In Third Person

I’ve been putting a lot of time into Street Fighter IV for the iPhone and I’m still having a lot of fun with it. I’ve gotten to the point where I can consistently hit 19-hit combos with Ryu, which is kind of scary, considering the fact that I can’t do that on the real thing.

Thinking I had mad skills, I decided to try playing the game at the toughest difficulty setting. On normal, I could beat the game with Ryu in under 8 minutes. On “Grueling”, it took me 25 minutes to get to the final boss. It was tough, but I didn’t mind the experience. It still felt somewhat fair.

It was when I got to M. Bison that the experience took a turn for the worst. If you’ve played a Street Fighter game, you probably can empathize with my pain. I spent another 30 minutes just trying to beat him before I finally broke through.

When you turn the difficulty up to the highest level, you as a player are kind of asking the developers to give you their best shot. If I was losing because I just wasn’t skilled enough, then I would have no qualms about that. However, like many other games with tough difficulty options, Street Fighter IV on the iPhone goes about it in an unfair way.

I will stick to talking about Street Fighter IV, but a lot of these points apply to other games with difficulty settings. In a one-on-one fighting game, there aren’t that many variables to play with to make the experience more difficult. The most obvious change when you turn the difficulty up is that your opponents are a lot smarter. At face value, I am cool with that. It wasn’t until I ran into M. Bison where it felt like the game got too smart. Once you get to Bison, I felt like 10% or less of my attacks were making contact, because Bison would block or evade everything.

Compounding the problem is the fact that Bison on Grueling does way more damage to you than you do to him. One of his Psycho Crushers can take off a quarter of your health bar. One Bison fierce punch on Grueling does the same amount of damage as a Ryu jump-in forward kick, crouching fierce punch and Dragon Punch combo. I’m then put in a position where I have to hit him three times more than he has to hit me.

In order to actually beat Bison, the game kind of demands you play it better than anyone can physically play it with their thumbs. I don’t think the interface is precise enough for players to take on and beat that type of challenge consistently, even if they get good at it.

But what really grinds my gears was when the computer began to “break” the game. Outside of all the tweaks to the AI and damage, the last boss in Street Fighter games always seems to play by their own rules. The computer beat me over and over again because it was able to consistently string together combos and sequences of moves that are literally impossible for a human to perform. When you play as M. Bison, you have to charge for two seconds before doing a scissor kick. In Street Fighter IV, the computer seems to be able to do them consecutively or with what appears to be no charge at all. At that point, you’re fundamentally changing the game at the last minute just to screw the player over.

There has to be better ways of giving players a tough challenge. I understand that programming a smarter AI that feels fair and realistic is tough, but I feel like a lot of games with difficulty settings resort to cheap and artificial tactics to make a game harder. I don’t have the answer to this problem, but at least after 30 minutes and two swollen thumbs, I was able to show Bison who was boss once and for all.