Street Fighter V, Initial Impressions

I picked up my Street Fighter V preorder for my Playstation 4 on Tuesday to little fanfare from my local Gamestop. It's not like they opened early, or did a midnight release - it's not like it's Call of Duty or Madden. The employee on duty had to try to work me real hard on the protection program and SFV's season pass to no avail. Thankfully, my kids know better than to use game discs as drink coasters thanks to other people's bad example. Also, why do I need a season pass for a game that swears you can earn enough in-game points to unlock all future characters? Do I look like a guy that cares about costumes? The employee didn't even notice that I was wearing my15th Anniversary Edtion Street Fighter T-shirt from 2004. (Or, maybe he did notice, and that's why he asked me about the season pass.)

What do you get for preordering the non-premium version of the game? You get an alternate costume for Ryu, the game's main character. On reddit, in the /r/streetfighter subreddit, they've been referring to this costume as "Sexy Ryu".

Unfortunately, the Gamestop employee had to ruin this for me by referring to this as the Chuck Norris version of Ryu.

Once you load up the game, you can start right away in offline mode, but you can't earn any of the game's in-game points. Meanwhile, you have a 6 Gigabyte download in the background for the 1.01 patch. I don't care who you are, that's going to take a while. After that installs, you can connect the the online mode. If you don't have Playstation Plus, you can't fight against other people online, but even if you don't have plus you still need to be logged in and connected to earn the in-game currency that you can spend on the characters as they release.

It's still Street Fighter, but it might feel unfamiliar. The animation is nice, although sometimes the characters have odd crosshatched textures to them like they're trying to crawl out of the pages of a comic book. The dynamic camera moves smoothly from showing the character entrances to the match. With the subtle changes made to input buffering, combo execution is much more consistent. However, all of the characters have had significant changes to their combos and some have had changes made to their specials. Chun-Li had the input for her Hyakuretsukyaku changed to a quarter circle motion plus a kick. (You used to just mash the kick button repeatedly until it started, but Capcom has been trying to remove special move inputs that could be adversely affected by network latency.) Personally, I like how they changed it because that move can also now be performed mid-air when it couldn't be before. Vega had all of his special move inputs changed. You can check all of the moves here. There's no Arcade mode right now. There's no Story Mode until after you download the patch. (Well, Street Fighter never had Story Mode at all before, so maybe that's something in and of itself.) The Survival Mode seems to have inconsistent computer AI difficulty. PC users are upset about a lack of controller compatibility and no button mapping utility. The one thing that's supposed to be working really well right now is online multiplayer, but since that's not a concern for me just yet, I haven't tried it.

Here's my list of suggestions:

• If you're going to play Street Fighter V against other people, don't wait. Hit the books now, learn the new moves and mechanics. If you need anything in the way of controllers I would suggest looking at what Hori has to offer. This goes double if you play with a pad instead of a stick - the Hori FC4 is fantastic compared to the MadCatz SFIV pads and works with PS3 and PS4. If you're playing on PC and have controllers that worked on XBox 360, those probably still work now.
• If you're not going to play Street Fighter V against other people but you do really want to play it, give it a month. Alex, the first of the DLC characters, is supposed to be released in March, along with more single player content.
• If you're going to play Street Fighter V against other people for money, go get in a time machine and go back to June 2015 and play the beta version more.
• If you listen to a lot of Carly Simon, you might think that this bullet list is about you. Don't you? Don't you?

My older son and I have played it quite a bit both yesterday evening and this evening, and while he used to main T. Hawk, he is now in the process of picking someone else since T. Hawk isn't currently in the lineup. I thought he was going to go to another grappler, but flashy (fleshy?) female wrestler R. Mika didn't really work for him at first. He did have some success with Necali (sort of a grappler?) and Rashid (totally not a grappler), though. If those guys don't work for him he might just wait for Namco to release Pokken next month. My younger son played it a little bit yesterday, and he didn't last long because Vega didn't work the way he expected but he may be switching to Zangief. I am getting the hang of Ken, who didn't really change that much, and I'm really digging Karin Kanzuki but I am probably going to rotate through all of the characters for a while so I can learn what each character's capabilities are.

The stuff is dead! Long live the new old stuff!

I made my semiannual trip to Best Buy the other day as part of Christmas shopping. PS4 controllers were on sale, my older son and I saw the trailer for the new Ratchet & Clank.




We were excited to see it, but we know that that also means that there's another game coming out. It's a game, based on the movie, based on the game.



