SFxT The Good, The Bad, and the Gutter Trash. Review

By goukijones — March 17, 2012
Tags: blithering-blathering review

GoukiJones Blithering Blathering about his experience with SFxT so far. Are the stages beautiful or a just a beautiful distraction? Is it possible that the Tekken characters themselves are the best thing about this game? Will gems be banned at EVO?

SFxT The Good, The Bad, and the Gutter Trash. Review from GoukiJones.

Street Fighter X Tekken has 19 Street Fighters including Street Fighter Alpha classic Rolento, Street Fighter III's big German Hugo and his partner in crime from back in the Final Fight days, Poison. It's a man baby. Tekken has 19 characters as well, but I'm sorry I can't tell you from which Tekken game in the series they come from. I played the crap out of Tekken 2, one of my favorite games of all time, I had it memorized completely, I knew the 10 hits for every character and King was my favorite. That's all I got to say about my history with Tekken.

Let me begin with the Tekken characters in SFxT. The Tekken characters are my favorite part of the game. I wanted to try Poison of course. I didn't like using her or him. My bad. Rolento I banned personally because FGC was already saying he was top tier and over-powered. So I figured I didn't want use a character that EVERYONE else was going to be using. King was in for sure, I love the grappling. King and Hugo that was my Dream Team when I first saw the entire roster. Hugo is one of my guys in SFIII I liked to use and he is another grappler so I figured they would be cool together. I used Hugo for the first day and dropped him. I switched to Lili who I now I officially second main. Does that make sense? [smh] I tried to use Hugo again after I saw some PWNn with him at a tournament. I couldn't replicate a thing I saw in that tournament. So back to Lili.

Playing with King is super fun. Although Tekken vintage 10 hit combos are absent -I don't know why- King still has a lot grabs and his super can be modified. Remember his chain throwing? Yeah there's only one option for that during his super. He also has a rising knee, which is up-forward and medium kick. Timed properly you can chain some amazing combos. He has unblockable grabs whether your opponent is standing our crouching also a Moonsault that is super slow, but could be a good mix-up. With Lili I'm still learning her basics and what to do with her. I enjoy learning these new characters and the "Street Fighter style" Tekken characters came out really nice.

As far as the Street Fighter characters go, it's a lot like SF4. If somebody was really good with Abel in SF4, they will be really good with Abel in SFxT. That aspect of the game doesn't thrill me at all, because I am terrible at SF4 and don't play it. Cammy is my main, but she is "free" most of the time. I tried Guile once in SFxT, but again, I don't like him in SF4 and I don't like him in SFxT. So in Street Fighter X Tekken I use two Tekken characters. King and Lili.

Playing online sucks. More so if you're a 360 user. Xbox 360 straight up does not have the same features as the PS3. Local co-op does not work on the Xbox 360. Local co-op or couch play is when you and your buddy play together online, at the same time, in the same room, on the same Xbox 360. Something we've experienced since Halo 2. Capcom has said 2 things about this.

"PS3 version: It is possible to mix and match online and offline players for scramble battles and pair play battles. Two local players can play on the same PS3 using 1 PSN ID, and play against other players online.

360 version: It is NOT possible to mix and match online and offline players for scramble battles and pair play battles. So you either have to have all players be offline and local (so 4 players, 1 Xbox) or have all the players be online (4 players, 4 Xboxes)."

Source.

"Unfortunately, due to time and resource issues, we weren’t able to get that feature into the Xbox 360 version and we apologize to those players who were looking forward to it. "

Source.

I don't know which of the 2 are worse. "It is NOT possible to mix and match online and offline players." Halo 2.

The second reason says they just didn't have enough time. Nothing to do with not knowing how. I'll tell you one thing, Capcom had plenty of time and the know how of how to put a bunch of extra content on the disk that they would entend to charge us for later. So the online co-op plus the 5 exclusive characters, make the PS3 version VERY different from the Xbox version. Xbox users got gaffled this time.

Okay you don't have any friends and just play online by yourself. WARNING: the sound cuts in and out during some fights online. I noticed this when I first got it out of the box and played it for 21:07 minutes. It's a bigger deal then some might think. There are plenty of sound cues in fighting games. All of the sudden a fireball is floating across the screen. Yeah yeah, you can SEE IT, but have you SEEN some of the levels in SFxT? More on that below. So the sound issue is a little frustrating. Connection otherwise seems to be fine for the most part, unless you are fighting Arthvader.

