Update of the world of SF
Street Fighter 4 characters are being somewhat redrawn, just to make them look sharper, some less creepy and bulky at the same time, but probably only slightly. In other news, so far it is said that Ryu and some others play like their third strike counter parts but Chun-Li plays like Sf2…..so far they say she sorta sucks which is a damn shame and makes me cry everytime. Keep hope alive, the game is not complete and not even have been announced for home consoles which might contain even more characters than the arcades, lets all hope. In other news of the world of SF, here is the latest HD Renix stories.
SF2 HD remix beta! 360
Capcom’s Street Fighter II’ Hyper Fighting is widely heralded as one of the greatest fighting games of all time, and its addition to Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade had more than a few classic fighter fans returning to the dojo in preparation for online brawling. However, its arrival on Xbox Live Arcade was met with a bittersweet reception, as while the single-player component was a near-flawless emulation, the much-anticipated online features suffered from debilitating lag.
Commando 3
Check out the latest movie for Commando 3.
Watch | Download
With Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, Capcom has another chance to do right by its throng of faithful fans, and the publisher seems to have learned its lesson from its first outing. Capcom announced today that it will be offering free access to the Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix beta to Xbox Live Gold members who purchase Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3. A continuation of the high-octane action series with roots dating back to 1985, Commando 3 will run gamers 800 Microsoft points ($10). It will also be available for download on the PlayStation 3.
With Capcom touting the SSFII Turbo HD Remix beta as the first of its kind for a digitally distributed XBLA title, Xbox Live Gold members will be able to download an access key for the advanced trial alongside Commando 3 this spring. The beta is expected to be available for play shortly thereafter. The beta period will run for approximately eight weeks, and world warriors will be able to battle it out on a single stage as either Ken or Ryu. According to Capcom, the purpose of the beta is to stress-test the game’s network code in anticipation of its full release on XBL and the PlayStation Network later this year.
;)
Experience the classic rivalry again for the first time in high-def.
Adapted for XBLA and PSN by Backbone Entertainment, SSFII Turbo HD Remix brings the classic fighter into the high-definition age, with completely redrawn visuals created by Udon Comics, publishers of the current Street Fighter comic book. Aside from its aesthetic enhancements, the game packs in a number of updated features under the hood, including online multiplayer matches, in-game voice chatting, and worldwide rankings.
Purists will be pleased to know the game is playable in all its old-school glory, but Capcom will also be packing in a “rebalanced mode” that promises “massive changes across the board to all Street Fighter characters as created and tested by some the world’s top-ranked professional Street Fighter players.” Gamers will also be able to choose between the game’s original 4:3 resolution or a new widescreen mode, as well as the game’s original tunes or a remixed soundtrack.
Reasons Behind No SSF2T HD Remix Beta on PS3
March 14th, 2008 Seth Killian
Over in the Ask Capcom forum, Christian Svensson (Capcom’s Vice-President of Strategic Planning & Business Development) weighed in on some disappointment about the Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Beta not coming to PS3.
A few additional points:
1. We are resource constrained. This project already has gone over the original budget (we had a new budget approved to accomodate our dedication to its quality and the new features… there were even a few we wanted to do that had to get cut in the end… more on that in a post mortem blog or something). Anyway, we wanted to do a beta to test the new network features but even if it were possible for Sony to do, it would require 3 submissions (US, Europe, Asia/Japan) to reach the same global audience we can with MS in a single test and global submission.
2. We treat the PS3 extremely seriously. To date, we are still the only third party publisher doing cross platform, simultaneous digital releases (still working on the global simultaneous, but see the issues above on multiple submissions per territory as an issue). Believe it or not, this is not easy and to suggest we aren’t treating the PS3 as important would be ignorant of what we’re doing for it.
3. In my ideal world of worlds, we would have done a beta on each. That said, the effort and time (not to mention money) that would have taken, if it even could be done, probably would have pushed the project back another few months on our side. I suspect you guys would still like to play this title in this calendar year.
4. The beta for 360 will absolutely help the PS3. There is code parity across the two and any issues found in 360 will be fixed in PS3. So while PS3 owners won’t be able to participate in the beta, they will still benefit in the finished product.
5. Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 will be an excellent title on PS3. The lack of a bonus beta doesn’t make it not worth its asking price.