We do find that kind of funny - the last time we got a game based on a movie based on a game, we got JCVD, Kylie Minogue, and my favorite S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Ming-Na Wen in the video game "Street Fighter:The Movie".



 Maybe if this becomes a more popular trend, we'll finally get a Resident Evil game starring Milla Jovovich.

In other news, it looks like Best Buy is only selling music as impulse purchases now.  When stores like Target and Walmart still have an aisle full of CD's, Best Buy's shelf space for CD's is shrinking. Even worse, the majority of what was there at Best Buy was either 1) specifically Christmas music or 2) albums so popular that they couldn't be ignored.  So, Adele, The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Metallica, One Direction, and a dwindling quantity of stuff towards the end of the alphabet. (I was looking for Bjork while I was there, and it was even difficult to find Beyonce or Bon Jovi.)

Barnes & Noble has a big music selection these days, but thanks to all of those hipsters out there that brought vinyl back, that's all they have. Not one CD.  Shelves and shelves of DVD's and Blu-Ray movies, and a big island in the middle full of vinyl.

I know, a bunch of you are probably saying "What about iTunes?", but I'm not entrenched in Apple culture, and I'm not looking to be dependent on it. I like how well iTunes works for me for podcasts, and that's as far as I'm willing to go.

It's a little late this year for me to change plans, but I think that in the future I'm going to have to make my default music buying plan to get something directly from the artist, since it seems you get better choices on what format you want it in that way.

In that vein, check out bjork.com - it's changed a lot since I've been there last and it's been redecorated in the style of her new album. If you haven't heard her new work, perhaps you should - how does the expression go - get it straight from the horse's mouth?

Street Fighter V - The starting grid is complete (and then some).

The last of the starting 16 Street Fighter V characters have been announced. The new second in command of Shadaloo, F.A.N.G (pronounced like "flan" without the l), appears to be very sneaky and able to keep opponents at a distance.


He's sneaky for being able to move quickly in a snake-like fashion under opponent's attacks. (0:30) He's also very sneaky for using poison projectiles, (0:33,0:36,0:39,0:45), turning into a big flappy bird (0:53), and for not having a fourth period in his name.

His poison attacks come in a few different flavors - both straight and arched projectiles like some of Dhalsim's fireballs, one that stays on the ground, and a cloud that surrounds him that does repeated damage to any opponent who gets too close.

In the last little part of the video (1:15), they also tease the first wave of unlockable/purchasable characters. They are:

• Alex, who you've only seen in Street Fighter 3 and Tatsunoko vs Capcom. He splits the difference between being a grappler and a rushdown character by combining command throws with shoulder tackles, chops, and a flying grab.
• Guile, a series regular, who appears in Street Fighter 2 and 4 and some of the versions of Alpha 3 series. He uses projectiles and a powerful somersault kick to keep opponents from coming at him.
• Balrog, a powerful boxer who started as an unplayable boss in the first version of Street Fighter 2, who became a playable character in the second version of Street Fighter 2. Like Guile, he was also in 4 and some of the Alpha games. He is one of Shadaloo's top ranks - look for a giant statue of him in the background of the video above.
• Ibuki, everybody's favorite schoolgirl kunoichi, who previously appeared in Street Fighter 3 and 4.
• Juri, a relatively new fighter in Street Fighter 4 who has elements of taekwondo and strange projectiles that don't always do what you think they're going to do.
• Urien, Street Fighter 3's most agressive rushdown character who also has large projectiles and a unique anti-projectile barrier. It will be interesting to see how they implement his special moves.

The way that I understand it at the moment is that these characters can be locked by completing challenges in the game, or by direct purchase. They are trying to encourage people that are playing the game on a regular basis to improve their skills, and they will unlock the characters as a bonus of being engaged with the game. It's not supposed to matter whether or not people are playing online against other people - the in-game currency that allows these unlocks can be accumulate offline as well. It will be some time before the new characters become available, since I think that the intent is to get the first sixteen characters correctly balanced before they start adding other characters.

Capcom is still continuing their beta program, so people that preorder the game for PS4 or on Steam will be granted access to early versions of the game, and Capcom will use the match data to try to determine what changes need to be made to balance the game. Due to the nature of how Street Fighter works, it may take some time for all of the possible techniques to be discovered. They are also using the beta to test the netcode, making sure that people are going to be able to play well online.

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In other news, Ash vs. Evil Dead has really been fantastic, and the thing that Lucy Lawless did in the last episode (yesterday) was so unexpected and amazing that I can't really hint at what it was and I have to tell you to just go watch it already.

