Street Fighter IV arrived on my coffee table last month.  I can’t stop playing it.  There are too many reasons why.  Being addicted to Street Fighter II when it came out, I had been waiting a long time for the game to evolve significantly.  Everything post Street Fighter II until now has felt like an experiment in what to do next, and with Street Fighter IV being released, it has finally stepped up.

3D is a big aspect graphically in the game, but fighting is still 2D.  Ultra moves/combos when in action allow for some camera play, as it zips around giving a truly dramatic feel.  In game music is excellent, and the sound FX are top notch.  I would however pay for someone to mute the announcer, and the boy band that plays during the title screen.

Where SF4 really shines is in online multiplayer.  Create a lobby, wait a minute, bam, you’re online kicking but with your leet skillz.  The best online feature is being able to play arcade mode, and still having a lobby available online for people to join, meaning that during quiet times online you can dive straight into the game practise pulling off your 94 move combo.

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The new characters are excellent, with 25 characters available (16 available initially, and 9 unlockable characters), and each character feeling just right.  The stories in arcade mode are fun to watch, and the challenge modes provide some extreme combo challenges.  Titles and Icons are a great way to earn some street cred, whilst giving the game more legs.

And then when you think you’re starting to get the new game, you discover focus moves.  Focus moves are the first step in the master part of ‘easy to pick up, hard to master’.  But when you start learning how to use them, watch your online ranking halve overnight.  Moves that were hard to deal with will become trivial, and block turtles now have more to worry about than fireballs and throws.

A game that may not appeal to those who aren’t Street Fighter fans, it’s a must buy for those that were or still are, and it will have you playing online for many months, if not years.

And yes, playing it on a big HD plasma between the two Street Fighter Rubixels is awesome.

Big thumbs up.  5/5.

Without spoiling the movie, it also covers his other exploits (including Sydney Harbour Bridge pictured above), and is an exciting insight into the eccentric man himself.  You don’t need to see it tomorrow, but it’s definitely a must see.

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Rachel Getting Married – Chick in rehab.  Sister getting married.  Drama.  Cry cry.  The end.   

Elegy – Guy meets girl.  Drama.  Sick sick. The end.

Death Race – Get out of prison if you race.  Zoom Zoom. The end.

Ghost Town – Guy dies.  Guy sees ghosts.  Life change.  The end.

My end of year for 2008 was at lightspeed.  Work and life balance are still balanced, but somehow each has grown a magnitude on either side of the scale.  I’ll be doing some catch up in some following posts but first a recap.

Looking back at 2008:

• Being involved with some amazing projects at work across Media, Telecommunications, and Finance.  Yes, I did mention finance.  I simply didn’t think there was an exciting finance project left.  I’ve been proven wrong.
• Continued to meet a great stream of people including clients, vendors, co-workers, friends of friends, and locals (at each locale).
• Managed to avoid communication saturation.  Twitfacespace can shut up.
• Used the fake Facebook acount for me that was given to me about 10 times.  Although, I’ve used it quite a bit this year.
• Got to check out so many cool technologies pre-release.  Most I can’t publicly discuss until they launch.  Some have launched… leading into…
• Got neck deep in Silverlight.  Microsoft have really come a long way and impressed me with how they are growing the technology.
• I spoke at Remix08 in Sydney and Melbourne on Building Interactive Media Applications, and got to meet a great crew.  Thanks to Michael Kordahi and Shane Morris and the rest of the Microsoft crew for involving me.
• Bought a DSLR camera, and in the first week took 2000 photos.  Worth every cent.
• Bought 36 Rubik’s cubes as a joke.
• Made some funky art out of it.
• Bought 360 Rubik’s cubes as a joke.
• Made some funkier art out of it.
• Rubixel was born.  Check it out here.
• Watched too many movies and TV Series, and still not enough.
• Rediscovered XBox Live.  XBox Live Arcade seeming to consume most of my interest there.
• Rediscovered email.
• Rediscovered C++.  How wonderful and painful you are.
• Started the blog but got distracted.
• Got motion sickness from Mirror’s Edge, and nightmares from Fallout3.

