I’ve been trying to limit my posts about Street Fighter to one per week, but I’ve been playing the crap out of the game, so it occupies a good bit of the video game namespace in my mind. And although I’ve been having a lot of fun with it, I do have some complaints I feel obliged to voice.

Firstly, since my post full of complaints about Games For Windows Live, I’ve come up with another complaint – a big one. Suddenly, every time I log in, I’m required to manually sign in and enter my password. And the “save my password” checkbox is disabled. Incredibly annoying.

Street Fighter also has the ability to accept challenges from online players while playing in Arcade Mode against the computer. I’ve done it on occasion. But the option can only be set from the game’s menu, not from within an actual battle. The other day, when I started playing against the computer, I found that I’d accidentally left that setting on. I was interrupted mid-game by an online challenger. My mistake. No big deal. But the thing that really pissed me off is that there’s no way to change your status and make your game private without totally exiting that game, which means that I had to start the game all over after having beat some fairly difficult opponents. That’s just bad design.

My remaining complaints are about the actual mechanics of the game. As a long-time Street Fighter 2 arcade junkie, the game mechanics of Street Fighter are in me bone-deep. You can’t block while in mid-air. You can only attack once during a jump. You block high attacks standing and low attacks crouching. The basic physics of the Street Fighter universe.

Some have changed.

For starters, they now allow limited juggling. While juggling was one of the things I hated most about Mortal Kombat, I can mostly tolerate the way it’s handled in Street Fighter 4. Aside from the “crumpling” effects provided by level 2 or 3 focus attacks, juggling can only be done with an ultra combo. This isn’t too bad, and doesn’t break the game. No problem.

The thing that really pisses me off is the change to throwing. It used to be canon that anyone in the process of standing up after having been knocked down was immune to throws for a split second. This meant that you’d never stand right next to someone as they were standing up, cause you’d always be thrown by a player who knew what he was doing. This was a big equalizer to help someone who was totally getting his ass handed to him. This has changed – the immunity is gone. You can now be thrown the instant you stand up. What this leads to, especially when playing against the computer (which has perfect split-second timing) is being thrown as you’re standing up before you have a chance to do anything. This can be repeated infinitely. This actually looks like you’re being picked up off the ground and thrown. It’s ridiculously cheap, and I’m a bit upset at Capcom for removing the throw immunity. When you’re fighting a computer-controlled Abel or Zangief, it’s ridiculous.

Lastly, the change to the Dragon Punch motion. It’s been made “easier”, which I imagine will piss off all veteran Street Fighter players who’ve had the forward-down-downforward motion ingrained into long term muscle memory. I have no issue with other players being able to execute the motion more easily – my issue is with the fact that the newly created shortcut motion is downforward-downforward. How many times do you move the joystick in that direction twice when you’re not looking to do a dragon punch? The net result of the newly created shortcut is that dragon punches come off all the time when you’re trying to do something else. It sucks.

Despite these complaints, I’ll likely continue to play Street Fighter far too often over the coming weeks and months. I’ll just bitch about it a lot.