Now if you can't stand horror in your comedy, or comedy in your horror, or women kicking butt and still getting objectified by the protagonist once in a while, or dismembered hands crawling around on their own, or anything to do with the occult, then please don't watch it because I wouldn't want to be responsible for television destroying your moral fiber.

However, if you like Deep Purple or the Amboy Dukes, you like comedy and horror together to the point that you want to make a movie about The Three Stooges coming back as zombies, you know that a balanced weapon loadout includes a chainsaw and a shotgun, and you're well-versed enough in literature to know what's funny about "A Farewell to Arms" and who originally created the Necronomicon, then by all means get right on watching this show.

Another new fighter for Street Fighter V, plus maybe SPOILERS

After a fair amount of speculation, the ever-patient and super-stretchy Dhalsim was officially announced for Street Fighter at Paris Games Week.



His play style is built around keeping the opponent away and being able to strike from long distances. In a new twist, the most obvious change to his projectile moves is that they now can travel in an arc, so it might still hit an opponent that you thought was going to jump in even when they're on the ground.

Here's some examples in gameplay from some Canada Cup players.




If you don't want spoilers for the upcoming characters of Street Fighter V, don't click the link for the words "this image" just below here.

Some data for other characters has been found in the data files contained in the latest beta versions of the game. If you have a look at this image, this is some raw code from the beta that had been picked through with a hex editor, looking for file names similar to the structure of the files in Street Fighter 4. Only time will tell if this really true or not, because they're still working on the game and parts could still be changed at this point.

Bonus tip: Angry Birds 2 - complete a section of a level with a single bird, and you get a "Strike" - they're 25,000 points. Complete it with two birds and you get 10,000 points. You don't get any direct bonuses for having birds left over at the end, but if you gets lots of strikes and birdies, you probably will have birds left over.

If you got here from Twitter or Facebook, the answer to the question posed is "parabolas".

Leaked SFV character is now official, plus bonus robot content.

So let's start with a riddle. Who's a Street Fighter that's green, from Brazil, and is absolutely electric?
No, it's not Blanka, but nobody would blame you for thinking that. The new Street Fighter V character that was previously leaked, Laura, is now official. Here's her trailer.


Based around Brazilian Jujitsu but with the added Street Fighter touches of a very slow fireball and devastating electrified attacks, she seems to have so many options available to her in terms of what her attacks are that she will quickly dispatch any opponent caught admiring her style. What I didn't really see yet is what her defenses are, and it may be hard to figure that out this early. I don't think that she was supposed to be the next character revealed, but I presume that the fact that a few images had been leaked prompted Capcom to officially announce her and end the speculation.

In other news, we picked up the newly released Chibi Robo game ZipLash for Nintendo 3DS last night. We opted for the copy with the amiibo (which we had to reserve), since it seemed like it could be difficult to get it otherwise.

Who is Chibi Robo, you might ask? Well, the first Chibi Robo game was on Gamecube in 2005. (Holy pasta! That was ten years ago!) You got to explore a house from the perspective of a small robot, walking under furniture and climbing up cabinets. You picked up pieces of trash and cleaned spots in an effort to make the humans in the house happy, but there were also other things going on in the house. Evil spider robots called Spydorz were thwarting Chibi's efforts to revive his predecessor, the much larger Giga-robo left in the basement without one of his legs or any battery power. The man and wife of the house were at odds with each other, leaving their daughter to feel withdrawn and non-communicative. If you get all the way through the game, you restore balance and happiness to the house. Part of the mechanic of getting around involved having a limited amount of power, and finding power outlets along the way as a way to recharge. Chibi has a cord and plug attached to him, and he just plugs himself in for a few seconds to recharge his battery.

The new game, instead of being a 3-d platformer is a 2-d side scrolling platformer, with the promise of using his cord and plug as a way to traverse environments. Although there are still outlets in the levels in some places, defeated enemies drop small batteries that allow him to recharge his energy. Chibi-Robo also finds snacks along the way, which is an interesting bit of advertising in itself - all of the snacks he finds are real branded snacks. The game makes it seem that collecting all the snacks is the main objective so it will be interesting to see how many different brands end up being incorporated into the game.

So far the whip mechanic is good, and there is more than one type of level so far, but we're not that far in the game yet. The music is cute, and isn't just the same stuff we've heard in other Chibi games. A lot of the familiar menu and selection music returns along with Chibi's basic sounds so that you have some things that remind you what you're doing, but the level background music is all new.  It's nice to see that Nintendo is still dedicated to a pleasant family-friendly gaming experience.

