i do some what agree with you. i also don't like sf4 and think sf1 is a little wooden. but you went ahead and completely forgot about the alpha series there, tanooki.
Nah I didn't forget it, I just didn't want to slide into that side series with my post. That and it seems there's some odd love for SFA3 which I hate. It has a bloated ass roster of way too many fighters and they got a bit too overly complex and technical with the types of style you could go with and the rest. I love SFAlpha2 by far as it had a nice sized crew, loved the handling and move set, and it just felt more like a natural extension of the main SF2 line of titles. Alpha 1 isn't bad, but it's a bit stiff, just not a favorite.
So yeah AJtM is right, I meant alpha/ex etc when I said spinoffs. Truth be told back in the earlier 90s I was far more into Capcom fighting than SNK. Of all things it was Samurai Shodown that sucked me in, followed by the original Art of Fighting and later in the late 90s King of Fighters 98, Last Blade, and Samurai Shodown 3 (fav of that series.) Like bogard I expected SF4 to follow in the feel with a little tweaking of SF3 Third Strike did and it didn't. It got very overly complicated with lots of ways to turn things around, the larger than I liked roster, but what really sold my hate of it was the shit eating cheaty ass 1P AI routines that are entirely unbalanced and show no difference in douchy behavior on default (4) or maximum (8) difficulty. I got suspicious of not having some consistent flow to my play with it when it came out. I put a few hours into just only using Ryu against Crimson in the training room, then went to verify things in the 1P fight mode too. I found that on default up to 3 battles the AI slowly ramps up but it's like blind to what you're planning, but from 4->end no fight is harder than the next except the very last. The computer behaves as if some dude sit sitting behind you at a game of poker and telling the dude across what you're doing. It would see what you're up to half into dialing a move and would bitchslap you before it was even pulled off, cheating shitty AI. It would randomly do it too, could be first, second, or third fight against some opponent and never consistent when/how often in each round. It was just infuriating. In training I'd try the same moves, combos, mix things up, do stuff I know would work on people, whatever...and it just would mind read the shit out of stuff and the difficulty slider had no impact (I was doing this on the PS4 release if that even matters.) I got fed up and sold it. I later got the PC version used, patched it up to date, still even with their fixes and tweaks, it still was a piece of shit, so I abandoned it entirely. SF4 turned me off so bad to the franchise I still haven't bothered to buy into the new one even if they said they made it more like the old SF2 line where it's not just for 1v1 humans/pros but all groups can play, enjoy and learn from it, how the franchise used to it.
