Saving the Street Fighter Franchise 76
Gamasutra did an in-depth interview with Yoshi Ono, producer of Street Fighter IV, about trying to bring the series back to the quality and popularity of the '90s. Ono also talks about broadening the market to include casual players, who were slowly driven away from the game by the increased focus on competitive play. Quoting:
"If you think about chess for instance, a kid and a grandfather can play the same game, with the same ruleset, and understand what's going on. I think through our competitive spirit back then; we were always out to out-complicate each other, and make our systems deeper and deeper. It was ok then because there was a wide player base who understood how to play these games, but that's not true anymore. What we're trying to do with Street Fighter IV is bring them back in. There's not a whole lot of other fighting games out there to compare it to, but hopefully, if we play our cards right and get people back in to the genre, we can blossom the genre itself again and spread things out and get it back to the way it was."
I played it at Comic Con (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a major fan of the series, so I had a lot of hopes for it. The graphics are noticeably improved, but the gameplay hasn't changed much. These kinds of games don't have a lot of room for depth though, so one can't really expect gameplay to change drastically.
I think the main problem Street Fighter has is that it's best played in an arcade, with a loud energetic environment surrounded by 5-10 people. Most people (in the USA, at least) don't go to arcades anymore.
So I played SF4 at Comic Con, it was fun. I still think Street Fighter Alpha 3 was the best of the series, but I'll definitely be buying this for the PC when it comes out later this year
Re:I played it at Comic Con (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I played it at Comic Con (Score:2, Insightful)
I could accuse you of trolling (Score:2, Insightful)
I won't, but someone else might.
I'll give you that, outside of SF3, the games are not very smoothly animated. SF3 is very pretty and very smooth. Street Fighter has always been about timing and zen, although prior to turbo, the game didn't have fast enough action to really be much fun.
The various versions of all the games are actually quite warranted. Few developers revise their games like this, or even have games that people would buy revisions of. Each revision in SF is generally seen as an improvement, and most have strong enough content updates to be considered separate from the unrevised game.
I'd thought the 3D nonsense was put behind us by the players, despite developers maintaining the delusion. Apparently not. If you look past the graphics for a moment SFIV is still essentially a 2D game, and if you don't, it's not quite as pretty as SF3 3rd Strike.
"get off my lawn" (Score:3, Insightful)
seriously, you act as if most people, all the way from the late 80's, were not "button mashers".
The quality of the audience for these games has not changed since then, it was not "better" back then.
Re:I played it at Comic Con (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I played it at Comic Con (Score:1, Insightful)
Wow.. just the fact that you know this makes me feel sorry for you. Ever thought about losing your virginity?
Yes, he needs to learn to become equally (or more) obsessive about football or Nascar to be considered normal in the USA.