
and alot of the characters in sf4 are sterile in sf3 they are more colorful and have more of a individuality
but I prefer the fast paced and more rushdown oriented game style of 3s than the slow paced game of sf4 get your downback bullshit out of here
