Street Fighter IV Review

It's obvious that each iteration of the long-running Street Fighter series has been carefully tuned and tweaked to the finest degree, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Street Fighter IV. The lessons learned in the franchise's 20-plus years have been used to prune back the core fighting experience to create something truly special.Street Fighter IV is a resounding success not only because it's one of the most technically complex 2D fighters ever made, but also because it's also wrapped inside a layer of absolute accessibility. Never has the old "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master" adage been truer than it is here.

The Street Fighter fundamentals have remained consistent over the years; your job is to knock out the other guy or gal. All 12 of the classic world warriors--Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Blanka, E. Honda, Zangief, Guile, Dhalsim, Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison--are back and playable from the outset, and they're joined by six brand-new and diverse characters. Abel, a mixed martial arts grapple-style character; Crimson Viper a female fighter with sweeping, airborne fire attacks; Rufus, a rotund fighter whose body makes him a bit of a sight gag despite his deceptive speed; and El Fuerte, a pro wrestler whose rushes and air throws make him a slippery foe. Ryu and Ken's sensei, Gouken, also makes his playable-character debut in Street Fighter IV. Naturally, he didn't teach the boys everything he knows, so when they meet again he has a few tricks up his sleeves, including a horizontal and vertical fireball EX move. The game's new end boss, Seth, fills the last spot and joins the list once you've unlocked everyone else. Character balance is spot-on across the roster, and as a result, you should never feel that you can't compete simply because you've chosen one character over another.

You'll need to finish the game multiple times and in special ways to unlock the complete character list. Doing so will make fan favourites Cammy, Sakura, Akuma, Fei Long, Rose, Gen, and Dan playable. Like previous games in the series, Street Fighter IV lets you perform powerful super combos, but it has removed air blocking and parrying completely. Developers Capcom and Dimps have added a completely new gameplay system: focus attacks, a new multipurpose offensive and defensive ability that can be charged to one of three levels by pressing and holding the medium punch and kick buttons simultaneously. There's no onscreen bar to show how charged your attack is, so you'll need to rely on the progressively darkening ink splashes surrounding your character model. Each character features a unique focus animation, so you shouldn't have any trouble working it out after a few rounds with each. Focus attacks make you vulnerable to damage because you need to be standing still to charge them (though you can dash forward or backward to cancel them), but the trade-off is that you'll absorb the first hit without the penalty of an animation reset, allowing for an instant counterattack if you land it. They can also act as armour-breaking moves, shutting down more-powerful attacks. Successfully landing a fully charged focus attack will deal damage and crumple your opponent to the ground, giving you the chance to follow up with an unblockable hit as he or she falls.

The new mechanic also lets you use part of your EX power-meter charge to exit animations early and chain bigger combos together. They take a little getting used to and some serious thumb dexterity, but once they're mastered, you can perform moves such as dragon-punch stalls directly into super moves or use them to juggle players in midair with multiple hits. Your revenge meter builds as you take damage, whereas the EX meter fills as you dish it out. EX power rolls over to the next round, but revenge must be built from scratch each time. This becomes a crucial risk-versus-reward mechanic. Do you take hits to build revenge and power up an ultra attack, or do you deal damage to burn your EX on improved moves, cancels, or save it for a super finisher? The flexibility of this system means that you're free to play according to your strengths and style. But just like reversals, EX power-ups, and ultra combo attacks, focus attacks serve to mix up the experience only for veteran players; such is the game's balance that they have never been required to win a match, and they act more as an additional weapon in the arsenal of a skilled player. They're waiting for you when you want to take a step up and learn how they work, but well-timed basic punches and kicks are just as effective.

The single-player mode is robust and has a lot to offer across several components. Arcade mode pits you against a set number of fighters from your unlocked-character roster and culminates in a showdown with Seth. Along the way to your goal, you'll always encounter a rival fight. These are regular fights accompanied by an in-engine exchange with your opponent. They're a welcome mix-up but often add nothing to the character's storyline because some fighters clearly don't even know why they hate one another. Each character's adventure is bookended by an anime-style cinematic movie that explains his or her motivations for attending the tournament. They're quite short and keep story to an absolute minimum, but they get the message across and do a reasonable-enough job of filling in the gaps. Given the amount of additional content shoehorned into this game, we were slightly disappointed to find that no bonus levels have been included, especially since we had high hopes of reliving our car and barrel smashing from Street Fighter II.

Regardless of whether you're down with busting out a tatsumaki senpukyaku at will or think it's some kind of egg-noodle dish, there's a difficulty mode here for you. Eight levels ranging from very easy to hardest are available, so you're sure to find one appropriate for your skill level. That said, even at the gentler difficulties, Street Fighter IV is no cakewalk because your opponents will occasionally mix things up with surprise super and ultra combos. First-timers will have no trouble picking up, playing, and learning as they go. Playing on the medium or above difficulty will also enable score tracking, letting you submit and compare to other players on the game's online leaderboards.

