Street Fighter IV is out. It's out and it's getting amazing reviews. There is something elemental about this series, the way it pares everything down to time frames of action and interaction involving just one other onscreen object - your opponent. This honed gameplay is married with a brilliant audio and visual aesthetic; gaudy scenery, hyperbolic speech samples, fizzing J-pop. Street Fighter II worked back in 1991, and number four works in the same way now, by mixing the self-consciously tacky with real depth and complexity.
If you've bought a copy you could spend the weekend button-bashing like a chimp on a caffeine drip, or you could decide to do this properly. Street Fighter is an art. There are systems and rules. Thankfully, it's not difficult to learn the basics.
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