Street Fighter Week: Combo Comparison

About 15 years ago you couldn't set foot into an arcade without elbowing your way through a bustling throng of Street Fighter II experts. Hell you might have been one yourself. Maybe you missed the arcade takeover and caught the games on SNES or PlayStation years later. Either way, you spent hours honing your combos to laser-like precision. But since those glory days, chances are your animation-interrupting attacks have softened somewhat, and with Street Fighter IV poised to reignite the flame, you'll need to know what still works and what doesn't.

We took a trip down to Capcom's SF-laden HQ and spent two solid hours comparing combos in Street Fighter IV. The video below shows them in the SNES Street Fighter II' Turbo (arguably the one most of us know best) and then again in Street Fighter IV.

This is part of a week-long series of Street Fighter retrospectives - clickherefor more.

Ryu

Ryu's uppercut/fireball is probably the world's best known combo (other than Taco Bell's T7, anyway). Get 'em with a deep jumping fierce, then crouching uppercut and immediately roll into the fireball motion. The uppercut animation stops and you get two hits for the price of one. Works great in both games. No trouble executing at all. Good thing - if it didn't work, Capcom's offices would be in great danger.

Guile

As with any charging character, playing Guile means finding all kinds of ways to charge without being overly obvious about it. One good trick is to charge in the air as you come back down from a jump - here we use that trick combined with an aerial jab, then a crouching jab and ending with a flash kick (or sonic kick, as the kids used to call it). Works great in Turbo, but to get two hits out of the flash kick in SFIV, you'll need to hit two kick buttons instead of just one. You can also mix it up and use kicks instead of jabs.