Street Fighter IV EX plus @ HUGE SUCCESS :D

I purchased SFIV on Tuesday expecting to find a game that not only brought back some of my favorite 2D fighter back to life, but also made the genre fun again. This past summer I played many games of Virtua Fighter 5, Soul Calibur 4, and Dead or Alive 4. This fall I purchased MVC 2, CVSNK 2, SF@ Anthology, SF Anniversary Collection, Arcana Heart, Fatal Fury, King of Fighters Anthology, and some Tekken games. The old games were fun until the nostalgia factor left and the games were just plain outdated and the more recent 3d fighters were either too button mashy, too complex, or just boring to play. I missed the good old days when someone could do a hadoken and it actually was a big deal (a hadoken in MVC2 means NOTHING). This game brought it back for me, it brought it ALL back. I was able to not only be familiar with 80% of the cast immediately, but since their movesets were hardly changed able to jump into the game as if I had been playing for years. It was because I have.
Street Fighter 4 doesn't have a 3D and isn't trying to compete with 3D fighters. What it is trying to do is evolve the current genre of niche 2D fighters with pick up and play controls so that any casual fighter can have fun with it and think they're playing fairly, while keeping a layer of depth hidden underneath it so that die-hard fighting fans can learn all the necessary frame data and combos they need to conquer all. I usually wouldn't mention anything other than the gameplay, but I must comment on an amazing feature of allowing online gamers to request a fight with you while you're playing the arcade mode...brilliant! A problem with the 3d fighters I've been playing is simply you do the arcade mode until you unlock whoever you want then you go into the lobbies and wait it out. It seperates the two things that most arcade goers loved into two seperate ways of thinking thus weakening the overall excitement of playing the arcade while someone walks up and puts a quarter in the slot next to you. In SFIV currently there are so many people playing and challenging each other that most of the people I try to fight in the lobby have already been challenged in the 2 seconds that I'm looking at their gamertag. My solution is to play the arcade mode just like in the early 90s and wait it out for someone to come challenge me. The result is that my average time of me fighting someone before being challenged is roughly a minute. I love it and hope that it doesn't dwindle too much in the coming weeks after the fact. This game does have its flaws, but I'm not here to point them out as I'm not a professional reviewer yet so until then Capcom you have done a fine job. ^_^