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Street Fighter IV Preview

• By Chris Morell
• December 22, 2008 11:53 AM PST
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From the streets to the sky, it's Capcom's time to shine.

With Resident Evil 5 a surefire hit, the Japanese company is adding to it a trio of gems in 2009: Bionic Commando, Dark Void, and the return of Street Fighter. Here's a special look at Street Fighter IV.

The year was 1992. I coaxed my parents into driving me down to an LA mini-mall EB Games to exchange a stack of crappy SNES cartridges for a shiny new copy of Street Fighter II. And then I missed school...a lot of it. And when I could no longer feign sickness, I demanded to stay home and play more Street Fighter II. You can imagine how well that worked.

And that was the last time I was addicted to a fighting game. Sixteen years seems like an eternity, and even though Street Fighter III came along a few years later, it was a major departure (no Ken? No Zangief?) and proved to be the most controversial, polarizing entry in the series. Since then, we've also seen multiple iterations of Tekken, Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive, as well as numerous spin-offs of the Street Fighter games. But nothing has ever come close to matching the fast, ferocious fun that was Street Fighter II. Until now. We played the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Street Fighter IV for the first time, and it screams fun-the kind of accessible, appealing fighting-game fun that made Street Fighter II such a breath of fresh air. Add fantastic new 3D graphics, old-school 2D fighting, a huge list of characters, and a robust new online mode, and you've got an epic fighting game package. Is Street Fighter IV the best fighting game ever? We're about to find out.

A True Sequel

Rather than continuing the trend of creating self-contained storylines in past Street Fighter games, Capcom producer Yoshinori Ono set out to weave all the separate threads together for Street Fighter IV. "We're adding a lot more story elements than you've seen in previous Street Fighter games," Ono says, "to establish an overarching canon that covers the entire Street Fighter universe."

Street Fighter IV is already playable in Japanese arcades, but the home versions will offer a deluxe package with plenty of new bells and whistles. Street Fighter IV on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC will bring a slew of additional characters and in-game movies to enhance the storyline, which picks up after the events of Street Fighter II. The cast of characters will be instantly recognizable to Street Fighter II fans. Ken, Ryu, Guile, Chun Li, Blanka-the gang's all here. The home versions of Street Fighter IV will include several extra characters not seen in the arcade original, and Ono said that these bonus characters were strongly influenced by the fans. "We decided we shouldn't make all of the decisions on which characters should go in," says Ono, "and we should listen to what the fans want."

So the fans spoke, via a poll on the Street Fighter website, and Super SFII Turbo veteran Cammy was added to the Street Fighter IV fighting roster. She joins six other new characters-Gen, Seth, Fei Long, Dan, Sakura, and Gouken (aka "Sheng Long")-in addition to the large cast of fighters that carry over from the arcade version.

What a Fighter!

With different development teams creating so many Street Fighter iterations over the years, the many stories and subplots for each character makes it complicated to create a new game with a coherent story. But this is a fighting game, after all, and Ono and the rest of the Street Fighter IV team are out to make the best sense they can out of so many loose storyline threads.

Both Cammy and Gen, the newest additions to the roster, have rather diluted histories in the Street Fighter series. In Street Fighter II, Cammy was working with a secret agency called Delta Red II to take down the company that brainwashed her, called Shadaloo. In Street Figther IV, Cammy is investigating the connection between a seedy new organization, SIN, and Shadaloo.

But Cammy's fighting style doesn't replicate her history as an assassin. "What you will see is a focus on the basics of what Cammy has always been able to do from back in Super Street Fighter II...a lot of kick- and limb-based moves, and we're using that as a base for expanding upon it," Ono explains. "So there may be ways to connect these together to make new combos that people couldn't do before." And because we saw Cammy in action, we can vouch for Ono's description. Her patented Cannon Drill accompanies a spinning backfist, a Hooligan Roll, as well as various combinations of kicks and slams to round out her Super and Ultra moves.

More Cammy screens on the next page.

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