The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Today I realized that I was sitting within arm’s reach of an arcade stick, and I had a copy of Super Street Fighter IV sitting on the table over there, and yet I was playing Street Fighter IV on my iPod instead.

I bought Street Fighter IV for my iPod because it was on sale for a buck, and Capcom was donating all proceeds for it towards the relief effort from the earthquake. I had heard surprisingly good things about it, so I thought I’d give it a try. If nothing else, I’d get this blog post out of it. I wasn’t expected it to be as good as it is. It is a really quality game, and completely worth your dollar.

There are several omissions from this version of the game. One is some of the characters. Apparently for awhile they slowly added characters, but they’ve basically stopped now. While I’ll miss personal favorites like Sakura and Dan, I understand why they weren’t priorities, and you still have a pretty decent selection of SFIV fighters in there, including all the required ones like Ryu, Guile, and Chun-Li.

The other omission is no Indestructible. Oh nooooooooo. But at least it still has Guile’s Theme. And the “fight over” theme, which is kind of the best music in the game, as far as I’m concerned. Always makes you feel badass after a round.

Anyway, onto how the game plays.
I don’t know what dark sorcery Capcom employed to make the virtual joystick in this game so good, but all iPhone developers who want to try to have a virtual stick or pad really need to employ it. Every single time I pulled off a dragon punch motion on this thing, I was blown away, but I can do it with a lot of consistency. Fireball motions are never any problem. The stick is fantastic, and that’s the whole reason why the game is playable.
Though not a one-for-one recreation, the game is very, very similar to actual SFIV. All the characters they included have the same moves you remember, and can employ them the same way. I picked Abel, for instance, and was using a lot of the same techniques I use in the actual game. You don’t have quite the same range of moves, though, simply because they have reduced the game down to four buttons: a punch button, a kick button, a “special move” button which you use to pull off your EX moves, Supers, and Hypers, and a Focus Attack button. This means you don’t have as much variety of normals, really, but it still does a fairly good job with what it has.

The game also looks pretty great, while running without lag on my second gen iPod Touch. It seems to be using techniques similar to Killer Instinct, which is smart. The fighters are actually sprites that have been ripped from taking pictures of the fighters in 3D. Still, it looks great. The animation is sometimes jerky when doing things like throws, since the game is trying to figure out how to get the two sprites to connect in a good way, but overall it looks very fluid, too. It’s certainly not enough to throw off someone of my skill level, and let’s face it, you’re never going to be super serious on your iPhone anyway.

The game has multiplayer over Bluetooth, which is nice, seeing as it’s a fighting game at all. It even has “Fight Requests” like the actual game, though the concept of someone noticing you playing SFIV on your phone, booting up their copy, and both of you having Bluetooth on for them to join you in the middle of your arcade session is a bit unbelievable as a scenario. Still, they tried. There’s no online play, because, well, let’s face it, fighters have a hard time dealing with lag on a console, much less over 3G. It’s good they have something.

Seriously, if you like Street Fighter IV, or fighters in general, this is totally fun to fuck around with. The AI is about what you’d expect from fighting games (I can beat everyone on normal but Zangief, who gives me lots of trouble, just like normal SFIV) and they intelligently set the game up as leaderboard-based as a race to get through tournament mode and beat all the fighters in the fastest time. It even saves your progress between matches, if you just want to play one round and then go back to something else. It’s totally fun to fuck around with for a dollar, and completely playable. It’s pretty fantastic like that.