6. When you show me someone running a cross platform beta… I’ll be impressed, because that’s a hell of an investment.
From Capcom site, gamespot, Kotaku.
Street Fighter IV Character leaked
New Street Fighter IV Character Leaked!
A photo of this week’s pre-newsstand Famitsu shows new SFIV character “El Fuerte.” Not much is known about him other than he’s a Lucha Libre wrestler. Hit the jump for a closer look.
From- http://kotaku.com/366743/new-street-fighter-iv-character-leaked
Balrog(M.Bison in Japan), Sagat
Sagat game play (stage 5 boss)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-ZMQ7ZlCqA
Balrog( M.Bison) game play (stage 4 boss)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfpXh2r72HM
South Asia Stage:
South America Stage:
North America Stage:
Move list on the panel,
one more
Street Fighter IV English intro
Here is the english version of the intro. Few changes near the end but samething as the japanese….but in english! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFMODzf3P3A
Inside Street Fighter IV’s Nostalgic Allure
SAN FRANCISCO — Nostalgia can be a disappointing thing, says the producer of Street Fighter IV.
“Sometimes, you remember things as looking cooler than they did,” says Capcom’s Yoshinori Ono. “Since it’s been 15 years since Street Fighter II came out, you might envision something that looks better. What we’re trying to do with Street Fighter IV is to build a game that looks like your ultimate memories.”
Capcom will release the long-awaited 3-D followup to their epoch-making fighting game series into Japanese arcades this June. But the game’s makers haven’t forgotten the sting of Street Fighter III, an immensely demanding and complex game that only appealed to a tiny sliver of hardcore players.
Somewhere along the line, Capcom lost the millions of casual quarter-droppers that made SFII the biggest game that video arcades ever saw. With Street Fighter IV, Ono wants to get them back.
Ono, general manager of Capcom’s online game development group, was faced with the Herculean task of creating the first Street Fighter game to be built from the ground up for online play. But he is also adamant that SFIV is a throwback, a step away from SFIII.
“Street Fighter III was kind of an exclusive club where if you didn’t know what you were doing, there was no reason to even try and play it,” says Ono (pictured right). “This time, we’re trying to re-open the fighting genre to people who haven’t played it in a while.”
That’s why SFIV will feature, first and foremost, the eight well-known fighters from SFII: Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Blanka, Dhalsim, E. Honda, Zangief, and Guile.
Ono didn’t select these characters one by one, he says. “They all made the cut individually as one group. It’s important, because this game is starting its life in the arcades, where you have a limited time to sit and play. You don’t want people flushing their 100-yen coins down the toilet; you’ve got to give them some level of familiarity.”
It certainly worked for me. Sitting down at the arcade cabinets that Capcom had hauled up to its hotel suite offsite of Game Developers Conference, I immediately settled into a groove with my old standby Chun-Li, despite not having put more than a few hours into a Street Fighter game for the last five years or so.
SFIV has the slow, deliberate pacing of 15 years ago, before fighting games became a frantic coke-fueled nightmare. This might turn off Capcom’s deeply hardcore base, but Ono insists he’s creating a game that is accessible but deep.
“It’s going to be a lot like chess,” he says. “There are grand master chess players who play on ESPN2, but you could also have a grandfather and his granddaughter playing chess. You’re in charge of playing at whatever level you’re capable of. We give you the board and some pieces and rules.”
Ono wants beginners to at least derive some satisfaction from fighting high-level players. “Even if you can’t get a checkmate, you’re going to get his knight, you’re going to get a couple of his pawns. That’s the driving theme of the game.”
Saying you want to reach out to casual players is one thing, but making it happen is quite another. Ono has chosen as his first battleground the arcades of Japan, which today mostly feature music games like Taiko Drum Master and UFO Catcher machines in their front lobbies to draw in schoolgirls and window-shoppers. Fighting games are shoved in the cigarette-stained basement.
Ono would like to get as close as possible to the street, for one particular reason. “Envision the front doors. First is the Taiko Drum Master. Right behind those are the gun shooting games like House of the Dead. We want to be right behind those, because we want people who walk by the doors to hear the nostalgic sound, hadouken!, and say, ‘Did I just hear a Hadouken? I want to check that out.’”
