To any veteran (or even casual) Street Fighter player, the words “fireball motion” or “sonic boom” are easily translatable to a classic fighting game mechanic. Fortunately, Street Fighter IV uses a similar vocabulary, so it’s not difficult to sit down and feel right at home within seconds. As the game’s producer Yoshinori Ono put it, he wants it to feel familiar to players who haven’t picked up the game in awhile, like “riding a bike.”
There are a fair number of new faces, but simply knowing that Rufus’ move set was mostly quarter-circle-motion-based, I was doing the “Galactic Tornado” in no time. And while all of this is true, I still found myself craning my neck up towards the move lists plastered to the top of the playable Street Fighter IV cabinets in Capcom’s CAPTIVATE suit at the Palms hotel in Las Vegas.
So while other videogame journalists were distracted by the random bikini fashion show happening 32 floors below, I grabbed some shots of the move list plastered to the units. As Capcom’s Seth Killian pointed out to me, not all of the moves are accurate (for example, Sagat’s Ultra Combo is three kicks, not three punches as illustrated), but at least now we know what a “Guacamole Leg Throw” is.
