I’ve been playing SF, although not unceasingly, since I was 7. Just because I’m not overly concerned with frame advantages and being the world’s best at SF, when you think hard about it … Doesn’t really say anything about me.
At any rate, I’ve never really understood the concept of ‘I don’t like it, so I’ll bitch about it on the Internet’ but hey, if it helps them sleep at night, more grease to their elbows.
The game is fun, several people find it fun … I think this is a success for Capcom. They’re trying to expand their audience. If it isn’t as deep as 3S, play 3S. What is complaining going to achieve? A patch? Laff
My points are pretty simple. Hardcore fans have been waiting and asking for an SF4 for years. If there were that many of us, Capcom would’ve made one years ago. They didn’t see the money in it, so it didn’t get made. Even when it finally did get released, it was with the intention of getting casual gamers in. Not to please the hardcore fans necessarily.
Street Fighter II at the time was more than just a popular game. It’s arguable that at the peak of it’s popularity it became part of pop culture. The videos are for the serious fighting gamers. They aren’t bringing anyone in. When most people found out about SFIV, their first question was “there’s a III?”
The SFIII series was horribly unpopular (in the US at least) BECAUSE they tried to cater to the hardcore gamers. Which is probably why they initially gave up.
Sadly, that’s it for my arsenal of pseudo emotes. I usually just go ‘Lol’ but I’ve come to find it rather generic.
Edit: RaJoMu pretty much sums it up.
It makes sense that fans are upset, but it’s not all about you … Capcom is a business. If every game they put out was catered to narrow audiences (Very much like that of SF3), they would be out of business.
The game isn’t even bad, I don’t understand why people are upset. It is after all a pretty fun game, and that’s what it set out to do … Entertain.
I love 3s but I observed that this is the most ignored fact in the core community. Sirlin is a tournament fighter who crafted a deep balanced game out of a past classic, but that doesn’t mean much in the thick of things now did it. I’m betting SF4, at $60, sold more than his much cheaper game.
That’s if the complaints I’ve heard against SF4 hold up in the first place (which they often don’t, in regard to the wildly polarized SRK community).
It’s a popular forum myth, but in all honesty there where numerous factors that resulted in SF3’s intial impact. Lack of timly console release, industry shifting focus to RPG’s/3D platformers and a overall poor handling from a Capcom’s marketting department.
It was also do to initailly being released on a dying system (DC), the death of arcades in America, and the CPS3 arcade board which was a bitch (from what I’ve heard).
MVC 2 went through all that too and is way more popular. I doubt the arcade board thing was a major factor.
@EVO- Of course there are other factors, but think about the fighting games that are popular and the ones that aren’t (in America)
Hot:
Tekken series
Mortal Kombat
Soul Calibur
Dead or Alive 3 and up
Vs. Series (mvc, mvsf, etc)
Not:
Virtua Fighter 4
Street Fighter 3 series
Fatal Fury series
KOF series
Now I love all the ones I listed as not popular (except VF 4, fuck that) but the point is all the games that cater to fighting game fans do terribly because they usually tend to lose the mass appeal that games like DOA and Tekken have.
That’s why I hate VF in general. They focused on only technique. No flashy moves, no dynamic camera angles, no cool character designs or characters for that matter. NO CONCERN FOR AESTHETICS WHATSOEVER. Best fighting game my ass.
Yeah sometimes developers focus so much on execution that they end up with a game that isn’t even fun to play.
I liked MK back in the day, I really have no idea who decided it would be a good idea to make the game fully 3D (MK4 was a travesty). I understand they were moving with the times but that just hurt the series.
In retrospect, we should be grateful Capcom didn’t take that direction with SF4. They’ve found the shade of gray that works.
Virtua Fighter doesn’t get the respect it deserves (and it NEEDS to. It’s the only truly technical 3D fighter), but the generic characters and lack of flair does hurt the appeal.
It’s like Sega’s got a great fighting engine and such. Now all they really need are appealing characters.
And the 3D MKs sucked because they tried stuffing too many things at once. Not an ounce of thought were put into their design decisions and they ended up with a big clusterfuck.
The thread is about why SF4 should or should not be used as a template for future fighters:
Like I said before, it shouldn’t. It’s a very slow rendition of an old game, which Ono pretty much said he wanted: A rendition of SF2 with ‘new’ stuff. Really, there is no new stuff. New to the series maybe, but hardly new at all. I think it took the things it was trying to copy and made them complete shit. If he wanted a better rendition of SF2 to bring everyone back, he didn’t need to step back in the actual animation movement department, the control department to SF1, and every single move to SF2 with lame characters. Even if Honda was top tier in this game, or the same as in ST at least, I still wouldn’t like it. So at least for 1 person, that kills your “People bitch because it isn’t 3s or ST.” I don’t want 3s or ST because I’m fine with those now. I want a new fighting game.
Completely agree, it sucks that whenever I see a VF machine in an arcade, within a month or two later it gets replaced by something else that no one touches. But even from just a near scrub level like myself, there are tons that you can pick up about some characters just playing the game.
sf4 presents NOTHING new. In fact, some of this old stuff that made the game challenging is now 1000x easier to do. For instance, reversal windows in ST are 1 frame, in 4 they have to be @ least 10 frames. The input window for specials\supers was also widened from 8 or so in ST to about 15 frames in this game. The jump duration is the longest its been for a while now and that only makes AA 1000x easier than in the previous games. Any other game that would let you jump that high would give you an air block, seriously.
If the game is easier to play than 20 years ago, what does that say about the game?
The game is so recycled its not even funny. Its the same damn thing we’ve been playing forever. Why is it that 20 years from Sf2, I can roughly beat guile the same way with ryu in sf4? That is some AWESOME progression…
It doesn’t say anything other than that it’s easier to execute moves. That was the point. New strats will come as time passes. It’s a new game, so it’s gonna take people a while to find the hax and whatnot. You can only beat Guile the same way because right now people are using him the same way they were in SFT. Also, you can’t really blame the game if you’re using Ryu the same as in SFT since I know he plays differently now.