Things I should have done more:

• Blog posts.
• Personal coding projects.
• Rubixels.  As time consuming as it is, it’s too much fun.
• Delegation.
• Said “yes”.
• Said “no”.

And that’s about it for now.  I’ll catch up on the details later.

This enormity has changed my behaviour.  What I have found in Fallout 3 is that I play it for just a few minutes, and walk away at any point.  The game is just so big, that persisting is pointless, and whilst the game has milestones, progression feels analog.  Living with your consequences makes the game very interesting.  For example, my uber hacking-lockpicking-sneaking-melee strategy isn’t going so good.  Why?  Let me point out there are few buildings, let alone doors, and even less computers, and in the vast expanse of the wasteland visibility is 100 miles, and nearly everyone has at least one gun.

Fig 1. Guns > Sneaky

But I’m sick of such large budget games not getting the characterisation solid.  Every second character in the game still feel like cardboard cutouts.  Some major characters are excellent, others feel like someone has wheeled them in.

The other aspect is radiation poisoning.  Radioactive poisoning in Fallout 3 is cool.   From rivers of toxic waste, to inactive bombs, and old war sites.  You start to feel like the entire world is a post apocolyptic Chernobyl.  Every time you eat a piece food, you get radiation poisoning.  Get too much and you start to get sick.  This in turn can be reduced by taking radiation reduction formula.  That is pretty simple.  Regardless, I dub this the ‘did we forget to balance this’ game mechanic.  It constantly feels like a ball and chain slowing you down through the game progression.  I like the fact swimming in radioactive water can make me sick, it is immersive, but I am at a loss as to how eating a kebab somehow makes me more radioactive than swimming across an ocean of radioactive sludge.

But enough of Fallout 3.  It’s good, either buy it if you can’t wait, or borrow it when your mate has completed the billion hours of gameplay or died of radiation sickness.

Second up on the agenda today is Cooking in the Dangerzone .  You can watch it on TV (in Australia) Wednesday November 5th on SBS .  Stefan Gates sets out on his way to Chenobyl, and against his producer’s advice, he eats the local food, with some interesting results.   A short clip from the show below…

A really interesting show, and well worth the watch. And with an 80 year old women eating radioactive food every day of her life, you start to realise how unbalanced that game mechanic really was.

Star Wars – Force Unleashed: Kid, flash forward, adult, bad, slash slash, bad, push push, bad, zap zap, confused, zap zap, good, slash zap pew push slash, boom, vader, confused, emperor, bang bang, the end.

This game was a real treat. Bad camera, quite buggy, emphasis on the controller-in-tv infusing camera, but a real treat.  The game mechanics at a high level are quite awesome.  Your character levels up slowly, unlocking abilities as you go, which is nothing new.  What makes the difficulty slider on the game.. slide… is that every time you die, you don’t lose experience Jedi uber power points. Hence the game gets easier and easier as you bash your head against the wall. This works well for impossibly large groups of gun toting angry wookies, just after you opted for the focus fire and are in dire need of AOE. Boss fights start off impossible at times, and then you figure out the strategy, and away you go. The Darth fight was really well done, and the emperor fight, well, who cares!  I just pulled a Star Destroyer out of the sky!

The downside, aside from the plot, which in essence is needed for the game, SWFU is short. Whilst dodging the store salesperson who was determined to sell me the Wii version with the WiiSaber, I picked up the game amazed they had a ‘pre-owned’ version so close to launch.  “That makes no sense!”… but after playing the game, it made perfect sense. Finished in an AFL Grand Final weekend whilst doing everything else I needed to get done. Other downsides, no multiplayer that I can find, and faux replayability.

Buy it if you are a die hard fan, but otherwise, rent it.