Sometimes concepts that seem so awesome in one medium don't translate well into video games. Take Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, for example. Many people have fond memories of playing with the toy when they were youngsters. One person would control the red robot, the other would control the blue robot, and both players would madly press the punch buttons on the toy until one of the robots' chins popped up. The loser would then push his robot's chin back into position, and the whole process would start over. There wasn't anything more to it than that, but people happily frittered away hours of their formative years just knocking each other's blocks off. Now, DSI Games has produced a video game rendition of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots for the Game Boy Advance that, despite a few modest changes, works just like the toy. It is perhaps the simplest and most repetitive fighting game ever produced--and easily one of the ugliest.

The game is loosely patterned after other 2D fighting games, such as Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, except that all of the characters are palette swaps of the same plastic robot, and all of the backdrops consist of the same toy boxing ring, which is superimposed over drab depictions of futuristic scenery. Each of the 10 playable robots has its own speed and strength characteristics, but they all look the same and have the same basic set of punches. The three play modes included also don't differ much. One lets you pit the red robot against the blue robot; one lets you set up a match between any two of the 10 robots; and the third lets you fight five robots in succession. Incredibly, the developers neglected to include a link mode.

Failing to include a link mode is inexcusable because the main reason people enjoyed the toy in the first place was that their friends and family were controlling the robot on the other side. Knocking the CPU's block off isn't nearly as satisfying.

The absence of a link mode is a terrible thing, but that isn't what makes Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots such a terrible game. Ironically, the game's biggest problem is that it's actually too true to the experience of playing with the toy. All of the arenas look the same, all of the robots look the same, and most of their attacks look the same. Just like with the toy, the outcome of each fight in the game is primarily dependent on how fast you can mash buttons. And, when you mash those buttons, you'll see the same choppy punches and hear the same clunky plastic sounds that you would if you were playing with the toy.

The developers kicked up the combat in the game a little by giving the robots extra actions and changing the way a knockout blow is performed, but these improvements are almost completely lost on the brainless CPU artificial intelligence. Every robot can move back and forth, punch high and low, duck, and execute power punches. Each robot also has its own unique special attack. Knockout blows aren't random as they are when playing with the toy. To knock the CPU's block off, first you need to whittle down its stamina meter by landing punches with the A and B buttons, and then you need to initiate the knockout punch by tapping the left and right shoulder buttons until another meter fills. All of these improvements seem like good ideas, but their value is completely offset by the CPU's inability to retreat or take advantage of openings. If you just mash buttons, the CPU will walk into almost every punch. In that regard, the video game rewards you for mashing buttons just as much as the toy.

Some concepts simply don't work as video games. Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots is one of them. The simplicity and repetitiveness that make it such a great toy make it a lousy video game.

It's an idea so simple, it makes you wonder why it took so long to happen: Take all your top-notch characters and toss them all into one game. In this case, the characters are Nintendo's, and the game is a new spin on your typical fighting game. The result is Super Smash Bros., a fighter that is easy enough for anyone to pick up, yet it has enough multiplayer appeal to stay interesting for a good long time.

The characters are, of course, what makes this game interesting. All the characters that have made Nintendo what it is today are represented, including Mario, Link, Samus Aran, Donkey Kong, and Pikachu. There are eight characters to choose from initially, and four more hidden characters to unlock. The game's backgrounds also reflect the various characters' natural envirornments: The Starfox stage is complete with buzzing Arwings, while Link's stage looks somewhat like a castle. The game's music is also pretty amazing, with tunes lifted directly from past games. So you'll hear the Legend of Zelda overworld theme, the world-famous Super Mario Bros. tune, and other littlepieces of incidental music, like the SMB star music and the Donkey Kong hammer tune. The look and sounds of the game really give it a "greatest hits" type of feel. The sound effects have been changed a bit from the Japanese version (the energy sword doesn't sound like a lightsaber anymore, and some of the speech has been changed), but not enough to really matter.

The game's object is pretty simple. Each stage hangs in the middle of nowhere, and you must knock all the other characters off the level to win. But it's not as easy to knock the fighters off as you might think: The characters can double jump, and several have attacks that can also be used to shoot upward., However, the more damage you inflict on fighters, the easier it is to send them flying. While you can rely on your standard arsenal of punches, kicks, and special moves to do damage, you can also pick up occasional items that randomly appear on the level. Items range from simple bats, swords, and guns to the more exotic Donkey Kong hammer and Pokeball, which spits out a random Pokemon whenever you use it.

