The announcement of Super Street Fighter 4 to the untrained ear sounds like a glorious time. However, with the current information available Capcom has only shot the franchise in the foot. So while this opinion is subject to change provided new information is released allow me to inform you why Super Street Fighter 4 is not exactly a gift.
The primary evil here is not the fact that the game will be a retail copy rather than DLC, but the fact that so far there has been no announcement for an arcade version. Now for the average man, this might not be such a big deal as for the most part American arcades are dead.
However for the fighting game enthusiast this is a major problem. The primary audience, the hardcore of the hardcore fanbase, will be overlooking this as the competition would not be seen around the world. A large part of the fighting game community is becoming good enough to compete at the grand stage Super Battle Opera or Tougeki in Japan as its an arcade only tournament.
With no arcade announcement Capcom has placed a huge rift in its hardcore fanbase, I suppose they still have the casual crowd. Unfortunately the irony of this decision is that to make this update console exclusive and as a seperate disc means that you’re appealing to the Western audience, who more or less won’t notice the finer tweaks the game will offer and will only see the 8 new characters will feel ripped off and more than likely will pass over the game to save up for the next big FPS or action game.
Next is the fact that 8 new characters were announced, while there are rumors going around to be more than 8, I can already see the Street Fighter 3 cast getting snubbed. Now for some reason there’s been a huge anti-Street Fighter 3 reaction since the release of Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix and Street Fighter 4 amongst people I know, minus those who started playing fighting games with Street Fighter 3.
Now my problem with this is that while the awesome character designs for the Street Fighter 3 series get snubbed we saw the return of the Street Fighter 2 cast which let’s be honest, who really sat at their computer screen and said “YES I GET TO PLAY AS E.HONDA!” its doubtful that outside of a handful of the Street Fighter 2 cast there was anyone that got the fans truly excited. Worse now with Super Street Fighter 4, their big announcement character? T.Hawk
Let’s get real here. Who really saw T.Hawk and said “Day one purchase!” not many I would think. So let’s see. So far we’ve got a fractured hardcore crowd, a casual crowd that could care less about fine tweaking especially when we’re looking at $30-40 dollars for this game(ironically these same people would justify buying ODST for $60, but that’s another article), and a boring character roster(so far).
Now I don’t mean to bash Capcom’s efforts, I want badly for this game to succeed, as its known I’m GamingVice.net’s regular Street Fighter fanboy. However I truly believe in order for this to work, we need a more exciting character roster a.k.a mixing in some of the Final Fight cast seen in the Alpha series and some of the Street Fighter 3 cast, which to a lot of people are new characters as there are a lot of people who have not played or even seen Street Fighter 3, believe it or not there are people who think Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Street Fighter 3 are the same game.
Primarily however this title needs an arcade release as without one you’re more or less taking the community that supported Street Fighter even through the ten year gap between Street Fighter 3: Third Strike and Street Fighter 4, and screwing them, which normally I could understand because Capcom is a company and they want money more than the fan’s approval but in this case they would be screwing the main fan base in favor of a crowd who could care less about Super Street Fighter 4 because it costs a little too much and they would much rather have a game for more money where they can shoot things.
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” but the fact that so far there has been no announcement for an arcade version.”
It’s already been confirmed theres going to be no arcade machine for this game anywhere..strictly PS3 and 360 only. So keep rubbing that genie lamp Gary. No Homo.
This SF crap was the precursor for the current HALO ODST crap and few others. The crap I speak is of retailing what should be DLC. Either free or no. IMO, KOF, Guilty Gear, & hopefully Tekken will continue to exceed the SF franchise. Yeah, its still a good play as a standup arcade, but arcades are now rare, smaller, with smaller-er selection of games inside(lol). And for $50-$60 bucks?! F… THAT! how about revising a SF anthology on 1 disc (likely dvd) mixed w/free and paid for dlc- that’ll be more interesting.
P.S.
I noticed you guys keep an eye on comments. Advice: take M.A.G. off the list of PS3 games to drum-roll for. Really! have played beta and… ugh! it will not compete well with competition b4 and after its release is my prediction, for sells and gamer enjoyment. Graphics/Gameplay not par with note worthy exclusives. Would be a tremendously better game in 3rd person or optioned that way. Better yet cancel release and combine and further an effort to make this the next S.O.C.O.M.
Look at it like this. If they were to put out all 8 new characters as DLC they would probably charge you 5 bucks a piece on psn and xbox live. How much does that come to if you were to buy them all? 40 bucks. Their also going to be rebalancing characters and adding new moves, how could you buy that as DLC?
