2/5 ★ – DirtyMidnighter's review of Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition.

This was the game I picked up alongside my shiny new Nintendo 3DS (the first console I had gotten day one since the Xbox) and I clearly had a hard time picking from the launch lineup. To be clear, I'm not a big fighting game fan. I've enjoyed my a bit of Street Fighter, SoulCalibur, Dead or Alive and Smash Bros here and there but nothing serious. A few things immediately struck me as odd about this version of Street Fighter 4: All characters were unlocked from the beginning. All 30 or however many characters could be played upon starting the game. I was incredibly overwhelming trying to figure out where to start. To make matters worse, the character portraits are practically microscopic on the 3DS screen. Nintendo online netcode for this game was atrocious. Getting a full match to work with no lag was near impossible. Also, it's Street Fighter 4, a game with a dedicated hardcore fanbase. Good luck winning a single match if you're a beginner. Fighting games are just not fun to play on the 3DS. It's an uncomfortable system to hold for long periods of time with angular edges and small buttons. Inputting complicated combos feels imprecise. To alleviate that issue, Capcom decided to put combo shortcuts on the touch-screen so that you can pull them off with the press of a button. This however, feels kind of like cheating and arguably changes the nature of the game completely. So yeah, I guess I should have gone with Steel Diver instead.