Those fine folks at Capcom have given us codes to give away for Ultra Street Fighter IV, the latest update to the venerable fighting series. While SFIV was an instant smash hit on arrival back in 2008 (Jesus, has it been six years already?) Capcom have followed their traditional practice of regularly updating and fine-tuning their games, with Ultra following on from Super Street Fighter IV and Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition in what has been rumoured to be the last paid-for update to the game. While we would normally take such claims with a grain of salt given Capcom’s long-standing love of the re-release, the age of the game suggests that the SFIV cycle would have to be drawing close to an end making Ultra likely to be as close to a definitive version of the game as we’ll ever get.
So what does Ultra bring to the scrap? The full list is:
- Four extra characters: Poison, Hugo and Rolento as per the ongoing SF/Final Fight exchange program, along with Street Fighter 3‘s Elena and the playable debut of evil cloned Cammy precursor Decapre;
- Six new stages ported over from Street Fighter X Tekken;
- Edition Select: Reminiscent of Hyper Street Fighter 2, this feature allows you to select different versions of characters from each of the major updates;
- Double Ultra option: Makes both of a character’s Ultra Combos available simultaneously, at the cost of reduced damage;
- Red Focus: an alternative to the standard Focus moves but with more invincibility hits;
- Delayed Standing: technique which allows a knocked-down player to slightly delay their character’s recovery, making standing slightly less predictable;
- A raft of balance tweaks based on community feedback, including the removal of unblockable setups;
- New modes: Elimination (An improved Team Battle mode for online play), and Online Training as introduced in Street Fighter X Tekken;
- YouTube functionality: Players can now pick any match from their battle log of online matches and upload it to YouTube (480p supported only);
- Full Steamworks integration: That’s right PC players, you can finally kiss Games for Windows live goodbye!
“Yur TEAREENG me aPAAART, Blanka!”
There’ll be a full review coming soon, but any PC or PS3 owners who don’t want to wait should email cavangallagherchud@gmail.com for a chance to snag a free code. All you need to do is state your name, forum handle if you have one and desired format and put ‘IT WAS TUESDAY‘ in the subject line.
There are three Steam codes and three PSN codes for the PS3 version up for grabs; entries open until 8PM PST, Tuesday August 12th at which point the codes will go out for three random lucky people for each format.
Or you could just go home and be a family man, or something..