Two-player battles are fun and all, but the game's real charm comes out in four-player mode. In any of the multiplayer games, you can either set a time limit or give players a certain number of lives to expend. Graphically, Smash Bros. does pretty well. Each character moves pretty nicely and looks about as good as you'd expect. Characters that have previously appeared on the N64 look about the same as they do in their own games. Samus Aran, who makes her first N64 appearance in this game, looks OK, although she is a little on the blocky side.

The game is extremely simple to learn and reasonably easy to master. The one-player game won't exactly last a long time, unless you count the time you have to spend unlocking all four of the hidden characters. So, if you've got a crew of friends ready to pick a Nintendo character and throw down, then Super Smash Bros. is definitely worth a purchase.

In the past, the portable fighting game was little more than a novelty. With only a couple of exceptions, Game Boy and Game Gear fighting ports were dirty, ugly versions of their arcade and console counterparts, complete with poor control. But as handheld systems became more powerful, the quality of fighting games skyrocketed. Since then, we've seen games like Street Fighter Alpha on the Game Boy Color and SNK vs. Capcom for the NeoGeo Pocket Color, both of which proved that handhelds could handle a decent fighting game. The introduction of the Game Boy Advance gave another bump to the genre and gave us a close-enough-to-perfect rendition of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, and now the handheld features a surprising port of Tekken 3 in the form of Tekken Advance. Namco may have had to cut a few corners to fit the 3D fighter onto Nintendo's handheld, but the end product looks and feels enough like the original game to succeed.

The first thing you'll notice about Tekken Advance is its altered control scheme. The button configuration has been reduced to three buttons, one for kick, one for punch, and one for throws. Additionally, in the game's tag mode, the fourth button is used for tagging out. This downsized control setting is a little awkward at first, but after a few rounds, it quickly becomes second nature. The main thing the setup forces you to compensate for is how you accomplish some of your moves. If you have a character like Paul, who originally was designed to do two different moves that involve hitting forward twice and hitting one of your two kick buttons, you'll have to decide which move you want by either tapping forward twice and hitting kick or tapping forward twice, holding the second tap, and pressing kick. It's slightly confusing at first, but after an hour or so, you won't even notice. The majority of the characters' major moves are intact, though most of the move sets have been reduced quite a bit. For instance, there are no "hold back and hit two buttons" counters in the game.

The game features a decent-sized roster of Tekken 3 favorites but doesn't feature a lengthy list of unlockables. Additionally, some of the standards, such as Eddy and Lei, are absent. The default character roster consists of Xiaoyu, Yoshimitsu, Nina, Law, Gunjack, Hwoarang, Paul, King, and Jin. Heihachi serves as the game's boss. Aside from the main arcade mode, the game also features a link-cable versus mode, time attack, survival, tag battle, versus tag battle, and practice.

The polygonal look of the Tekken series is, for the most part, intact, but this is where most of the aforementioned corners were cut. Understandably, the game uses prerendered character models rather than trying to render the characters polygonally. The game's animation is fairly choppy as a result, which in turn changes the game's timing fairly significantly. Still, the game looks quite good for a portable game. The stage floors rotate around in the SNES-style Mode-7 fashion that has been repopularized by the GBA. The game has great sound too, retaining a lot of the effects from the original version of the game and delivering pretty faithful renditions of the original game's music, as well.

On its own merits, Tekken Advance is a solid fighting game. That said, some longtime fans of the series may find themselves stumbling over the game's timing changes or simplified move sets. But the differences aren't noticeable enough to keep Tekken Advance from being a game worth playing, and thankfully, it has more to offer than just the novelty of seeing yet another series favorably scaled down to handheld size.

King Of Fighters 95 Review

King of Fighters '95 is the first Neo-Geo fighting game to make its way over to the Playstation. And sure enough, it throws in fighters from the many other SNK fighting games - such as Art of Fighting and the Fatal Fury series. In addition to the normal one-on-one fighting mode, KOF adds a team mode, which pits two of three teams against each other.

King of Fighters' main selling point, and most redeeming feature, is the sheer number of playable characters: 26, including two boss characters. For team battles, players can choose among eight pre-programmed teams, or use the "Team Edit" mode to select any three characters. Another feature that keeps KOF from being a complete Street Fighter clone is the inclusion of Last Resort moves: When a character is near death, new, fairly difficult moves become available. These moves include massive fireballs, super combos, and more.

The graphics in King of Fighters are substandard at best (think "bad 16-bit Street Fighter knock-off"). Though the backgrounds are passable, the characters are very pixellated - their only strengths are their slippery, smooth, lifelike stances and attacks. The characters also lack any star-quality: Players won't find a Ryu, Sub-Zero, Guile, Paul, or Jacky no matter how hard they look. What's worse, none of the characters possess any interesting special moves or attacks. So even with the unusual number of fighters to choose from, the pickings are pretty slim. The sound is also a little drab, though the music is passable and isn't too repetitive. Loading times are terribly long, and occur between every round of a team match.

