(A few days ago, I talked some trash about Killzone 2. Sony has since patched the game to fix roughly 1/3 of the things I hated. This is good news, but I'm not sure why they waited two months after the game went to press to figure out how an analog stick works on a PlayStation 3. Anyway.)

Street Fighter has spent nearly two decades stretching itself thin. Even its “standard” edition had at least six flavors, and the zillions of alternate editions range from rivalries with Spiderman to the deformed “SF Kidz” game. Some people seem to love this gamut—I've been to fighting game tournaments where guys giddily argue over rule changes, glitches, cancels, and parries. But I usually wind up playing with folks who enjoyed SF casually years ago, pick it up anew, and wonder where the hell these super-ultra punch/fireball combos came from.

It's hard to say which of those groups Street Fighter IV (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3) is more interested in. On the surface, this is a “back to the roots” rebirth that doesn't open with a major learning curve. Wanna start a fight? Then you can use the old games' characters, mash buttons, and use the same moves from the Super Nintendo version. You don't have to worry about dodging in three dimensions or other particularly complex systems—at least, not obvious ones. The intangible feel of the fights—the speed, the weight—is both heavy and cartoony, responsive in the way that a Super Mario jump in the air feels right. And the game's a beaut for its era, its fighters rendered in pen-stroke 3D with all kinds of charismatic gestures—when you slug a guy in the stomach for a coup de grace, his face responds in satisfying, Looney Tunes fashion.

The learning curve still depends on how much Street Fighter you've memorized. Everybody's seen a SF cabinet at a pizza place—everybody knows you gotta press the punch button—but there's a language beyond the button mashes, spoken in dozens of very particular joystick motions, that are near-essential for this game. I speak this language, so SFIV, to me, is like going somewhere with a different dialect and picking up on the slang to fit in. I immediately understood the new “focus” move, where two buttons are held to absorb a punch and surprise a foe with a dizzying counter. I also didn't need someone to explain the game's system of fight-ending super moves—created specifically to help losing players, yet made complex enough to restrict new players' use of 'em.

Granted, it's a competitive game, so the guy who reads the manual and practices the moves more often is probably going to win. There's something to be said about the spit-shining presentation; tough matches and losses are pretty easy to swallow. And as a Street Fighting lifer, I love the little tweaks to this game—that “focus” system stops my friends from using cheap attacks to beat me (and vice versa), and the super-move system has been simplified from years before, if you can believe it. Over the past few weeks, it has tested well as a party game amongst fans and curious bystanders alike. That doesn't mean Street Fighter IV is the ultimate in intuitive, “next-generation” combat (I'm still waiting), but that's the only complaint I can muster through my blatant bias. For added value, the online modes run really smoothly, and the “challenge” modes deliver a decent through-the-fire training marathon.

If I speak Street Fighter-ese, then I'm a mute nitwit when it comes to real-time strategy games. Halo Wars (Xbox 360) has been billed from the outset as the ultimate army-managing game for my type, paring down the complexities of Starcraft and Total Annihilation to an Xbox gamepad. Hot damn, they did it.

Let's not get carried away—for all intents and purposes, this is Starcraft, with a pinch of Age of Empires, made over with Halo characters. You're managing military combat in a bird's-eye view, and your tasks are familiar stuff—build resources, use those resources to create armies, use more resources to make the armies stronger, and attack an enemy base while defending your own. Two of those steps have been streamlined for playing on an Xbox instead of a PC, one good and one not so much.

In many strategy games, you create little peons to do grunt work—collect diamonds and trees and whatever. Halo Wars replaces this with a very slick trick—some buildings automatically receive infusions of cash. The catch is that you have a limited number of building slots, so you have to balance out cash generation with building your implements of doom. In simpler terms, less micro-management means more explosions. Fine by me.

Not as slick is the game's one-dimensional upgrade tree. It's hard to miss this in multiplayer fights, because they each end the same way. Instead of picking from a few divergent army paths and strategizing accordingly, your only major option is to press the “make me stronger” button as much as you can. There are a few criss-crossing options that can change a given fight, particularly the game's two “races” and three leaders per race, but for the amount of time it takes to build a super-army in a multiplayer contest, the straight-line path to victory means the redundant payoff is typically a letdown.

Shame, since the single-player mode is pretty satisfying. Each of the 15 missions is built in discrete, varied fashion, balancing the “overwhelm your enemy” basics with lots of rescues and assaults. My favorite is one in which a massive, murdering laser is scanning a battlefield, and you have to send multiple squads in opposite directions to confuse the laser and win out. Boy, that'd have been a cool way to expand multiplayer—to give opposing forces a major objective on top of the typical combat. No such luck.

The plot is stupid, and the dependence on the Halo license absolutely blows—I can imagine this game's makers developing far more freakish enemies and designs if they weren't stuck making Lego-sized Spartans. Be that as it may, I have to say, there are really no hurdles or issues in Halo Wars as far as picking up a controller and running an army smoothly. That fact is worth bolding and italicizing, because the feel of this game makes up for a lot of its shortcomings, at least for a long-term rental. Treat this as “baby's first RTS,” and it'll whet your appetite for this genre, guaranteed. I can only hope we'll soon see another console-friendly RTS that builds off what Halo Wars got right.