At home with a group of friends is another story. Street Fighter X Tekken shines with 4 people in the same room, teamed up and fighting against each other. Minus the 100+ timeout endings, just waiting to be tagged in is extremely thrilling. We've played quite a few hours like this. During our most recent session we tried the scramble battle. What the fuck is happening during this? It's super fun and I could only hope that all Capcom fighting games in the future have a similar mode. Scramble mode is 2v2, everybody in at the same time. Just like a Tornado Tag Team match for my WWE marks. Or if you're old (also like me) like Ryu & Ken VS Bison from the alpha days, but Bison has a partner too. This a great group/party fighting game.

There are still a few things I don't like about SFxT. A lot of this game comes off as experimental. Like Capcom just wanted to try out a bunch of different things to see how the FGC would react. The stages for example are extravagant. A little too extravagant. If you thought UMvC3 backgrounds were flashy and have too much going on, the SFxT stages are far more out of control. In Ultimate I feel some sort of separation from the stages and my characters. In SFxT, the graphics, lighting and 3D characters in a 2D/3D environment blend perfectly. A little too perfectly. (winkface) There are some stages that we have already completely banned. The Pandora stage, with the colliding mammoths in the background -Which makes a noise when they hit, remember I mentioned noise cues earlier? You can't hear the jets flying by on Shield heli-carrier.- in round 3 on the Pandora level, Jacks and armored trucks and T-Rex's is flying around all through the background. It's bananaz. Yeah, I can't deal with that. Pit Stop 69 is also banned. By round 3 on that stage it's so dark you can't even see some characters. BatRastered says "All I see is black."

Some of our favorite levels are the Half Pipe. Can anyone tell me who the four Bison girls are on that bill board? That's a pretty simple level, the colors are normal and there isn't a bunch shit distracting you in the background. Mishima Estate makes noise, but this is because your character is stepping on roof tiles. This is actually pretty cool, stepping sound effects on different types of flooring is a cool feature for fighting games. Quick shout out to the Mad Gear Hideout. So I can stop talking about the stages, I'd like to just say to Capcom that we need more options for more laid back levels. Nothing happens on the training stage I know, but what happened to the grass fields or the sky scrapper roof tops? Keep some of them simple.

Gems what the fuck? Seriously? I didn't know what the FGC was going to think of this. My rule is, if you make something for your game and it's banned at EVO and other FGC tournaments, then you fail. It's a waste and nobody will care. It will kill your game. Like Mortal Kombat. Which I'm surprised enough people are still playing it for it to get a nod at EVO. Back to the gems deal and EVO. If the gems aren't allowed at EVO then they will have failed. The least I can see EVO doing is allowing people to choose gems from the default list. All the special edition and DLC gems will not be allowed. Which will still fall under my category of FAIL.

The gems are cool and I like the idea of having a little strategy there. Ono said this also brings to the table that Ryu VS Ryu could be completely different because of gem selection. Yeah that's a great idea ... for Darkstalkers. J/K. I mentioned earlier, SFxT could be full of experiments. The gems just aren't practical.

Now that I've blithered and blathered for some time about my experience with SFxT this last couple of weeks, lets get down to brass tacks.

Street Fighter X Tekken looks amazing.
Plays a lot like Street Fighter IV.
Has something very unique with the Tekken characters fighting styles in Street Fighter type gameplay.
Great features such as 4 people playing at the same time in a 2v2 tag situation or a 2v2 4 characters on the screen at once.
Tons of great characters and even more to come with DLC.

So don't be a mad when I give Street Fighter X Tekken Rent it! Especially if your only option is to get it for Xbox 360. Playstation has 5 more characters and you can play locally with your son, friend or for some of you extremely lucky Jimmys, your girlfriend/wife. So it could possibly be a Buy it! on PS3. But still, hard to tell if this game will be around next year errr what I want to say is EVO 2013. Ultimate will, SFIV will.

Try it before you buy it.

Since I wrote most of this review Capcom issued a press release, that they will be patching the sound issues in SFxT. Also a tournament mode in which you will be able to edit gem selection during character selection. So that might help its chances at EVO to have the gems included, but not any DLC or Special Edition gems still.

You can watch us team up and play locally every Friday night. We usually start around 9-10. Twitch.tv/goukijones Stop by join the chat. FYI we are not pros. lol. We do accept challenges live on the internet. If you happen to get a chance to brawl us, you better bring your A game. We live on the internet. Taking 0 prisoners. Don't be a Jimmy! Thanks for reading. Please leave a comment.

Street Fighter X Tekken

SFxT The Good, The Bad, and the Gutter Trash. Review

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