Playing KOF is like playing a modified Street Fighter II arcade machine; people play it now and then, but never seriously get into it. While a few of the Last Resort moves look neat, they won't hold gamers' attention for longer than an hour. There's no question that this game is better suited for the SNES than for the Playstation.

The King of Fighters NeoWave Review

Home to many great fighting games and shoot-'em-ups, SNK's everlasting NeoGeo finally seemed to retire a few years ago when SNK Playmore made the decision to switch over to the Atomiswave, a similarly designed but technically more powerful system. So what was the company's first order of business now that the time had come for a fresh, new beginning? Why, porting over one of its popular fighting games, of course. Enter The King of Fighters NeoWave, a spin-off of SNK's best-known fighting franchise. Based on The King of Fighters 2002 but featuring marginally improved graphics and various gameplay tweaks, NeoWave frankly doesn't look (let alone play) much different from a typical KOF installment. This budget-priced Xbox Live-enabled fighter still packs some good stuff for hardcore fans, but the touched-up paint job doesn't make this feel like a whole new game. In fact, in some ways it feels like a step backward from The King of Fighters 2002.

KOF NeoWave features the traditional three-on-three team battles that the King of Fighters series is known for. You can't change fighters in the middle of a round, so your fighter keeps going either until he or she is defeated, or until the other team of three gets wiped out. So even though you choose three characters going into the standard game mode, the battles are all strictly one-on-one. The mechanics of gameplay are very similar to previous KOF installments, especially 2002, which means you'll once again be attempting to string together various punches and kicks with special moves for damage-dealing combos, while occasionally busting out with super moves and other tricks. The roster contains three-dozen different fighters, including most of the popular favorites, plus three different fighting modes. It's a lot of variety, but at the same time, it's mostly well-worn, familiar territory. If you've already played KOF 2002 and moved on, NeoWave won't do much to draw you back in, and probably isn't worth your while.

That's not to dismiss the quality of the underlying action. More than a decade of tuning and refining has informed this King of Fighters installment, which contains a diverse and interesting cast of fighters, and plenty of room for individualized tactics and strategy. The fighting is fast and intense, especially if you take it online. When playing online, KOF NeoWave behaves just fine (unlike the Xbox version of King of Fighters 2002 released last year). Matches are relatively lag-free and it's possible to jump straight into a rematch. You can limit the roster to exclude hidden characters to keep things fair, and you can even try to organize or participate in player-made tournaments. Since the game is also available in Japan, you can look forward to some international competition, though not a lot. Nevertheless, getting to play online with other King of Fighters fans is probably the game's biggest attraction.

What's truly new in KOF NeoWave? Not much, really. The character graphics are all recycled, the soundtrack is mostly forgettable, and a lot of the audio is muffled and indistinct. There's still a lot of charm and personality on display in the different fighters, but this isn't a good presentation by today's standards. The character roster has been tweaked since 2002 to include a few old favorites who didn't originally make the cut, like Shingo and King. The three different fighting modes (super cancel, guard break, and max2) influence your character's moves and abilities, as well as how often you can use your most powerful techniques, though systems like this have been a part of 2D fighting games for years. The conventional four-button KOF control scheme (for light and strong punches and kicks) gains one more button this time around for what's called "heat mode," which causes your character to flash red and get stronger, though at the expense of health. It's not that meaningful of an addition. The game also sports some fully 3D backgrounds and nice-looking portraits for all the fighters. There are a few alternate modes of play, like an "endless" survival mode, and numerous graphical options you can tweak to slightly adjust how the action looks on your screen, but this isn't major stuff.

Other than that, The King of Fighters NeoWave feels rushed. The onscreen interface looks ugly, especially the life meters. There's no text dialogue in between matches, which might not seem like a big deal, but it's a glaring omission--in past installments, fighters' personalities tended to come across in the between-battle dialogue. The last boss isn't an original character, but rather a recycled hidden fighter from a much older game. Worst of all, there are brief but painfully noticeable loading times between rounds, interrupting the fast pace of the action. One might reasonably expect the Atomiswave hardware to improve on what the NeoGeo was capable of, but whatever improvements are on display in this game are negated by new problems. The translation to the Xbox didn't seem to do much to compensate, either.

In the end, KOF NeoWave is a decent 2D fighting game that's recommendable only to those looking for more King of Fighters, for better and for worse. It's not a substantial or impressive upgrade for the series, but if you're still a fan, chances are you enjoy picking apart each new installment, noting subtle differences to moves and abilities, comparing additions and omissions against past versions, and so on. And being able to play online against other fans is nice, too.