Hadouken! My first glimpse of Streetfighter IV

Now this has got me rather excited. Way back in the early nineties, the corner shop near my school got a Streetfighter II arcade cabinet. The result was complete and utter chaos - the second the lunch bell rang, a swarm of school boys (myself included) would rush to the shop to play it. Queues would stretch out of the shop door and several yards back up the hill as we waited patiently for our turn. None of us had seen a fighting game of such depth before; for once, it wasn't a simple case of pounding buttons - there were special moves to memorize, and each character had radically different skills to master.

For me, the fighting game genre reached its zenith with SFII, and the countless sequels and 'homages' that followed - from King of Fighters to Tekken to Dead or Alive - never quite captured my imagination in the same way. There was an almost magical balance to the gameplay that Capcom themselves never quite recaptured.

But something tells me - though I could be wrong - that they may just have learned from their past mistakes, because Streetfighter IV looks brilliant. The Okami-esque trailer is a little misleading - there won't be paint spattered everywhere, for one thing. A read of an article in Edge magazine reveals that the game will in fact look a little more like this:

While it's obvious from the early screenshots that Ryu and Ken are the only characters finished to a presentable level, it's still fair to say that Streetfighter IV will look marvelous. I'm also assured that all the iconic characters - E-Honda, Chun-Li and Dhalsim for example - will be returning. If they look as good as Ryu and Ken, I can't wait to see them.

Capcom are remaining tight lipped as to which consoles it's being developed for - though I'm guessing that it won't be the Nintendo Wii from the quality of the graphics.

So it looks good - but how will it play? The good news is that SFIV will be '2.5d' rather than 3D, and the developers have suggested that SFIV will be very close to SFII in terms of gameplay - just what I wanted to hear.