Remember how, in Street Fighter II, each fighter had their home turf, and you, as the jet-setting player character, would travel the world to meet your opponents in their home country? I'm a bit weirded out by how Street Fighter IV has done away with this completely. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to where you might fight any given opponent. I imagine Ryu calling Chun-Li on the phone and saying, "Hey, so, we gotta beat the crap out of each other again, where do you want to meet this time? Oh, you're at a drive-in in South Central Los Angeles? Cool, I'll be right there."

Certainly not an issue in gameplay terms, but what can I say? I like structure, and this sort of thing shakes up my world view to the core.

Anyway, the game is awesome. I'm having a blast with it, and I don't even care that I totally suck. To give you a sense of just how poor I am, I had to set the difficulty setting to Very Easy to complete Arcade mode, and even then, final boss Seth took me something like ten tries to defeat. Dude is a straight-up punk. At first I thought maybe he was just ridiculously difficult to everyone, but one dude on my friend's list already has the achievement for finishing Arcade mode on the Hardest difficulty, which I can't even fathom attaining.

Playing online is a blast, too, despite my lack of skill. Out of the 11 or 12 ranked matches I played, I won one. And one guy who defeated me followed up his victory by sending me a message that read, simply, "PWNED?" I never thought I'd long for the days of face-to-face arcade trash talk but the insults people dished out amid the neon and noise of an arcade were downright Shakespearian in comparison to some of what you get on PSN and XBL these days.

I can already tell that I'm going to be spending many, many more hours with Street Fighter IV. I'm not sure I'll get much better--as Jeff points out in his review, the Trial mode doesn't teach you anything about theory, and I'm not sure if the more nuanced aspects of play will reveal themselves to me over time, or if I'd need to hunker down with a strategy guide or seek the counsel of a fighting game guru to learn them.  But we'll see. Getting better would certainly make the experience that much more rewarding, but even for a lightweight like me, the game is just terrific. I can only imagine that it's more enjoyable still for those with the skills to appreciate and take advantage of all the depth the gameplay has to offer.

If you have the game on PS3 and you're not in the habit of sending people messages that say "PWNED?" after you beat them, feel free to add me. I'm HarajukuKid. You'll probably clobber me, but I may learn a thing or two in the process.