So I did as promised and put a solid eight hours into Street Fighter IV and I must admit I did enjoy it. My thumb hurt like hell by the end of it and I’d unlocked all the characters save Gouken and played a lot of versus against my kids and even with my wife. She remembered the game from my long past uni days.

But when 6pm rolled around on Sunday the game was right back in the return slot down at the video store and not a moment late.

In my opinion, its not a great fighter for this generation, compared to Tekken, Soul Calibur or even Dead or Alive the game has very limited depth and I think in the long run a lot of people are going to feel a bit cheated they shelled out so many clams for it. I’m pretty confident there will be a lot of copies on the second hand shelf at your local store a month or two from now.

I’m more concerned off the shake up amongst people who read reviews and make purchases based on them. Street Fighter IV might be pretty good, but it is not a Fallout 3 or Killzone 2, games it has scored the same as and sometimes higher than. It has less characters, less moves and less modes than the average fighter released today. I think reviewers are really failing to acknowledge that a lot of buyers don’t have the nostalgia for the series they do. And whose bloody idea was it to use anime intros and endings that look even worse that Yu-Gi-Oh and sound like they were scripted by a seven year old? So much for the character mythos getting some respect.

Look at it this way. If a game released tomorrow that wasn’t made by Capcom, but technically identical to Street Fighter IV and featured a cast of different characters, would it receive an overall metacritic score of 9.4? Absolutely not.

For me playing Street Fighter IV was like going through an old photo album. Each hadoken illicited an ‘awww’ rather than a ‘booyah’. As I said, I enjoyed my time with it, but if any brain dead journo gives it game of the year this December he deserves to have his toe nails pulled out.