Thursday, March 13, 2008

New Street Fighter II HD Remix Video, Images, Capblog, Online BETA!


Gamespot cornered David Serlin - the lead designer of SFIIHD down at Backbone - to ask them a few questions on the upcoming game. The video above also includes the first direct-feed video of the game!

Check out the video above, or download it directly here.

Now one of the first things you'll notice is that the graphics have changed a little - little flatter, thumbs in the right place this time, some giant eyebrows on Ken - well that's because they've had to start from scratch all over again!

The Capcom Blog has updated with a brand new entry all about the changes to SFIIHD in far, FAR more detail than any regular person could care for. But we're not talking about regular people - we're talking about Street Fighter fans!

There are a number of reasons we decided to change the art and here’s the run down of how we came to that decision: As a necessary part of development, we had to outsource a lot of the work to an outside company that based their work off of Udon’s key frames. This company has an excellent reputation and ability as an outside art contractor and we were very impressed with their overall resources and their infrastructure. Without going into the nitty-gritty of it, the art they were producing just wasn’t up to par or schedule of what we needed. To be honest, a lot of their art was looking pretty good, but just not “good enough.” It just wouldn’t satisfy the quality bar that both Capcom and Street Fighter fans demand.

So, we turned to Udon to help solve this problem. First, they identified that all of us (Capcom and Udon) were aiming way too high with our render style. In the original style, we were going using at least 6-8 tones to go from the darkest to the lightest values of a particular color. This, as some fans actually pointed out, is extremely hard to do. We decided to stick it out and go with that route and unfortunately, it didn’t work out too well.

There has been a bit of a delay thanks to the complete recreation of the recreated assets - but it's allowed them to add some more gameplay modes. Some of them include:
• 8-man Tournament Mode. This has been especially challenging with the new netcode
• Both Remixed and Classic music
• Hit Box Display. (Woohoo!)
View the whole blog post here, complete with viewable changed between characters.

And FINALLY - players will get a chance to play an online BETA of Street Fighter II HD! That is, if you buy yourself a copy of the upcoming Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 - only for the XBLA version! Capcom will send anyone who buys Commando 3 a code to download a trimmed down, online only version of SFIIHD, where players can only play as Ryu or Ken. This BETA will allow them to see how Lag goes since the original version got quite a bit of flack for the online code.

Hey, it worked for Crackdown - I'm just hoping Commando 3 is an exceptional game that lives up to my memories of playing MERCS on my SEGA Megadrive!

Source: Gamespot video, Capcom USA Blog

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