I am a big fan of Capcom and its fighting games. I have been playing some version of Street Fighter IV for about seven years by now. It’s easily the most popular fighting game on the market and will likely remain on its throne until Street Fighter V comes along.
But Capcom didn’t handle the port of Ultra Street Fighter IV to the PlayStation 4. It was Other Ocean Interactive who did that, a third party studio that is best known for the awful job it did on Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection , which needed to be patched post release countless times just to become stable. That reputation for unstable and buggy games unfortunately shines through in the PS4 version of Ultra Street Fighter IV , making it one of the worst versions released to date, bordering on unplayable in certain circumstances.
I was going to write a review for the game, but it turned out my review was simply a laundry list of bugs.
So instead I decided to write you a laundry list of bugs.
Here are 10 bugs that make the PS4 version of Street Fighter IV a pile of garbage.
Game Freeze
Sometimes the game will freeze. We thought Street Fighter -related freezes were gone when they patched out the knife meets fireball glitch from Street Fighter X Tekken . However, I have had the game freeze on me twice already, one while in a match, and one while loading. I never had the PS3 or Xbox 360 version freeze on me once. Heck, I never had the PC version freeze on me, and I used a whole bunch of unauthorized mods on that one.
Missing Sound Effects
At times, sound effects simply don’t play. Usually, you’ll notice this in a match when your hits aren’t making that satisfying “thwack” sound. This is very distracting, and since a lot of fighting game balance factors in sound design, I’d say that the game becomes harder to play when this bug takes effect. Just try playing your favorite fighting game muted and you’ll see what I mean.
Missing Voice Acting
This same bug carries over to the game’s voice acting as well. It’s most noticeable in the announcer, who forgets to say his quips at the beginning or end of a match. Granted, this is less distracting than missing sound effects, but it’s still sloppy. Not to mention it sounds incredibly awkward when the game tries to load up a cinematic super and the people performing it and getting hit by it are dead silent.
Swapped Sound Effects
Once again, this is probably just an offshoot of the previous two bugs, but it’s the best version of the bug we have found. Through some incredibly strange coding magic, the sound effects for one move can be swapped out for another. It doesn’t even have to come from the same part of the game! Examples I found on Youtube included Dudley making car crash sounds when he jumps and dinosaur screech sounds when he dashes, as well as Seth making Howler Monkey noises when he jumps and attacks. It’s so bizarre.
Menu Slowdown
Now, all of these prior bugs I could have ignored. Sound design doesn’t really effect gameplay that much and coding is hard, so I expect (perhaps overly nicely) that every game will freeze or have a long load time or two. But the PS4 version of Ultra Street Fighter IV has slowdown on its menu . Is selecting a game mode too intense for the PS4? Of course it isn’t! The very idea that a game would see slowdown on its menu screens is unthinkable in today’s level of tech. This has to mean that someone was falling asleep on the job because it’s the same damn menu system that worked fine on every other last-gen platform.
Offline Input Delay
Here’s where the bugs begin to get game-destroying. Online, fighting game players are no strangers to input delay. When information needs to be transmitted between one location to another, there is bound to be some delay, even if we were running at the speed of light. But Ultra Street Fighter IV for the PS4 has input delay in its offline modes! Two people are just sitting in front of the TV playing, and there is a delay between when you hit the button, and when a move is thrown. Why? Once again, this game has existed on last-gen platforms for ages without this problem. Why now?
Offline Input Dropping
If input delay wasn’t bad enough, sometimes the game doesn’t even register your inputs. I tested this out with several sticks, new and old, and PS4 controllers as well. Every so often the game simply does not register your inputs correctly. It’s probably something having to do with the way it processes your inputs in the first place. In casual play, you probably won’t notice this, but at high level play this can mean the difference between a match win and loss.
Invisible Moves
I don’t even know what to make of this one. For some reason, under the right circumstances, Guile’s Sonic Boom is invisible in this game. Once again, why? I’m not even sure what sort of coding snafu could have caused this. It looks like they simply did not include the texture for the Sonic Boom at all. Instead, all you see is the gust of wind that would be around where the Sonic Boom usually travels.
Offline Match Shuttering
I think, for some reason, the online code of the game is somehow clashing with the offline code. This is a completely uneducated guess, but considering the nature of some of these bugs, I’m not sure what else could be the case. Throughout several matches of Ultra Street Fighter IV on the PS4, I have seen an outstanding amount of stuttering. Characters will shake back and forth, as if they were rapidly resetting to a prior state, completely obfuscating the action.
Offline Match Rollback
And finally, we have the bug that annoys me the most. I, admittedly, have not fallen victim to this bug and have instead simply seen it talked about. But the idea is that every so often, in offline matches, the stuttering ends up in a state prior to when it started. So you could, for example, throw a move, hit the opponent with it, and the match will roll back to a point before the move was even thrown. This is a pretty normal occurrence in online matches with crappy latency, but not offline matches.
The poor launch of Ultra Street Fighter IV for the PlayStation 4 is putting the community in an awkward position. Many tournaments, including the upcoming Community Effort Orlando 2015, have pledged to use this new version as a way to promote next-generation fighting games. But with the game as unstable as it is right now, this could negatively affect tournaments in deep ways. Few pros will want to play a game where a bug might cost them a prize pool of thousands.
We can only hope that Capcom will fix these issues soon.