Unlike my awesome Twilight review, this review is completely biased and based entirely on my own opinions.

I have now played about 40 hours of Super Street Fighter IV (on PS3, if that matters) and feel that I am adequately prepared to give a review of my experiences and the quality of this game. I should tell you that I focused almost entirely on online play. I have played very little of the single player, which is the same as online but before every fight the characters will say something to each other. For some reason this pre-fight taunt is absent from multiplayer.. I think it's bugged or something. The animation always starts but then immediately stops and the fight begins. Maybe it will be fixed in an upcoming patch.

First, let me talk about my single-player experience. I could sum it up in two words: shit-fest (or is that one word? I never understood hyphens). The only good feature "Arcade" mode has is it can allow you to connect to real people. I fought Ryu in the Arcade mode set to the Hardest difficulty because I wanted an experience similar to fighting in the arcade against another person. What does arcade Ryu do? He shoots 100 fireballs. When I finally decide to jump over the fireballs and kick him, he uses Shoryuken. This puts me back into fireball range at which time I see another 100 fireballs coming at me. I jump in again and he uses Shoryuken once more. This is totally different from the real arcade/online experience in which Ryu players only shoot three fireballs before they use Shoryukens.

In the Arcade mode you get a brief cutscene of the character. Sometimes their background, sometimes they are molesting children, sometimes they are talking about one of the new characters in a kind of lusty, raspy voice off-screen where I assume he's rubbing a box of kittens against his crotch. These opening scenes have little to no animation which is kind of lame when the original Street Fighter IV included animated cutscenes for both openings and endings. The endings do have animation, but they are about 5 frames per second and as such they look like shit.

I am of the opinion that the characters should never, ever talk. I don't know if Capcom does this on purpose, or simply doesn't have anybody with the ability to write but the win quotes and cutscene writing is simply horrible. Let me give you an example, which is actually from the original Street Fighter IV as I don't have a TV tuner to get shots from my TV. This was one of Blanka's win quotes in Street Fighter IV:

In case you can't read that it says,
"I'm so much cooler than you. You can't even make electricity!

With writing like this you have to wonder, why do they even bother? You could probably find Ken and Ryu erotic fan fiction with more substance than Capcom's storytelling.

But this game isn't about its singleplayer. After all, singleplayer is where you learn to do all the 25-hit combos your character has. Online is where the real action is! That's where you learn that your 25-hit combos aren't actually viable until you've played for three years and you happen along someone who just started playing in the series and hasn't learned they can hold back to block. So what is the online play like? Let's explore it together.

The best way to prepare yourself for the competition of online play is to simply jump right in. You have three choices: Ranked, Endless, and Team Battles. Endless and Team battles are stupid, who wants to wait for some other idiots to play? These are how you recreate real arcade experiences before arcades had more than one Street Fighter machine. Joining an Endless battle is essentially the same as putting your quarter up there on the screen next to everyone else's quarters while you wait for your turn to fight whoever won the last battle. Ranked is where you go from arcade to arcade traveling across the country defeating everyone you possibly can and spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on a Street Fighter Road Trip. The bonus is now you don't have to play using an arcade stick that someone fucked up with all their hobo stink and which can't do up and right at the same time as a result of said hobo stink. Usually one or two of the buttons at the arcade are stuck with some sort of train goo and once you press them they won't come back up, allowing you one carefully timed fierce punch per five battles.

Ranked is where you're going to find all the best players in the game and a wide variety of play styles everyone chooses Ryu and uses the same moves. Okay, that's an exaggeration.. sort of. Some nights I play I will fight 8/10 Ryus. Other nights I play, like tonight, and I fight 1/10 Ryus.

Ranked battles have some good filtering options. You can choose to search by number of rounds and time limit which is useful because in our world there are people who want to win, no matter the cost. These fine folks will choose one round with a 30 second timer and then use a heavily defensive character such as Guile or Blanka to hit you once and then simply wait out the timer. You can also filter the game to search only for people who are the same skill level as you as well as a higher skill than you. Again, players who wish to win with no challenge can also use the search option for players who are lower in skill than you and simply stomp new players into the ground because apparently that's fun.

