Although it’s been location-testing in selected Japanese arcades for a while now, Capcom’s decision to debut the near-final Street Fighter IV cabinets at a recent press event meant just one thing: competition. Assorted journalists and PR types, all from the SNES Street Fighter II generation, all with dim memories of the Tiger Knee and the Yoga Noogie, all playing winner stays on. You can’t buy that kind of popularity.

Familiarity with the old games helps. Structurally, the game uses SFII as a template and builds outward, so virtually every combo and counter – from Ken’s four fierce to Guile’s air throw – work as they always did. After complaints from playtesters, the version shown at GDC – which used 3D collision detection – has been adapted to mimic the 2D hit-boxes of the original, so that crossover attacks and Dhalsim’s stretching kicks feel the same as before. Frills from later games – the air blocking from the Alpha series and the parries from SFIII – are ignored to simplify things. The decision was deliberate, and taken early.

“As fun as it was for people like us who knew what we were doing,” says producer Yoshinori Ono, who also worked on the ill-fated Capcom Fighting Jam, “parrying kind of started a trend where new users were afraid to get into the game. We love Street Fighter III and hope people will keep playing it on PS2, but Street Fighter IV is its own game.”

So: there are new features, but they build on the classic in a coherent, sensible way. Easiest is tapping two buttons at once to use up a quarter of the Super gauge with an enhanced special move – a faster hurricane kick, say, or a double fireball that goes through other projectiles. More demanding is the Super Cancel: pulling off a special move and then repeating the stick/button command ‘cancels’ the initial move in favour of a bigger one. Most difficult of all – at least to land – is each character’s Ultra move, only available after they take a certain amount of damage, but rewarding players lucky or skilful enough to make them connect with extreme close-ups and immense amounts of damage.

All these moves were swiftly assimilated into most players’ games – they are, after all, designed that way – but we have it on good authority that the thing to master this iteration will be the Focus attack. Launched by holding and releasing both medium attack buttons, Focus will protect the fighter doing it from one attack as it powers up, and stun an opponent if charged for long enough. Most players used them sparingly, but a tense three-round bout against Ono proved their effectiveness. He compares the system to boxing, noting that “the skill is in reading your opponent’s move before he starts moving”.

Of the new characters, El Fuerte is the spiritual sibling of Virtua Fighter’s El Blaze – apart from sporting masks and tights, the Lucha Libre stylists also share a penchant for running rings around opponents. After a quarter-circle fireball sets him sprinting, Fuerte’s got a reported 18 different offensive or defensive options – he’s short on combos, but makes up for it in guessing games. Morbidly obese fanboy Rufus, meanwhile, has a belly sporting wobble physics that shame DOAX, but he’s surprisingly quick for a fat lad, offering plentiful anti-air options and a spin that sucks in opponents.

MMA fighter Abel and SNK-inspired C Viper appear to have been toned down since earlier versions, but remained troublesome enough to throw a few veteran Guile players off their game. Also announced – but unavailable – was new boss Seth, the CEO of M Bison’s weapons division. Silver-tinged and sporting ‘body enhancements’, he might seem best suited to the more stylized SFIII or the Marvel Vs Capcom series – but judgment is reserved until the final version.

In the meantime, it’s more pleasing to speculate on rumours that Dan Hibiki and Fei Long have been spotted amid the game’s concept art, suggesting that Capcom has far-reaching plans for future downloadable content. And there’s always the question of online play: how will Street Fighter cope when one frame of lag can lose an entire round?

“Unfortunately, we’re limited by physics: data can only travel so fast over phone lines,” says Ono. “We’re focusing our resources on trying to hide lag – so we’re thinking about things like predictive inputs, where the game predicts what you’re going to do ahead of time and pre-loads animations, that sort of thing. The key is to soften the blow of the lag rather than eliminate it, because that’s not possible.”

Hopefully the system Capcom settles on will work – otherwise the only option is a flight to Japan, an arcade cabinet or a brace of Hori Arcade Pro sticks and some obsessive friends. But where to find them? Simple: just look for anyone who was a teenager in the ’90s. After all, as Ono says, “Even if you don’t remember how to play Street Fighter, your thumbs and fingers do.”