With their being no arcade release Capcom is already in the pocket of the person that goes to the arcade because they have no other alternative to play the game regularly unless they buy the game on console. Should their be an arcade version? Yes, definently. But most of the big name tournaments are held on console.
I don’t see a problem with what Capcom is doing here releasing another game so soon. How is this any different than what Call Of Duty does? They put out a game every year, same shit basically with a few tweaks, and throw a 60 dollar price tag on it and everyone who’s a fan of the series buys it.(Yeah that was a bad comparison comparing a shooter to a fighting game..but were all gonna sit here and fucking deal with it) How is this any differet besides the genre?
If people don’t want to pay 60 bucks(if it gets priced at that), wait a month to a month and a half and it’ll be 40 bucks, just like what happened with Street Fighter 4.
Cliffs:
40 Dollar DLC for characters
Wait a month for game to drop from 60 bucks to 40 bucks
Get More features on disk than you would with DLC
Ill be in my chambers if needed
Main difference is the FPS community is way bigger, they have a hardcore crowd that always buys and a casual crowd that buys most if not all as well.
The fighting hardcore crowd will of course buy, but will still be upset with lack of arcade release, as we love getting beat by the Asia crowd, we go to SBO every year like the Knicks lol. However for the casual crowd that they successfully reeled in probably don’t see the game the same way because its Super Street Fighter 4 instead of Street Fighter 5. COD4: Modern Warfare became Modern Warfare 2 and putting that new number on the title wins over the casual crowd. That’s the problem.
man you underestimate fans of T.Hawk.
just because some people like you dont like T.Hawk or some other characters doesnt mean that some people we are waiting for him and now we are very happy to see him in SF4.
and ofcourse there is another problem.
many characters in the street series are from USA.the are not so many from other countries.from what ive seen up until now many fans want characters like Cody,Guy which they are also USA characters.i mean ok very good characters but so much characters from USA dont you think?in a game?
and i think that Guy and Cody will be add to SSF4.
why is problem T.Hawk?i dont understand that.
they place Dan which is one of the worst characters in Street Series and now you are complain about T.Hawk.
sorry but i see some unfair and also racist problem here.
T.Hawk is my main character since Super Street Fighter II in SNES and im VERY HAPPY that i can see him and play him in SF4 series.
pls dont disturbing my enthousiast.
3rd one for the day, I sure do hate padding the comments on my article, but it is fun to interact with the people so gracious enough to take time out of their day to read something I wrote and share their thoughts.
First of all…wow I’ve never been called a racist for liking T.Hawk, I’ve got nothing against the hispanic community, I love El Fuerte and Vega(Claw), and if you were talking about the native american community, my main character in Tekken is Julia who I love to death. I agree with you in fact, there are too many American characters, I’d love to see a character from a less publicized country like Greece, Argentina, or Ghana. Honestly, there’s no real problem with you liking T.Hawk it’s just I don’t think he was the character to get people excited for the game, I’m sure he has fans, but I think DeeJay would have got the crowd more hype.
However, you liking T.Hawk means I’m better than you.
You brought up some good points, but overall, I think Super Street Fighter IV will be a good thing. You can’t really fault them for not making it DLC because there improvements are just so vast (so Capcom says.)
As for the new characters, I know some T. Hawk fans and even more Deejay fans. Whenever I played Street Fighter II Turbo HD online, it seemed like every other dude was T. Hawk or Deejay (when it wasn’t a shoto.)
They were smart by announcing that this will be cheaper that SF IV, and they also said that fans who own the original will get something extra out of SSFIV. No clue what it is, but anything’s better than nothing, right?
And just think of all the money you’ll be saving in quarters! And who knows, maybe if the game does well enough and the fans are adamant enough, Capcom WILL release an arcade. I wouldn’t be surprised. They’ve always been good with fan service.
Thanks for actually reading the article brownkidd, but it isn’t really the disc I’m mad about. Unfortunately I’m a SF fanatic for life so I’ll be buying the disc anyway lol, my problem is lack of arcade release because this is a really big deal to a lot of the hardcore tournament community and not using all the interesting characters from SF3, I’ve got no problems with the SF2 cast other than I think a few of ‘em are boring, however I think between SF2,3,Alpha,SF1, and Final Fight I guess, you can have an extremely entertaining roster that appeals to fans of all SF series.
You bitched a lil’ too soon. Happy now?