Street Fighter Round-Up
It’s been a big week in Street Fighter news! So much, it’s been hard to keep up!
First of all, the next new character for Street Fighter IV has been revealed. His name is Abel and he’s a blond, white guy with amnesia. Personally, I can think of a certain blond, white girl with amnesia that I’d much rather see in SF4, but okay. At first glance, his design looks alright, at least from the waist-up. It’s hard to tell if he’s a martial artist or a soccer goalie. And whomever is in charge of character designs for SF4 sure seems to be a big fan of the faux-hawk. His moves look pretty sweet, though, and could be the token muscle-bound brawler.
Earlier this week, Street Fighter IV was not only present, but playable at the Arcade Operator’s Union ( or AOU) show in Tokyo. Capcom set up a full area of SF4 arcade machines for attendees to play. You can check out footage of the arcade machine as well as a peek at the new characters, C. Viper and Abel, in action here:
As always, I’m very impressed and anxiously awaiting the game’s release. My only comment is that I hope they speed the gameplay up a bit. It still feels like a sluggish 3D fighter, rather than a 2D one. Even with it’s higher animation frame rate, Street Fighter III moved at a speed that most of us have grown to love in 2D gameplay. And games like Battle Fantasia and Rumble Fish 2 have proved that it can be done using 3D characters on a 2D playing field.
Many who have attended the show and have been reporting online seem to have the same things to say: The graphics are beautiful. I can’t deny that; they are! Though I’m curious as to how well the controls feel compared to how they look, as described above. This may soon be answered as some members of Kotaku are planning on organizing a personal SF4 tournament for themselves next week at the Game Developer’s Conference.
In the meantime, if you want to get a fresh Street Fighter fix, there’s always the new mouse-controlled Street Fighter game, Street Fighter Online Mouse Generation. The concept is almost cool in the same way that drive-thru liquor stores are almost a good idea. So far the only draw that they’ve been able to come up with beyond the novelty of playing Street Fighter with just a mouse is that they give you the feature of creating custom characters.
Taking a cue from Modulok, you can create your own character using interchangeable body parts, including classic characters. So you can plug Chun-Li’s legs onto Ryu, along with her Spinning Bird Kick move. Or strap Ryu’s arms onto Chun-Li so she can throw a hadouken. Or apparently create some other character with a fish head.
You can take a gander at the gameplay through the trailer/tutorial video, courtesy of GameTrailers:
And I thought playing fighting games with a keyboard was tough… I think I’ll pass.