Don't get me wrong - I still like shooting zombies as much as the next guy, but there's more to games than terror and panic. There's puzzle solving, cute robots, slow fireballs, and hot Brazilian chicks!

Street Fighter V, still in progress, Part 3 - plus bonus cubing.

Continuing on with the developments of Street Fighter V, here are the remainder characters that were announced so far.

Vega has been a series regular, inasmuch as any character can - he was in the II series of games, first as one of the unplayable bosses, and then as a playable character from Champion Edition onward. He was also in Street Fighter Alpha 3 and all of the versions of Street Fighter IV.



While much of his gameplay is familiar to people who have used him before, a major change is a new ability to change from using his claw to not using his claw, allowing him a few different moves.

R. Mika has only previously appeared in Street Fighter Alpha 3, but apparently she has really made an impact with players because she was on the top ten list of most requested characters.



While she may seem like bubbly fan service, she is an even more complex character in her Street Fighter V appearance than she was in Alpha 3. All the characters that use command throws (a special move with a more complicated controller motion as opposed to a regular throw that only takes a particular button combination) a referred to as grapplers. This includes Zangief, T.Hawk, Hugo, Abel, and Hakan. R. Mika's look is more in the vein of wrestling-as-entertainment than serious fighter, but that's part of her charm. In addition to a grappler's arsenal of grabs and smashes, she can also rock the microphone to hype herself (increasing the damage that her command throw does in the process). Even more amazing is that she has a few moves that utilize her tag team partner Nadeshiko. Watch out for attacks coming from any direction, and really watch out for the spectacular tag team finish.


Rashid is brand new. We don't know a lot about him, but we think he's one of the good guys.


We do know that he harnesses the power of the wind, but he's also wearing a scouter like he's from Dragon Ball Z. Is he trying to find out if Ryu is over 9000?

Karin is another fan favorite from Street Fighter Alpha 3 returning to the game. In Alpha 3, her primary function is to serve as Sakura's rival, and uses counterattacks and rushdown moves to get the upper hand in a match.

Her Street Fighter V incarnation doesn't seem tremendously different in overall style, but it would appear that she has a wider variety of moves available to her.

Zangief was just announced October 1st at the Russian gaming convention IgroMir. He's been in one more game than Vega has, since he was included in the Alpha series a game earlier. This is the grappler that all other grapplers originated from.

This time around, Zangief  has many more moves at his disposal and it's just crazy what they've done with him to soup up his abilities. I was most impressed with him repelling an attack by just flexing, and him headbutting a fireball to disperse it. (Too bad it was Bison's two-hit fireball that still had one hit left.)

While I was busy putting this together, another character was leaked, but there's no video yet. I did find a few still pictures of the brand new character Laura fighting Ryu on the Brazil stage, which I think we can assume is hers. She seems to have some jujitsu moves, and a strange fireball, but I think that her fighting style will make more sense once we actually have some video.

There are only a few characters left to be revealed prior to the game's initial release, but knowing Capcom there will be lots of added characters over the life of the series.

In a side note, I was so excited at the grocery store this week to hear the following words spoken by the cashier (emphasis is mine) - "You're the second person today to come through (the line) with a Rubik's cube." However, when I had my cube solved 40 seconds later she still seemed surprised.

Yesterday at the other grocery store on a trip for pizza and cannolis, I did a demonstration for the dessert counter attendant, and popped an edge piece out of my DaYan brand cube while I was doing it. I recovered well, so it wasn't a big deal. I went a little more in depth than I might usually because she asked better questions than I usually get. She even remarked that she felt like she had learned something. I hardly ever take my DaYan cubes apart, and I had my other DaYan pop at lunch that day for the first time. I guess I've put enough mileage on them in a year and I probably need to take them apart and clean them and re-lubricate them.

Street Fighter V, still in progress, Part 2.

The next characters to be announced in Capcom's Street Fighter V were everybody's favorite English commando, Cammy, and a big ugly bouncer named Birdie that we haven't seen since the Street Fighter Alpha games.


Cammy shows off most of the moves we've come to expect from her, and Birdie looks like he's gotten a substantial tune-up that may or may not include some ingestion of hot sauce. (Did you see the fire coming out of his mouth?)

After that, Capcom announced longtime series regular and Ryu's friendly rival Ken Masters.


Some people complained about the new hairstyle, (it looks bananas?) and some people weren't sure why a game that's supposed to show greater differentiation between characters had Ken in it at all. But, I think it would be hard to take him out at this point since their rivalry is one of the main story points of the game, and they have done a great job of gradually differentiating the characters in the past. Their mission to not have a lot of characters just be clones of each other has just allowed them to be more daring in their changes with Ken.

