In my last years of high school, Street Fighter 2 was pretty much the arcade game of choice. I remember how great a revelation its graphics and sound were coming after games like Karateka and Budokan. In the days before the Internet, we couldn’t know the full extent of its popularity or the boom in fighting games it kicked off, but we did know that we had something special in our hands. It had a variety of characters, each with different movesets. It gave each of them command-based special moves and it used six buttons to control, which I believe was unprecedented for the time. The boys in school talked about it constantly.

Due to this nostalgia, when Capcom announced that Street Fighter IV would be based not on the forgettable Street Fighter III but the classic Street Fighter II, I knew it would only be a matter of time before I got it. I knew that I would never have the time or patience to master its intricacies in the way a teenager could, and that it would be too light a game for me to be truly absorbed in, but I’d want it all the same just to be able to play around with the familiar characters at my leisure and kill the odd hour here and there with mindless bashing fun.

To my surprise, Street Fighter IV is not only a glorious homage to the classic of yore, it’s also a genuinely great fighting game in its own right. Capcom has wisely chosen to keep the fighting in 2D while rendering characters in 3D and panning the camera only during special sequences. The graphics are fantastic, especially with the painting filter turned on, and strike a good balance between realism and a slightly cartoonish aesthetic. The latter in particular helps to keep the game look family friendly by preventing the female characters from being too embarrassingly sexy as many recent fighting games have become. I’m looking at you Soulcalibur 4, Dead or Alive and Devil May Cry 4.

Best of all, Street Fighter IV remains accessible to newbies while offering enough depth to satisfy even expert players. Unlike say Tekken, the moveset of each character is quite short, so learning and practicing them isn’t an insurmountable barrier to entry. Even the controls are fairly forgiving, provided you’re not doing something silly like playing it on a keyboard. However, the new focus system, which lets the character absorb an attack and unleash a devastating counter, works great in the hands of experts and is easy enough to learn that even a neophyte like me can be tempted to use it once in a while. Add on stuff like the option to spend Super levels to turns moves into EX versions and experts will have plenty of tools for them to play with.

So in a nutshell this is the fighting game to get if you like fighting games but don’t care to develop supernatural twitch skills. It’s available for all major platforms, it’s easy to find people to play against online and it has all the right bells and whistles to appeal to everyone. Heck, even the cutscenes are plenty entertaining even if they don’t make much sense story-wise. My favourite one is the pre-fight scene when Dhalsim fights Rufus. “Are you an alien?” Hilarious!