In general, I’m not a big fan of fighting games. In fact, outside of an arcade setting, I suck at fighting games. Using a joypad to throw dragon punches feels as foreign to me as using a spork to cut steak. This is why I bought my SlikStik arcade controller years ago for playing Street Fighter 2 on my PC via MAME.

You see, back in the early to mid nineties, I worked at an arcade. Making pizzas, and later on running the LazerTron league. The bonus to this was that after hours, I’d stay and play video games for free. I got fairly good at Samurai Showdown 2, Virtua Fighter 2, and even a little Mortal Kombat 2. But no game did I play more than Street Fighter 2. I played the game so often that while I knew a few guys who could match me, I hardly ever met someone who’d beat me consistently. I learned how to use every character in the game, and used the characters I was less familiar with when I’d fight someone who wasn’t as good at the game. It was hard to win a game using Vega or Blanka – I wasn’t nearly as good with them as I was with Guile and Fei Long. And back in the Street Fighter 2 days, a 4 or 5-hit combo was impressive. And hard to pull off.

This weekend, I got the PS2 to USB adapter I needed to hook up my SlikStik to the new PC. It worked, and I played Street Fighter 4. I played and played that game. I played it until my feet hurt from standing up on the concrete floor of my man cave. And while I was standing there playing against some nameless person in Detroit or Reno or Little Rock, I was back in that arcade. Somewhere in the depths of my subconscious animal mind, I could hear the arcade cacophony – the pinball bings and blips, the wooden crash of skeeballs. I could smell the popcorn. And I was lining up my quarter on the machine for next game.

Street Fighter 4 is fantastic. My biggest fear was that even a tenth-of-a-second lag would render the game unplayable, as split-second timing is such a huge factor. My fears were unfounded. My biggest gripe is that the timing of Street Fighter 4 is slightly different from the timing of Street Fighter 2, and such a minor difference seriously throws off my game.

Even on normal difficulty, the game is no cake walk. I refuse to play on easy, and so beating the game to unlock characters is a challenge. On day one, I beat the game with Guile, Ryu, Ken, and E.Honda. In doing so, I discovered (remembered?) a very important fact – fighting the computer and fighting a human opponent are like day and night. You need to use vastly different tactics. When fighting the computer, you’ll find that you can use the same technique over and over, and the computer doesn’t learn. You also don’t have to worry about being cheap, and sometimes being cheap is the only option, because the computer gets really cheap – sometimes seeming to pick you up off the ground in order to throw you by way of inhuman timing. When you’re fighting a human being, you need to be at least marginally respectful. Cheap jab-throws, spamming attacks, or taking off the last sliver of someone’s health by using a special attack while they block are not acceptible. It’s arcade etiquette. And while I can’t expect every player on the internet to be familiar with these conventions, it seems that the majority of the good players are adequately respectful. My unfounded opinion of online competitors had been largely based on Penny Arcade’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, but with Street Fighter 4, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the maturity of most of the online opponents I’ve faced. One guy had a headset and actually verbally apologised the one time he cheezed me.

Since then, I’ve been trying (without luck) to set up my own in-monitor microphone so that I could say hi to some of the guys I’ve fought against. I’ve been in the GFW Live control panel adjusting voice settings, but the interface doesn’t seem to hear anything from my microphone. I’ve adjusted Windows sound settings and tested the mike in other applications, but haven’t yet had any luck.

Street Fighter 4 introduces a number of new rules and techniques that I’ve had to get used to. I don’t know whether any of them were in place for Street Fighter 3, which I’ve never ever seen, much less played. But things like focus attacks, EX attacks, and armor-breaking are entirely new to me. But I’m getting used to them. Much of the time I was playing online, I had about a 20% victory rate. But I got at least one win against every opponent I faced, so I’m not a total lost cause. I know that online competition tends to be pretty fierce, so I want to practice enough to be competent at the game before I click that “ranked match” button for the first time.

I’d like to close with an observation about the game’s music. The title theme for Street Fighter 4 is a song entitled “Indestructible”. And while it’s catchy enough that I’m hearing it in my head after having played the game for a few hours, the switch in music between Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter 4 reminds me of the switch in music between Star Trek: Next Generation and Star Trek: Enterprise. Anyone remember the theme song for Enterprise? Yeah. That’s the feel I get from the Street Fighter 4 music.