I'll even do you a favor so YOU can stomp new players. If you want to know how to use the "search for lower skilled players" option you simply search for more skilled and same skilled and make note of everyone's names. Then search the "Any" option and find someone who wasn't in the previous list. If you're playing during primetime you may have to refresh each list a few times to get a full list but this works 9 times out of 10 to find you someone weaker to fight. Obviously as a world famous journalist I should verify my facts and I have verified this technique by stomping newbies for several hours. I found it strangely unrewarding. I much prefer beating someone by a sliver of health and screaming obscenities at my television while my wife shakes her head in another room. Or losing by a sliver of health and screaming more obscenities at the TV. Then again, I scream obscenities at Final Fantasy XIII, mostly whenever Hope is on-screen and talking.

There are some really good fights to be had in Ranked mode but in order to do so you need to keep a manual list of all the people who choose Ryu and all the people who have double your Player Points or Battle Points. Avoiding these people can enable you to have a really enjoyable time in Super Street Fighter IV.

Final Scores (letter grades because I am a teacher):

Graphics: D-
The graphics have not changed very much since Street Fighter IV. You would think this lack of updated graphics meant they could add more stages for people to fight in, like maybe one for each character - but no. You'll see many of the same maps with a handful of new ones. It is probably for the best that the graphics didn't change, to enable us to transition easier - but you couldn't have used a little bit more new artwork? Stupid.

Voices: English, F. Japanese, C+
The English subtitles have typos and the the voice overs are mostly atrocious. The Japanese voice overs are better, though the Japanese voice overs in which the actors spoke some English (Cammy) are worse than the English voices. I think Street Fighter was better when it was just grunts and nonsense words.

Music and SFX: B
The music does not interrupt the matches and the sound effects generally work nicely. Rufus, however, needs to make a jelly-type sounds when he jiggles.

Controls: F
Is it really any surprise that Capcom just happens to sell Arcade-style sticks for all of its fighting games? What's a great way to make your $40 game sell for $200? Sell two different fight sticks - one cheap that breaks almost immediately and one expensive that lasts forever. It doesn't matter that the expensive one costs the same as the cheap one in terms of parts and labour, it says TOURNAMENT EDITION on it so it must be better. All that's left is make the game's controls too difficult to effectively function on a 4-face button gamepad and you're all set. Well, except for fightpads but why spend $40 when you could spend just a little more and get an arcade stick?

Playability: A+
Super Street Fighter IV is easy to play. You put the disc in, you press the button to start the game, and you are playing. No bullshit, no registration, no hassle. You jump right in and that's great. Everyone should be able to get their shit ruined by Sagat in less than five minutes and a game is guaranteed to be successful.

Online: C-
Lag can be problematic but that's hardly Capcom's fault. The real problem here is there is no good way to filter out specific players. You can't filter by controller type or specific regions (I want to allow Korea and Japan but not allow USA or Europe), nor can you host a room and disallow people whose points exceed yours by any amount (nor can you filter lower-skilled players). Trying to join games is often a lesson in frustration as you are greeted by join session errors over and over again. This problem is solved by hosting your own rooms, though then you run the risk of facing people considerably stronger than you because of the lack of host filtering options. But once you get into a match with a player who is at the same level as you the game becomes incredibly fun. Good luck finding that rare, lagless, evenly skilled player who is not spamming Shoryukens though.

Verdict: If you like Street Fighter, it's a buy. If nothing else it's $40 that will last you until Marvel vs Capcom 3 comes out. If you are not a big fan of Street Fighter (or you are unfamiliar with the series) you might still enjoy it but be prepared for a hell of a learning curve before you start being competitive, and it's not really the good type of learning curve in that it won't make you better at anything except Super Street Fighter IV.