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Whilst out shopping the other day I was browsing the 360 display shelves for bargains when my heart skipped a beat; Street Fighter IV – an arcade perfect 3D reimagining of SF2? I had to have it. And lo, I did. And it was good. But I’ve been playing this damn game for the last 17 frackn years or so in various incarnations (stemming from my initial love of the SNES port, though the less said about the clunky-ass 4-disk swapfest that was the Amiga port the better) – and it just seems to get harder and harder with each incarnation [with the XBLA version being notoriously unforgiving].

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not a dedicated, hardcore player of the mighty SF. I don’t know absolutely every combo for every character, and I don’t compete in tournaments. What I do do is give my mates a damn good run for their money – a lot of the time coming out on top – and enjoy it immensely.  I’ve finished the SNES version on the hardest level, and can last a fair number of rounds in the arcade should I be fortunate to stumble across a working machine. But this thing, at one specific moment, is cheap. How cheap? Think free. Think “as chips”, think “How-the-fuck-am-I-supposed-to-do-anything-when-THREE-FRAMES-after-I’ve-got-up-off-my-feet-you-put-me-into-some-super-mega-ultra-psychedelic-headcrush-spin-grab”. Repeatedly.

This does sound a lot like I’m just some bitter, twisted old wastrel complaining about my decline in performance as my eyes fail to track and my feeble fingers struggle to hold on to the gamepad – but that’s mostly not the case. A lot of the time the game’s rather fair, it doesn’t unnecessarily perfect you without mercy, or use too many gay tactics. Though, in a nod to Mortal Kombat [which I regard with an indifference closely bordering on aversion], the AI will do a lot of knocking you down and then hovering over you – daring you to get up and immediately be dealt more of the same – but thats swiftly batted aside by a perfectly timed Shiroken.

What I don’t like is the final boss: Seth.

You sure do look purty in them there jeans, boy...

Seth, for lack of a better description, is a cunt ticking time bomb. Naturally blessed with the ability to use everyone elses moves, he adds to this by having his own set of moves, including (but not limited to):

1. Teleporting all over the shop ala. Raiden – so all your moves flip sides as he decides which cheek is most photogenic for the slo-mo finisher.
2. Unblockably (??) sucking you into his Ying/Yang sphere of a belly from across the screen (no, really) and then spitting you out minus a large section of your health bar.
3. Delivering small children into the world.

For the first round, he’s a standard enemy. He jumps, he hits, he uses lots of different, varied attacks – but is eventually beatable through thought and determination. Victory is possible.

However, once you’ve won a single round against him things change drastically for the worse. Gone is the gentlemanly spirit of fair play previously present, where an opponent is allowed a split-second, a glimmer of hope, before being consigned to a wheelchair indefinitely. In its place is spat out a cheap-ass David Dickinson-a-like switching sides 3 sides a second then grabbing you for a playful, painful, spinning pile-drive. Relentlessly. Over and over. Until you die.

This sucks lots.

Apart from the final boss after one rounds worth of defeat, I’m absolutely loving it. The focus system and Super Cancels are awesome, though will take a lot of time to really put in my muscle-memory and become instinctive. It looks fantastic, sounds pretty good, and most importantly, plays fantasticly well. I wish I’d played the arcade version to offer up a comparison, but from all accounts this is a fantasticly faithful port of the new arcade giant. We’re not talking Outrun on the Spectrum – this is the real deal, with every last frame and nuance present and correct. Flawless.

A bad workman tends to blame his tools, and as an owner of an X-Arcade stick (sadly 12,000 miles away in the UK), I would love to get a XFPS dongle and see what difference having a real joystick as opposed to a joypad makes – but even on the 360 game pad it’s not so bad. Not having 6 buttons on the right does have an impact, and the only way to truly enjoy the experience would be with the XFPS or a similar yet sadly-limited-in-use-and-ludicrously-marked-up Official Street Fighter IV Arcade Stick(TM) (roundup of arcade sticks via link). But hey, nothings perfect – and aside from the abundance of chips when it gets to the last round of the last fight – I can’t speak highly enough of SF IV.

