Ed Loves Bacon - Review: Super Street Fighter IV

I still remember that spring day of 1993 at my friend Josh’s house when I first played Street Fighter II on Super NES. A higher echelon of gaming competition was introduced to me invoking a fury in my soul. I loved it. Most players of the game can confirm the cocky satisfaction that fills you after vanquishing your buddy with a well-timed shoryuken. Street Fighter II was the revolution of mano-a-mano gaming and became the grand pappy of many, many… many fighting games to come. Like a fried Twinkie, too much of a good thing can be monstrously destructive. The genre suffered a powerful decline earlier this decade partly due to consumers being bombarded by fighting games, sequels and updates. It seemed that every few months you had a new game with the Street Fighter or Capcom name: X-Men vs Street Fighter Ex, Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter, SNK vs Capcom, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Street Fighter 3 Double Impact, Marvel vs Capcom, blah blah blah. All of these were great, but it got heavy on the wallet, and doesn’t include all the other miscellaneous fighting games from Capcom, SNK or Namco (Remember Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, Samurai Showdown, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure?). I won’t bother going into the 3D fighters, the point is made that there were a lot. Marvel vs Capcom 2 was truly the reason to buy a Sega Dreamcast in 2000 as it brought together all characters from five years of Capcom crossover fighting games. Sadly, we gamers later found that MvC2 represented the apparent end of 2D fighters, a depressing realization that set in as 3D gaming became the mainstream. Capcom even stated there would never be another numeric Street Fighter title. But Producer Yoshinori Ono changed the fate of world warriors when he pitched the revival of the series to Capcom bigwigs in 2006, it was a go with one condition: it had to be done proper.