The Street Fighter series has been all but stagnant for the better part of 15 years and finally after countless iterations and 3D attempts Street Fighter II’s true successor has hit the streets. For some reason Capcom always had trouble marrying the fast and furious nature of the series and the flexibility of the camera of their 3D forays. Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha and Star Gladiator, while fun, always felt a bit floaty. It wasn’t until they made Viewtiful Joe soon after the advent of cell-shaded graphics did I see the potential of someday experiencing swooping camera animations during 3D specials.
Today is that day.
Street Fighter IV is everything a fan has dreamed of from the series. Tight control, balanced gameplay, flashy finishers, gorgeous character models, stages and online play. HD Remix gave us a taste of what could be in a current online Street Fighter and it’s all here. In fact it’s just about more than anyone could ask for.
They even incorporated anime intros and endings and in-game mini-cutscene character interactions. Died. In Heaven. I understand most these types of games are all about the fight but those kinds of things are what encourage a player to try out different characters and rewards them for beating it with everyone.
I do wish they hadn’t made grapples’ input commands as simultaneous light kick/punch. I assign those to shoulder buttons and that’s just weird. You can assign throw to R1 or R2 but those might be bettter suited for 3x punches/kicks. Ah the conundrum. Oh well I can forgive them. I can also forgive them for putting some crazy Justin Timberlake sounding pop song peppered throughout the game but whatev. This game is the supreme dopeness regardless.
Go buy it. Play it. See me online and let me flash kick you into oblivion and love it.
So a friend showed me this link to the new Final Fantasy 13 trailer and it looks pretty sick. Of course the cut scenes are over the top action insanity, but it seems like they’ve finally raised the bar during the actual gameplay combat where the camera work seems integrated and cinematic and the character animations are seamless and fluid. Not that past efforts had fallen short, but I knew it was only a matter of the technology catching up to the execution.
I think we’re almost there, folks.
Check out our girl, Lightning I believe she’s called, (a Squall/Cloud with breasts and a gunblade) in the visual extravaganza by clicking the pic.
Looks like PS3 is starting off with a bang with it’s ‘09 line up. Here’s a taste of what you can wet your whistle on the first quarter of of this year. No brainers for me are Capcom’s offerings of Street Fighter 4 and Resident Evil 5.
The long-anticipated Ghostbusters game has a new video and boy does it aim to impress. The characters are lovingly rendered with a fun caricatured style that clearly represent their actor’s counterparts. Granted, I wouldn’t want to wait 20 years every time they made a video game based off a movie property, but this is the quality that can be achieved when studios aren’t forced to coincide their game launch along side the movie, official marshmallow cereal, lunchbox, bedspread, and action figure line with 24 points of articulation.
First off let me say that if you are either a Mortal Kombat fan or a superhero fan, this game is for you. That being said lets get to the nuts and bolts of what makes this game great and what keeps it from being perfect.
The Pros:
The graphics are beautiful and the models are excellently crafted. The background stages take you everywhere you’d expect to go from the Batcave, the Fortress of Solitude, Paradise Island and the Lantern universe headquarters planet of OA. The fighters have specularity maps that reflect real-time light sources that are just an awesome sight to behold.
The story mode takes you though both sides in animated cut scene narratives and breathes life to all of the characters. Everything is explained thoroughly by comic book authors that reconcile both universes coexisting though existing video game and comic book mythos.
In terms of gameplay, it’s the best one since MKII. Aside from the occasional sidestep the fights are held pretty much on a 2D axis. The essence of old 2D kombat is retained with current-gen 3D graphics. The mechanics have been simplified to combo/special move stringing of when and where to perform them.
The Cons:
After such a lavish production quality provided by the Story Mode, the single character Arcade endings only offer a single art rendering and brief voiceover ending. It’s still more than most current fighting games offer but after experiencing Story Mode, they are a bit of a let down.
As fun as the game is, there are still some poorly designed combo strings that snuck their way past testing. “Infinites”, as they’re called, are combos that that can be strung for an eternity by poor and lazy coding. The final boss AI is also very cheap but all of these are par for course for Mortal Kombat games. Something to consider though is that this is the first time an MK game can be patched though the Playstation Network and Xbox Live. As it seems it’s already received an update.
As everyone on the internet has already loudly vocalized, the teen rated diet fatalities simply leave you wanting more. They’re still worth doing since, again, they provide what most fighting games still lack: a “finisher” type of feature. Not a huge gripe but something to keep the game from being perfect.
Bottom Line:
A solid title for any fan of the comic book or fighting game genre.
A must-have for any fan of both.
Since we first saw MK vs DCU here at PS3Pub, there has been a lot of press coverage about the title involving roster announcements, game features and so on. Newly released is this video with many of the recently announced characters in full combat showing moves we’ve never seen before.
Found a developer interview from the StreetFighter Blog about Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. Street Fighter hype is escalating due to SF4’s imminent 2009 and nows the perfect time to warm up your quarter circle hadouken slide moves. In the interview, Capcom Associate Producer, Rey Jimenez, gives us a heads up on what to expect from the revisiting of the all-time classic. Udon Entertainment is redoing much of the game art and cut scenes. Expect some dope remixes of some of the definitive theme songs of the character rosters in their home stages.
Be on the lookout Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix this year.
Always been a huge Resident Evil fan and I repeatedly punish myself for still not having gone through Resident Evil 4. But if you haven’t caught one of the more recent trailers it pretty much has it all: bike chases, shotguns, long legs, a walking monster made completely of tentacles, and of course a metric asston of zombies!
Resident Evil 5 comes to us finally in current generation graphics and according to buzz on the internet, co-op playability, which is what this series has been needing for years, and will absolutely guarantee my purchase come first quarter ‘09.
Often times console systems don’t really begin to start showing their graphic potential until the middle or late into their life cycle. Heavy Rain is beginning to show that we have yet to see the true pixel-pushing power the Playstation 3 has yet to offer.
Well now that people are getting their long awaited fighting game fix in Soul Calibur 4, Namco isn’t quite done yet as they get set to release yet another premiere version of one of their flagship fighting game franchises. Tekken 6 is on the horizon and there are some Japanese gameplay videos courtesy of Tekken Zaibatsu. This year marks the year of the fighting game and the ultimate versions of them seem to be coming back with a vengeance in the next few months and Tekken is no exception.
Seeing these games finally reach HD with current-gen graphics and technology are surely a sight to behold.
