As a side note, the latter isn't a problem in the main game at all. It only becomes a problem in that specific game mode where the player must haul as much ass as possible on a fixed health budget with time ticking away, and 99% of the game mode involves a hoarde of monsters fixed on your position. When faced with a good sized group of said monsters, the game wants to make sure that you want to drop that poisonous rotten egg you picked up while trying to pick up the first-aid spray sitting right next to it. Problem is that when you hit "discard" after wasting a precious split second in the menu, you want to get back to the hauling part and instinctively get ready to line up your crowd-pleaser. Yet, the ever so annoying question remains, "Are you sure?"
You are then whacked in the head with a beer bottle, or promptly killed by whatever insta-kill a mini-boss felt like doing to you. It's not that I don't understand the reasoning behind it (you don't want to just drop that magnum into space now, do you?), but it should have been taken out of The Mercinaries for the sheer fact that one mistake sends you to restart hell anyway. If you drop your gun, you do what you always do and restart. If there's a minute left, the S score is on the line, and you only need to heal up once before victory, you probably wouldn't mind dropping a gun and you probably don't want to sit there like a retard staring at your pockets.
Prototype had the same problem. There were zillions of options when it came to you killing things, but I thought the menu for choosing from those could have been different. I don't have a good idea how to make it better, and it wasn't game changing, so I can forgive that. What I did not forgive was mapping twelve skills that do different things to one button. That ruins things, like, say....challenges meant to be beat with those specific skills.
Seriously, did not one game tester unlodge whatever it was lodged in their throats and tell their bosses that a challenge involving the use of all five skills that were mapped to the X button and nothing else was just stupid? You have to jump and charge your jump with the X and R1 buttons, but you also air-dash and double jump with those buttons, but you also glide by tapping the jump button twice, but if you've already air-dashed twice then you do something completely different making you look like a drunk pigeon about to crash land in the middle of Times Square. Forget fighting an air battle, because while it's cool to perform once you do it, you will fail and fall off buildings a lot. It's not a game-killer because you are a superhuman so falling doesn't mean death, but it is very annoying to try to do anything with pinpoint accuracy. At least that's the way it is on the PS3, because the developers also managed to forget that "accuracy" on the DualShock is just a bad thing to strive for. Too many games have I played where if I get relaxed and hold the controller comfortably, pressing up is actually pressing a little to the right. So if air-dashing sends you flying in the direction you don't want to go then you're stuck re-dashing to compensate, and it's all your fault when that fails too because you happened to be relaxing and enjoying your game instead of trying to snyc yourself in robot fashion to hold the controller the way they want you to.
There's more to that story, but the ire of today is directed squarely at Street Fighter IV. I should have rented this game first, but GameStop dropped the price to $20 and I could hardly resist. Capcom never gets it wrong with these series, except for maybe the slightly-too-obvious EX series that wasn't as terrible as people said it was. It was an experiment in 3-D, and not every one of those mid-to-late 90's experiments went according to plan. I can forgive that. Yet, Street Fighter dominated the fighting genre, was as balanced as ever, and never apologized for what it was. Sure, people could get to be experts at the game and know how to do everything the average person didn't have a clue how to do, but the game wasn't considered "technical". Street Fighter Alpha 3 is still considered a behemoth of a fighter because of its speed, offense, simplisity, and intensity. You pick it up and can put up a fight if you know the basics, and you figure out everything else as you go.
Hearing Capcom talk about Street Fighter IV was like hearing a hot celebrity tell you exactly what you want to hear. They claimed that the game wouldn't be about learning the moves, but instinctively pulling them off. They said that it would be an offensive game first, focusing on balance from there. The game's graphics looked great and with the history there, nothing could go horribly wrong. Right?
Well, just when you think that there are at least a few franchises you can trust, Street Fighter IV goes back on every promise made before it launched. Yes, I'm late to the party by a long shot, but the game astounded me at how absolutely terrible it was. This was a nightmare of design. I'll be honest; I own the PS3 version. Maybe this might just be on my end, but I cannot see how. I also didn't play multiplayer in any fashion, so there is a certain element of cheapness involved no matter what, but the game is still fundamentally broken and Arcade mode is not an excuse for that.
The first major problem with the game is that Capcom purposefully sabotaged the game controls for anyone without an arcade stick, though I seriously doubt that would save it. First, moves simply do not work. Fireball forward, for example, actually does a fireball a low percentage of the time. Depending on what you were doing, you either dragon punch up into "juggle me" land, punch aimlessly into nothing, or just stand there like a dolt. To test this theory, I whipped out the old SNK games, Street Fighter Alpha 3, and Soul Calibur IV. In every single game, a simple quarter-circle forward move would work perfectly fine. Soul Calibur had slightly less success being that it's 3-D and that every move can be followed, so whatever you were doing before has some significance as to what that quarter-circle is going to do. Yet, that was still remarkable accurate and was totally attributed to me: the user.