Through converting the game to 3D whilst keeping its 2D roots firmly intact, SF IV has opened up to another generation one of the most finely honed yet accessible fighting mechanics known to man – and if the truth be told, the humiliating thrashings delivered just keeps me going back to Seth in an effort to, this time, finally make him my bitch.

With a vengenace.

Don’t remember if I blogged this back on the old site… thought of the song today and even if it’s a dupe, it’s a good one =)

Also, proper hi-def mp4s of this and other Longcut videos + a whole bunch of tracks are available (free) here.

• Funny indian language music video with subtitles of what they’re saying if they were singing in English, um, if you get what I mean.
• Baseball pitches – Do you know your changeup from your splitter?
• Not sure which font to use? Have a look at all the fonts on your machine and how they look here (There should surely be an offline app for this.. but damned if I know one – suggestion always appreciated! [linux preferred ] )
• One of the greatest ideas ever – liquid glasses for the third world – absolutely ingenious, and it’ll work.
• When items aren’t new enough or old enough to have value they enter the trough of no value. WooOOOoooo…
• Notcot.org – is full of, as the site says; ideas, aesthetics and amusements.
• Deinterlacing rigouressly explained. No, really.
• Creative bank-note graffiti ftw.

And a special mention goes out to the following site for being the best damn product review site I’ve ever had the good fortune to stumble across:

• alatest.co.uk – Product reviews of pretty much everything tv/computer/music/gadget type stuff with internal and grabbed external reviews to make meta-scores, available in many nationalities (not just UK flavour) – really, really good site. Three thumbs up!

A real quick and easy way to speed up your compiz experience – first we’re gonna use fusion-icon which is just a little systray icon to get access to your compiz settings (also this is very useful to reload the window manager or set it back to KWin/Metacity or whatnot if Compiz decides to act up in any way). Fusion-icon isn’t bundled with Compiz by default, so if you haven’t already got it, from the terminal go with:

sudo apt-get install fusion-icon

[Update: It turns out you also need Compiz Settings Manager, so run sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager ]

Okay – now you’ve got it, you might want to run it… From the console type:

fusion-icon

And you’ll end up with a systray icon like the one pictured below:

Okay – almost there… Right click on the Compiz Fusion Icon and select Settings Manager and then General Options and click the Display Settings tab. Here you’ll see the two options we’re going to tweak:

• Refresh Rate, and
• Sync to VBlank

Basically – to increase performance you just bang the refresh rate up to a higher value (maximum of 200) and untick the “Sync to VBlank” checkbox…

With that done, I get the following performance change from the Compiz Benchmark (found in Compiz Settings Manager):

Over 230% speed increase? Not bad at all. However – as we all know there’s no such thing as a free lunch, for the sake of balance I’ll outline some downfalls of this method as well:

• Your graphics card will be getting more of a workout, so will run hotter and the fans will spin faster (hence noisier) – and this can decrease the lifetime of your graphics card, but really only in the same way that driving your car will decrease the lifetime of your tyres… It’s there to be used!
• With Sync to Vblank disabled – you’re going to get a bit of page-tearing, the severity of which and how much it bothers you will depend on your system and your own personal preferences.
• Your compiz.real and Xorg process time will increase – which is to be expected as they’re going to be doing more work.

If you’re good with that or just want to cheaply get a big performance hit – go for it and enjoy your swifter compiz desktop!

Also, you don’t really need to whack the refresh up all the way to 200 if you’re just looking for a small boost. Edging the refresh up a little bit and leaving VSync on can be enough to improve performance to a point where everything is smooth & swish but isn’t hogging the box. Have a play with the options and see what best fits. Cheers!

Update: I’ve also found that (on NVidia graphics cards at least) checking the loose binding box through fusion-icon (under Compiz Options) increases compiz performance, as it seems the NVidia driver is pretty slow at assigning textures. If you wanted to start compiz from the commandline with this option, just call it with:

compiz --loose-binding

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What the hell’s going on when firefox in linux runs slower than in windows – and significantly slower at that?! In fact – running firefox in the Wine windows emulator is faster than the native client!

Lunacy. Original article here.