We’ve just had a nosey through the back catalogue of our favourite fighting series ever and found an eye-opener or two. Have you ever heard of Street Fighter 2010? Retro buffs aside though – we can already hear them moaning “well yeah, duh” as they nurse two decade’s worth of thumb calluses. You may be interested to know that this 1990 NES title featured a bionic cyborg-cop Ken in a science fiction platform game environment. So thank Capcom that this didn’t catch on, and that the Street Fighter game we’ll still be playing in 2010 will closely resemble the game that Capcom released a year later instead.

Now, you can call this premature, but we feel comfortable about saying that Street Fighter IV PC is brilliant. Even if we weren’t lucky enough to have already played the 360 version, disregard one or two of the flakier footnotes that have only slightly stained the otherwise sterling Street Fighter series, and there’s precedence for pure excellence.

This fourth major release in two decades of coin-op and console games goes back to the basics of the original Street Fighter II game, which inspired a slew of spin-offs and spawned a zillion copycats.

Classic characters are making a comeback and no Street Fighter game would be right without Ryu or Ken. New characters to the roster include Crimson Viper, Abel, El Fuerte and Rufus, plus rockhard baddies like Seth (a cyborg built by M.Bison and given upgraded versions of all the best moves in the game). Capcom has built on the standard attack system by giving SF4 focus attacks, which rely on reading your opponent and perfecting the timing of a counter, rather than memorising a string of combinations.

Finally, the return of Ultra Combos proves that Street Fighter fans will get bored of long, cinematic, acrobatic and one-sided combo chains just as soon as they consider watching old Kung W Fu hero films on a rainy Sunday afternoon a waste of time. So, we can only really call into question the port itself; it’s one of the few console conversions where we’d agree a joypad of some description is mandatory. Playing this on a keyboard makes even less sense than playing Unreal Tournament 3 using the 360, so it’s lucky you’re able to use a 360 pad with your PC. It would be a slap in the face for PC gamers otherwise. A hundred-hand’s slap in the face, actually.