The next character that Capcom revealed is the first fully new character, Necalli.


Necalli has big crazy hair, attacks that can penetrate through the ground, a command throw, and not much of a command of English. We don't really know anything about his backstory yet, but he doesn't exactly seem like one of the good guys.

Now about the game itself - Capcom has done a great job in having a Beta for people that have pre-ordered the game. The best part about it, in my opinion, is that one of the first times that the servers were running an early version of the Beta, it wasn't running up to par. The servers couldn't handle the load at the time, and they had to try again in a couple of days. Polygon talks about it here. Why is that such a big deal? It's a big deal because you want it to fail early, under somewhat real-world conditions, instead of failing the week the game officially releases with all of the characters running and a lot of people being disappointed. Capcom has dissappointed a lot of fans by having questionable netcode (the parts of the program responsible for the networking aspects of the game) in some of the game modes of the PC version of Street Fighter IV and it's never fully been resolved, only worked around. If it's a game that's primarily being played online, the game will live or die by its netcode and Capcom is really going to have to make it great, especially with this new endeavor of increasing the size of the player base by funneling PS4 and PC users into one pool of players.

For those of you thinking about the PC version on Steam, check out the system requirements on the Steam page - just keep scrolling down to the end there.

Street Fighter V, still in progress.

It's been a while since Street Fighter V was first announced, and it's been nearly as long since I talked about it. There's still a long way to go before the game is officially released, but I'm really pleased about how transparent Capcom is being about the game and the steps they're taking to make sure that they have a successful release.

The first thing that people would need to know is that Street Fighter V is only coming out for Playstation 4 and PC. Sony deliberately partnered with Capcom to do this, which both helps sales of the PS4 over the XBoxOne, but it is also helping with unifying the online player base. For the first time, all of the people playing this game will be able to play each other. Street Fighter IV had three separate player bases - XBox360, PS3, and PC(Steam). By removing the XBoxOne from the equation, because there would be no practical way to get Sony and Microsoft to allow any sort of cross-system play, it becomes possible for Steam users and Playstation Network players to play against each other for Street Fighter V. As the competitive fighting game scene grows, it becomes helpful and important to unify the player base in this way.

When the game was first announced, all we had was Ryu and Chun-Li. Ryu is Street Fighter. He was the original character that you played as in the original Street Fighter, when there wasn't even a number after the title yet. Chun Li is a fan favorite from Street Fighter II, and has been in the majority of the games that followed. A scary version of Charlie Nash and a rather familiar looking M. Bison followed next.

M. Bison seems familiar enough to people who played him in the other games he appears in.



Charlie has changed a lot from the Guile clone that he used to be in the Alpha series. Sporting some aftermarket repairs, which I guess he needed because we thought that he had died in a previous game, he now has some tricky teleport moves and more ways to confuse his opponents.



While this is a good start, obviously there need to be more characters, (and there are) but I thought that it was great that Capcom was gradually adding them in during the development process as a way to tune the game mechanics.  They've probably been doing this all along, but this is the first time that Capcom has done a Beta program this big and has shown the game this much prior to release.

Next time, we'll discuss the Beta in more detail and show off the next four characters.

The future of Street Fighter is here, and it is noodly.

Fans everywhere of Capcom's "Street Fighter" fighting game series rejoiced this week. Not only did a new patch for Ultra Street Fighter IV get released which included character re-balancing and the debut of the supremely wacky Omega Mode, but we also got our first glimpse at a live match of Street Fighter V which was announced for PC and Playstation 4.



While the Nerdist runs the headline as "Destructible Stages Revealed in First Ever Live Street Fighter V Match", I think they buried the lead here. The real headline should be "Chun-Li Kicks Butt, Even With A Bowl Of Noodles On Her Head."

If you fast forward to around 6:54, you will see series mainstay Ryu finish a round against Chun-Li with a devastating Denjin Hadoken, pushing her through the stage wall and into the kitchen where a bowl of noodles lands on her head. It's not just a cutscene tagged onto the end of the round - the noodles stay on her head for all of her victorious last round and the closing tag, despite her rather acrobatic Spinning Bird Kicks.

Certainly, there are more implications to be discussed, like why Street Fighter V isn't going to make it to XBox One or WiiU, or how on earth Charlie has made it back into the series despite being MIA since the Alpha series games, but those will have to wait for another time.