Email: Street fighter 4 is complete garbage

Sean,

 

I remember reading your post on how great street fighter 4 was. Knowing how refined your taste in games are, I took your opinion seriously and purchased street fighter 4 arcade edition. I must say I was impressed by the sheer variety of characters and how nuanced the game mechanics were. I even had fun for a while mashing buttons and watching my characters do some impressive feats. 

After a while I began getting destroyed by the computer and realized that mashing buttons just wouldn’t work anymore.  Naturally, I decided to actually learn how to play the game. Well wouldn’t luck have it? The game explains absolutely nothing. The game pretty much forces you to study youtube videos and scour the forums just to learn how to play as if I had nothing better to do with my time. I must say that it’s really fantastic that each character has a totally unique set of combos. I guess the game would be a bit more enjoyable if you actually memorized a handful of combos but no, the button input timing is nuanced completely beyond comprehension. So even if you do memorize the combos like you would cram and memorize for a biology exam, your combos get completely sabotaged if you are off by just .000001 of a second. This game is just about impossible to learn and I am ready to throw the disc out the window.  Fighting games are about playing with your friends, not the computer. It is a multiplayer centric game. Your friends won’t be able to do every combo either.Smash Brothers also sucks if you just play the computer.

Mortal Kombat 9 is better designed for a single player experience, or so I’ve heard. I’ll try that one day.

The last game I think I truly recommended and raved about was Minecraft when it was in Alpha. Right now, I’m just bouncing between a ton of games. With the game like Hammerfall, I’d never recommend it. It has too many problems in it. However, I find certain elements interesting of it. I mention it only because no one else is mentioning it.

The only games I’d recommend are the ones I can’t stop playing. I find myself never playing Street Fighter IV unless I have someone else around to play it with. So I don’t play it much. Yet, I still find Unreal Tournament fun even if I play alone or with someone else. Currently, I’m still playing a ton of Alpha Centauri and started trying out Command and Conquer 3 (why hadn’t I played this one yet?).