The Stupid Gamer

Disclaimer: The following rant is purely the opinion of me (Brad Mosbacher) and is not reflective in any way of the opinions of Jeff Rivera, anyone else affiliated with Stupid Gamer, or the millions of SFIV fans that will maul me when they find out I posted this little rant. Now it’s time for me to rage.

This story starts out fairly innocently. I was at Target yesterday, to purchase some necessities that were long overdue for me (clothes, pillow, new shoes and the like) , so i decide while I was there that I would go ahead and purchase Star Ocean: The Last Hope for 360. But those hopes were dashed on some rather sharp rocks when they didn’t even have a slot open on their shelf for the game. So I wander about the store for a while more, picking up various items and  just looking around before coming back to look at games again. This time I notice they have Street Fighter IV in stock and I decide on a whim that I was going to buy the game, even though I know next to nothing about it, aside from what was told to me by word of mouth. I end up purchasing the game and then I check out and leave. Fast Forward to 11:30 PM: I pop the game into the 360 and install it to the hard drive, then fire it up, not knowing what to expect. I enter the game, go into options and set the difficulty to easy, then I enter arcade mode. I pick the character I want to play as, which was Ryu, and start a match, then the game does something unexpected. It comes right at me like a seasoned  pro gamer and completely annhilates me, again and again. So I pick a new character, Chun Li this time. I manage to win a couple times and was starting to feel pretty darn good about myself when it happens again. The AI goes into kill mode and wipes its electronic ass with me. Needless to say I am absolutely and totally pissed off right now, simply because of the cheapness and overpowering nature of the game’s AI, even on the easiest difficulty.  As it is now, it is absolutely impossible for me to learn how to play this game even if I wanted to (yes I know there is a training mode, but I dont like those modes). Long story short I think I made the biggest mistake of my life buying Street Fighter IV and I will probably never bother with the series again.

At times I try to convince myself that I’m actually pretty good at Street Fighter. I mean, I probably gave local gas stations and arcades every quarter I owned from the moment Street Fighter II hit the US up until the late ’90s.  As Street Fighter IV has caused a lot of hype and attention, I have noticed that many popular message boards are filling up with newcomers asking why the series is so difficult. There are also quite a few old-timers that walked away from the game around the time that Capcom started focusing in on the Alpha series.  Well, I’m hoping that our Street Fighter IV guide will be useful to both of those groups, as well as the longtime casual player that’s never really been able to delve into the deeper bits of the battle system.

You can find the guide here: http://stupidgamer.com/street-fighter-iv-guide/

A link to the guide is also available just below the site header. Please feel free to email me anything that you think would improve the guide at jar155 [at] gmail.com. I also welcome any and all criticism about my strategies or conclusions about the game. Thanks for reading!

I don’t get an enormous amount of feedback outside of commenting on the site, but lately I’ve been getting some direct emails (thanks!) from people asking when the next podcast is going up and when I’m going to get back to updating the site. I’ve been wrapped up with a handful of things, including a trip to California, some sickness, a root canal, late work nights, and STREET FIGHTER IV!

I’ll get back to normal posting real soon, including a strategy guide for Street Fighter IV, which will cover basics for newcomers to the series or to those that are just rusty because they haven’t played Street Fighter since the ’90s. I apologize for the gap between podcast releases, and we even had a plan to podcast today but I absolutely crashed when I got home from work. Five nosebleeds in one day will do that to you, you know.

In anticipation of big releases or to celebrate great games already out, the forum members over at NeoGAF often will come together to create fan made magazine style ads. Recently the community turned their collective attention toward Street Fighter IV, and the results were quite impressive. Check out the slideshow below for a sampling of some what they’ve come up with. You can use the options on the slideshow nav bar to switch to full screen mode.