I'd like to clarify something I said yesterday.

I realized not long after I wrote a nice chunk about Street Fighter IV that I implied that the game is bad. I'm not sure I want that to be the case in your head, but there has certainly been a trajectory to my opinion on the game:

1. This is new and good!
2. This is the fighting game norm
3. This has helped me make new friends
4. This is slow and plodding
5. This isn't what I want

Now, this still seems like I'm being overly harsh, but that isn't the case. In fact, I'm something of a proponent of the game even though I don't ever want to play it again. It's brutally obvious to anyone that reads this that, to me, the fighting game sun rises and sets with Street Fighter III Third Strike, and it would take both a similar masterpiece of a game and the time that I used to have to dump into it for me to be so in love with anything else. The cruel realities of both business and adulthood are against me on that one.

Maybe one of these days I'll write something about all of the good that's come from Street Fighter IV and its many upgrades, but I feel it's more important at this point to qualify yesterday's statements. I'm pretty sure you got that I was using Dhalsim as a metaphor for both fighting game development and the health of the current gaming industry (if only the large developer/ publisher side). But if you didn't, there you go, I guess. Street Fighter IV isn't really that far removed from what we're seeing currently with the new Star Wars movie; it's what you love intimately about the old ones, but with a few new characters and a couple of slight twists. During the previous console generation, things were awfully lean for companies that were swimming in money from the generation before it, and market-tested surefire hits were more the creeping norm than a sense of innovative adventure. Street Fighter IV is a clear product of that, though to its credit, it evolved into something much grander over time.

Comparing that to the Street Fighter III games as I did, which were almost a full reboot from a character and mechanical perspective (though, again, many of those character archetypes still exist), was meant to drive the point home. Maybe it also perpetuated a feeling that SF3 is better than SF4. Well, I guess personal biases creep in sometimes no matter what. Whatever. You're smart people. I think you get it.