When they get there, they’ll be greeted by some amazing visuals. I enjoyed playing SFIV, but I enjoyed watching it perhaps even more. Seeing the cartoonish cel-shaded visuals in still screens is one thing, but watching them move is quite another. I observed, standing there, that they looked like the illustrations in the classic Super Nintendo instruction manuals come to life. As it turned out, this was exactly Ono’s goal.
“Capcom has a history of great artists, and the paintings we have for the characters are really compelling. What we wanted to see if we could do with this was make a game that looked like those paintings, moving before your eyes,” says Ono.
The challenge, of course, was replicating those paintings in 3-D. SFIV’s gameplay takes place entirely on a 2-D plane, but the graphics are in three glorious dimensions. “There was a lot of back and forth between the art director and the tech guys about what the (cel shading) should look like, finding a middle ground between too much realism and too much cartoon,” says Ono.
To perfect the look, the tech team used a game design technique that Ono says he hasn’t used in the last 20 years, not since the days of drawing pixel art by hand. “We had a picture that the (art guy) had drawn on the left-hand side of the monitor, and they were trying to imitate it on the screen by tweaking the shaders,” he says. “It was fun to do that, but it took forever.”
The end result is an absolutely gorgeous end product. Although Capcom has only announced the game for arcades, it’s a dead cert that we’ll see a version on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. But isn’t that an issue, I ask Ono, because all those casual players you want to court own the lower-powered Wii?
Ono goes back to his chess analogy. “You could have a gold-inlaid board, knights with diamonds in their eyes. Or you could just draw a grid on a piece of paper and use cheap plastic pieces. And you’re having the same amount of fun,” says Ono.
In other words: “Street Fighter IV, as it stands now, would be well-suited for the higher-level platforms. But the game doesn’t have to have these visuals in order to be fun. We could go, potentially, to the Wii. We could make it on Game Boy, for all we know right now. As long as the rules are the same, that can be independent of the visuals. So we’re not going to be limited by any hardware specs; we’re going to aim as wide as possible,” he says.
Driving the point home, Ono name-checks Nintendo’s game design genius. “This hearkens back to what Miyamoto said at a previous E3, that the evolution of console technology really is independent of fun, games aren’t getting any more fun.”
Potential home versions of the game should offer something else to hardcore Street Fighter fans, says Ono. “If and when there are console versions, we could see someone like Sakura-chan (from Street Fighter Alpha) or Ibuki (Street Fighter III),” says Ono. “For a home version, you can sit and practice the characters as long as you want to before you take them online. So there will probably be a move to add even more characters to the home version.”
“Of course we know that there are people who want Alpha characters, who want III characters, who want all-new characters. We get emails, we read the message boards. We’re listening to all of those voices. We have to respect those users as well, they’re terribly important,” Ono says.
From- http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/02/inside-street-f.html
New SF4 interview with Ono
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/31063.html?type=flv
- Online play.
-Spots for new characters and play testing going on.
-No home console commented on but is interested in .
- Design work.
- This game is for the fans so your word decide the outcome on alot of things.
Vote for the character you want to see in SF4! Capcom made a Poll
The Poll located on the right side of the screen, on the Capcom Community Boards(http://blog.capcom.com/). No article, just the Poll on the right side, entitled “What character would you like to see in SFIV?”
Capcom Drops Street Fighter IV in Japan
When I read this, I almost tried to eat my own hand in excitment but yet, crying on the inside because I still can’t play it! Hey, that won’t stop my crazy fanboyself from jumping around for no reason though, yes, Street Fighter 4 is lurking around somewhere in the arcades and you can too play it, if you have the right connections!
“It’s official. Street Fighter IV has been released at the All Nippon Amusement Machine Operator’s Union Fair, and it looks badass. In terms of characters, Capcom’s finished product features a handful of old favorites like Ryu, Ken, E. Honda, Chun Li, Guile and Zangeif. Some new characters have been introduced as well, such as C. Viper and the amnesia-stricken Abel. Gameplay looks to be incredibly smooth, combat intros look intense, and the KO move at the end of the video above looks pretty nuts. Capcom introduced a few other games at this year’s AOU Fair, but Street Fighter IV was obviously the main point of interest. We can’t get our hands on this one fast enough. It will still likely be quite a while before the game hits US shores, let alone finds its way to likely target consoles Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. How much do you think it will cost to ship one of those arcade machines over here from Japan?”
from http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/02/19/capcom-drops-street-fighter-iv-in-japan/
New SF4 videos!
