Wow. Every new trailer I see of Street Fighter IV raises my anticipation level for this title a little more, and the video released from Captivate 08 yesterday is no exception. Just ignore the annoying voice-over.
Stunning. The proof will be in the playing of course, but it certainly looks promising that they’ve captured the essence of arguably the best fighting game ever to grace any system. They even have a revamped version of a piece of music that I definitely recognise from SFII - I think it might be from Vega’s stage?
I assume all this footage is from the arcade version, but I would guess that the 360 version will look pretty much identical. It tickles me a little that the term ‘arcade-perfect conversion’ is once again to become relevant when it comes to this title; it almost lends it an extra level of nostalgia since we cared very much about that sort of thing back when the originals were doing the rounds.
I realise we’ll be waiting a little bit of extra time for the home console version, but this definitely confirms my previous decision to skip Soul Calibur IV. The quote ‘A tale of souls and swords, eternally retold‘ seems a little too poignant, I do feel I’ve played SC a few too many times in recent years. The addition of Star Wars characters, even more ludicrous mammaries and destructible armour (for the girls, obviously - noticing a pattern yet?) seems just like so much gimmickery to distract from the fact that it’s the same game all over again. At least Street Fighter has been absent long enough that I do miss it…
June 4th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
I used to love arcade-style games. The dreamcast had some excellent ones, though I can’t remember what they were called. Looks like they’ve gone all out on this one though, I’m loving the cartoon-esque sequences, they look awesome. Some of them are so far out though that they fail to become a game and more about smashing the controller as much as you can. I hope there’s a decent amount of technique to it.
June 4th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Ryu’s stage.
June 4th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Yep - Ryu’s stage… The classic SF2 theme.
Also, isn’t that the most annoying voice overe EVER!
Looks good though (although I’m still of the opinion that Soul Calibur 4 also looks good - maybe not SF4 good, but still very good)
June 5th, 2008 at 7:50 am
AFAIK, there is no arcade version of SFIV, at least several artices I read the last days stated that. To my knowledge, this game is a nexgen console and pc exclusive.
June 5th, 2008 at 8:35 am
@SunSailor: not sure where you read that, the arcade version is definitely still coming out first and always has been advertised as such. They were still saying that at Captivate this week. The console & PC versions are ports of it, done by a partner company.
@Baz: it’s not that SCIV doesn’t look good, it’s that it looks a little too much like SCIII (which itself was a little too much like SCII), beyond the ridiculous physical attribute enhancements. I generally don’t like repeating myself too often when it comes to games, at least not without a decent time lag between them, I have trouble finding time to play everything I’m interested in anyway. The only thing I’ve really enjoyed repeating recently has been the Guitar Hero / Rock Band games, but that’s because I love music games and it’s still quite fresh to me.