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It actually came on the ship date despite the man on the phone telling me it wouldn’t come until the day after. I rushed on over to pick up the ps3 version of the collector’s edition with the Ryu headband preorder bonus. The line was literally frozen in front of me, not because of excitement, but because the person ahead of me was trading in an entire stack of games. Finally, I made it to the counter and, for what is probably the first time in history, left GameStop without being asked to preorder anything.

Rather than opening it right away, we decided to savor the moment and have a meal first… at least until Jonah’s camera finished charging for the impending photo shoot. We then promptly went downstairs with our bag of delights. Since the headband was a preorder bonus, separate from the rest of the collector’s edition box, I knew what I had to do before going any further. I tied that piece of red cloth around my head, knowing full well of the ridiculous photos that would ensue.

"It says Street Fighter IV and has a picture of Ryu on it, just like the one in the game!"

It was a little weird to find out that most of the collector’s edition box is actually taken up by the plastic containing the Ryu figure. I mean, everything else is easily contained in 2 blue ray cases, so it makes sense. It was just a little surprising. The figure is pretty sweet, though it only stands somewhere between 2 and a half to 3 inches tall. I opened the movie case to see which things were inside. The case contained the 65 minute anime movie, the collector’s edition soundtrack, the collector’s hint book, and the voucher for the first costume pack, which includes Abel, El Fuerte, E. Honda, Rufas, and Zangief. Unfortunately, I found out that you can’t actually redeem the voucher until Thursday, when that particular DLC pack officially releases.

Despite what I thought, this does not come with the 2 disc official soundtrack. The collector’s edition soundtrack is a single disc with 17 tracks. It only contains the character themes and clocks at about 50 minutes. This is not bad, though, considering the character themes are what I wanted most. I have yet to watch the anime movie it comes with, but my understanding is that it takes place before the game. We’ll make sure to watch it before next week’s podcast. The collector’s hint book is cooler than I thought it would be. Basically, it shows you how to do the moves of the new characters, but displays them in comic frames with drawings accompanying each attack.

"The best damn hint book in town!"

Finally, it was time to boot up the game disc!

I cleared the table and started setting up my X-Arcade Dualstick. In our haste, we ran into problems getting it to work properly on the ps3, but it was only a minor setback before it all was figured out. After changing the voices to Japanese, we managed to play one round before mutually deciding the install should be required instead of optional. Seriously, it was a really long load time. The install didn’t take terribly long, though it forced us to resync my Dualstick. After the install, loading times were improved tremendously.

Jumping into Vs. mode felt every bit as natural to Jonah and I as it should have. The controls felt super tight and many of the moves on the returning characters were already familiar. Once we took a look at how special moves work, though, things got even more interesting. There are essentially 4 kinds of special moves in Street Fighter IV. If you were to perform a quarter circle and punch with Ryu, you would perform the standard hadoken that takes no special bar to use. If you were to do the same action, but with 2 punch buttons you would do the EX version of the hadoken. This will take 1 segment of your special bar. Almost every special move has an EX version, so there are lots possible strategies. If your super bar was full and you performed 2 quarter circles and pressed one punch button, you would perform the super combo: “Shinku Hadoken”. There is a separate bar called the revenge gauge. When this fills up at least half way, you can perform the same action as the super combo with all three punch buttons instead of 1 to perform Ryu’s ultra combo: “Metsu Hadoken”.

While the super bar fills up by performing attacks, the revenge bar fills up from getting hit. An interesting thing about the 2 bars is that only the super bar will carry any remaining energy into the next round. The revenge bar will completely empty itself between rounds, so you need to make sure to use your ultra combo before it’s too late. The 4 types of special moves utilizing the 2 different bars makes for a very deep and enjoyable fighting experience.

The graphics are amazing thanks to the heavily emphasized style. The music fits the mood of the stages and is all around great to listen to. There was no lag on any of the matches I played online.  There is a lot of extra challenges to keep you busy. There is even anime cut-screens at the beginning and end of each character’s story mode. The only real complaint I have with the game thus far is its final boss, Seth. To put it bluntly, Seth is a cheap bastard. Almost all of his moves seem to take priority over yours. Seth is a relic of the arcade scene, designed to make you put more quarters in the machine to finish up that last little bit before the credits roll. Despite all of this, he’s not nearly as bad as most SNK bosses.

Annoying final boss or not, Street Fighter IV is one of the most satisfying fighters I’ve played in awhile. It stays true enough to its roots that you can jump right in while adding enough extra layers of depth to really set it apart from its predecessors. It’s truly not a fighter to be missed.

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