Chun Li off-screen vs Abel http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/142/1…d_2294066.html
More from Ono and Sf4 intro video
Second-hand impressions, and more from producer Yoshinori Ono.
by John Tanaka
February 14, 2008 - Powerful publication that it is, Famitsu managed to get some hands-on play time with Street Fighter IV in advance of the game’s AOU expo showing this weekend. And not only that, but the site also managed to score a short interview with producer Yoshinori Ono.
We’ll be playing the game for ourselves at the show in order to deliver some direct hands-on impressions shortly, but fir biwm we’ve translated a few impressions from the Famitsu editors, as posted over the weekend on the Famitsu.com site. The editors played the game on January 18, and warned that Capcom’s development staff was still tuning the gameplay.
The overwhelming impression from the editors was that Street Fighter IV really does feel like Street Fighter II in 3D. One editor joked that it was Street Fighter II-2.
Getting into specifics, one editor commented that the game’s combat, while not as fast as some recent 2D fighters, isn’t slow either. This editor noted that the characters take a bit of time for their follow through on attacks, so if your opponent misses a blow, you’ll have an opportunity to strike.
Most of the editors mentioned one particular change to the gameplay: faster jumping. Following a jump, the characters return to the ground faster than in SFII. One editor actually failed to get into one of his SFII combos following a jump attack because the timing was different. This editor feels that his is the biggest change from SFII’s gameplay, and he also expressed his pleasure with it.
On specific characters, the editors noted that Chun Li’s winning poses are pulled straight from the classic SFII. Ryu feels like a mix between his Super Street Fighter IIX self and his SFIII Third Strike self, while Ken leans more towards the latter. Dhalsim has all his classic special moves, including the mid-air Yoga Teleport, although his limb extension feels slower than it was in SFII. Dhalsim also appears to have a number of new moves, some with “peculiar” motions. One of the new character, Crimson Viper, feels different from past SF characters, and offers players a lot of choice in how they want to use her.
Moving on to the Q&A session, the site first asked Ono to share some background on SFIV’s development. Ono disclosed that he’d personally wanted for some time to make a new title reminiscent of Super Street Fighter II X, but the chance never came around. The opportunity at last presented itself when Keiji Inafune, producer of the Onimusha and MegaMan series, expressed the opinion that it would be good to at last make a new entry in the series. Ono suggested making the new title in time for the series’ 20th anniversary.
On the topic of characters, Ono explained the abundance of classic Street Fighter II characters in the roster by once again noting his desire to get fans of the series playing without having to view the instructions. In response to a question about non SFII series characters appearing in the game, he said that while the roster is not yet complete, he’s worried that there would be to many fighting stles, so the plan is to focus on the SFII cast. However, he does hope to respond to fan requests in some form in the future. The focus on SFII characters may alarm fans of the Street Fighter III and Street Fighter Alpha franchises. Outside of just the charactrs, Capcom is also going with fighting systems that are evolved from SFII. The fighting system will not have elements from SFIII and Alpha, Ono confirmed.
While we’ve been given a chance to meet the SFIV cast over the past few weeks, Capcom has been keeping the game’s stages under wraps. Ono promised stages produced in the image of classic SFII battlegrounds, along with some brand new stages. Elsewhere in the article, Famitsu revealed that three stages will be playable at the AOU arcade show in Tokyo this weekend, including a stage set in China.
The big question for SFII veterans is will the stage list include the classic car smashing bonus round. Ono said that he gets asked this question a lot, and while it’s something he’d personally like to do, extending the play time in the arcade could effect profits for arcade operators. He didn’t rule the bonus stage out, though, instead referring to it as something that’s currently to be determined.
Ono hinted at some sort of card system for saving player data — a pretty standard feature for arcade titles from Sega and Namco nowadays. He didn’t get into specifics, only saying that he’d like to save battle history and records and have that save data be reflected in the game.
Famitsu also had the guts to ask Ono about bringing SFIV to home platforms. The producer gave the expected answer, noting that he personally wants to release the title on a variety of platforms in order to let the most people play it.
But the first chance to play the game for the masses will come in the arcades this Summer. Or, if you happen to live in the Tokyo area, this weekend at the AOU Amusement Expo. We’ll be attending the show on press day on Friday, so be sure and turn back later tonight for impressions and more.
SF4 Pictures
