Street Fighter IV (PC) Review Update

Capcom has released Street Fighter IV for the PC this week, following up on the February releases for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The differences are few, but still meaningful for PC owners. For a more detailed take on what makes Street Fighter IV so great, check out our full review, which has been lightly updated to account for the new PC release. This article will mostly focus on the specific differences found in the PC version of the game.

From a gameplay and features perspective, Street Fighter IV is identical to what you'd get on consoles. The game supports Games For Windows Live, giving it a set of achievement points and a player matching setup that, for better or worse, is just like it is on the Xbox 360. That means that you'll still occasionally run into cases where you can't connect to a match after the quick match option gives you a list of available players. Also, the game ships with the Championship Mode update that was released as a free patch for the console versions of the game. It would have been nice to see cross-platform support between the 360 and PC versions of the game, but so far, at least, there seem to be plenty of players on the PC who are looking for a fight.

The game certainly has support for the keyboard, but that's not how you want to play Street Fighter IV. You should consider a joystick or gamepad as a requirement if you want to enjoy the game, and don't forget that you'll need two of those things if you want to enjoy playing the local versus mode. I used the Xbox 360 versions of the MadCatz Arcade Fight Stick TE and the MadCatz gamepad, both of which are pretty ideal for controlling the game. As it does have keyboard support, players with joysticks that map to keyboard presses should be in luck, but I want to stress that I didn't test that out for myself. Additionally, online reports state that the PlayStation 3 versions of the MadCatz controllers released alongside Street Fighter IV PS3 work just fine.

The other options come in the form of graphical tweaks and settings that you'd expect to see in a PC game. These options let you tweak the resolution, filtering, v-sync, shadow quality, and so on. The good news is that Street Fighter IV was originally developed for the Taito Type X2 arcade hardware, which is really just a coin slot hooked up to a Windows machine--and not an especially beefy one, either. I wouldn't call my machine state of the art, but I was able to turn every setting up to the maximum and still get my frame rate up to the 59.97 frames per second that you'll want to achieve for the most playable results.

The other interesting option is a set of additional shaders you can enable to give the fighters a slightly different look. They're fairly subtle, with one adding a bit of an ink effect that hovers around the edges of the fighters, another giving the characters a watercolor-like palette, and posterize effect that flattens the look of the characters out a little bit. Watercolor is probably the most striking, but I prefer the default look of the fighters.

As this is a Games For Windows Live game, it offers support for downloadable content, none of which seems to be available on the GFWL Marketplace as of this writing. It seems reasonable to assume that the same alternate costumes made available on consoles will eventually make their way to the store.

As it can run in a higher resolution that the console games and offers more graphical settings, this version of Street Fighter IV has the ability to look better than the 360 and PlayStation 3 releases, but the differences aren't major. Provided you've got the right controller for the job and a good widescreen monitor, the PC version of Street Fighter IV is a perfectly capable version of the game that, like the previous releases, is positively terrific.