I decided that since I'm fighting in Arcade mode, the computer must be handing it to me because it's cheap and evil, causing me to be frustrated and pulling off the moves wrong. Not so. The fireballs still didn't work (I'm using Ryu, by the way). So I switched to another character, Crimson Viper. She has two moves that involve quarter circles; one forward, one backwards. The quarter circle forward move worked a couple of times, and then I decided that I must have been doing something wrong with Ryu, until the problems started happening again. Finally, training mode asked me to perform a basic combination. So I did it, and it didn't work. I tried it again, and it didn't work. On the fifth or sixth attempt, without any rhyme, reason, or sense, the computer decided that I was obviously using the quarter circle backward move in the middle of my combo. I double checked this, and the combo does not call for anything to go backwards, so I didn't make a mistake, but I still guessed that I must have done something wrong. The sad part? The experiment was repeatable, and she does in fact do the wrong move randomly. I've played a lot of fighting games in my life, and never has this happened, and I am not that bad at fighting games at all. Let that settle in, that Street Fighter IV doesn't even read your moves correctly. This leads directly into the second major sign that nobody gave a crap about the controls.
It's Virtua Fighter all over again. I could not play Virtua Fighter 4 because frankly, that is definitely a game I am no good at. To me, there is no rhyme or reason to how some of the combos work in the end. It's too technical for my tastes, and I couldn't quite figure out why some things just did not work as advertised. I once agonized for fifteen minutes trying to figure out why a certain training combo just wouldn't pull itself off, but I still couldn't manage to do it. Yet, I got some enjoyment out of the game and I wasn't useless at it. I'll just never be good at it.
Street Fighter IV takes this to a whole new level. First, what the game and manual tell you to do just doesn't work half the time. At least, not for someone actually trying to learn the move in question. If there are certain parts of the game that are just meant for really good players with experience to figure out, that's all well and good, but building this into the standards of the game and then botching it is just stupid. High kick then super fireball move sounds simple enough, right? There's nothing complicated about it, and it is training mode after all, so you should be learning how to do this.
High kick...then a punch. High kick...then a dragon punch. High kick then a fireball. High kick then a lot of standing there. High kick then...it actually happens! Now, if only he shot the fireball this century, I might have cleared that bit. No matter what, the fireball is delayed a long time if it feels like working.
Look, I can pull off the Buster Wolf with the snap of a finger, and even the crappy 3-D King of Fighters games got that right with no trouble, every time. I know how to rip off a move before I've even landed so that my fighter unleashes the second he or she hits the ground. This is foreign to Street Fighter IV. If there is a trick to pulling these moves off, then why the hell is it a f***ing secret? Even if it wasn't, none of them even work properly!
When you do manage to pull one of these moves off, it doesn't matter in the end anyway. You're just going to be grabbed and thrown. After rigorous testing of the theory and several witnesses, I proved without any doubts that the hit detection of this game is one of the worst in fighting game history. Say that you felt like kicking M. Bison in the junk. Well, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize that if your boot has made it's way halfway through his bladder, then I think you have succeeded in doing your job. Well, that common sense hasn't made it's way to Capcom. If only you know in your last barfight that as long as you put a hand on the guy doing the pinata bashing, you were God at that moment, could remove the foot with no pain, and simply fling him into the bartender.
That is how the game works, no matter what a fighter connects with. Your teeth could be in your windpipe, and all you have to do is grab the guy in front of you and nothing will have happened. A good part of my first two playthroughs in Arcade was spent trying to figure out what the physics were and how to score hits and defend like the computer was doing. Nothing was consistent, nothing made sense, and while normally I have a great deal of patience with fighting games because each one has a distinct rhythm you have to get the hang of, this didn't seem to have one at all.
It's sad, really, because there was no way this game should have failed. Yet, it did. Massively. I have never played a fighting game that I can remember that was botched this badly, except for those digital scan games that tried to copy Mortal Kombat. Rise of the Robots wasn't that good either...but that's beside the point because it was boring and had nothing to it anyway. This game has all the flair of an A+ title and no control system to speak of, and my God, it's Street Fighter. How the hell do you screw that up, Capcom? You somehow managed, and while I tried to like it, it was my second playthrough that killed it for me.
Ryu vs. Abel. Abel spends 90% of his time rolling back and forth around me until he feels like grabbing me. I try to break the grab, but that never works. So I get thrown, I get back up and try to grab him since he's right there. My hand passes through his head and he's not even moving a muscle to stop me, but for some reason I'm flying across the stage again. I land again, and he hits me with some unbreakable move that leaves me open again. So I crouch and defend. He throws me again. I get up, and he's rolling at me three times straight, and whip out a nice mean heavy kick to the face. His head is covered by my foot, and he just sticks his face into it and grabs me again. I get up, wait for him, punch him towards the face...and he ducks. So what the hell, he did it to me, right? I reach to grab him, and he's sitting pretty. Nothing happened. I charge up my gut-buster because I'm ticked off at this point, and I let it fly the second he stands up. He's not defending, my hand is buried in his stomach, and I'm flying again.
I pause.
"Did you see that?"
"Yes, I did."
"My fist was in his spine, right?"
"Yes, it was."
"F*** this game."
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