It's good to be a fighting game fan

Yesterday was a good day if you are a fighting game fan, particularly of Street Fighter or Tekken. While a lot of news got leaked early, yesterday Capcom finally released information from their Captivate 2011 event to the public. In this post I'll summarize a lot of the more important tidbits for my friends, facebook followers and anyone else that may not stay on top of the big fighting game news releases. I'll also be adding my opinion here and there.

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition comes home

First of all Arcade Edition was finally officially announced for home consoles. It will be available as a DLC on June 7th for $15, or as a full disk release on June 24th for $40 in case you no longer have a copy of SSFIV or never picked it up in the first place.

As I stated previously you get 4 new characters: Yun, Yang, Evil Ryu, and Oni (or Oni Akuma). They are also implementing balance updates across the entire cast.

The endless lobbies are being updated so that you can apply filters to let other players know what kind of fights you are seeking. Such as character specific, or if you're looking for players of a certain skill level. Think along the lines of MvC3's lobbies.

The replay channel is receiving an update that allows you to search for specific players as well as other helpful search options. You can also follow certain players and receive updates as to when they have uploaded new videos. The My Channel will also let you share up to 50 videos to be searched for by the community.

I think this is a great update and if you spend any time with SSFIV at all you owe it to yourself to pick up this update. The great thing is though, even if you choose not to or can't afford the update right away you wont be left behind from the other players. You can still play against regular SSFIV players, although the rules will follow standard SSFIV rather than the update.

I would have liked to see a few more characters, but the rebalancing will make things fresh again and perhaps fix a few of the more unfair matchups. Time will tell.

Lots of new Street Fighter x Tekken information now available

This is probably the most exciting thing to come out of Captivate for me. They started by releasing the below cinematic trailer that shows more gameplay as well as reveals more of the cast:



The cast now includes: Ryu, Ken, Chun li, Guile, Abel, Kazuya, Nina, Bob, Craig Marduk, and King.

The game will play similar to the Tekken tag series in that you choose 2 characters for your team and when one of those characters loses all of their health the round ends. Matches will play best 2 out of 3 rounds.

It follows the standard 6 buttons Street Fighter layout of lp, mp, hp, lk, mk, hk. The Tekken cast also uses 6 buttons, but the game has been engineered so that lp, mp, lk, and mk respond as the traditional 1, 2, 3 and 4 buttons of Tekken. Many of the Tekken character's combos and specials will port directly over from Tekken 6 and Yoshinori Ono explained that seasoned Tekken players will mostly feel right at home by ignoring the hp and hk buttons all together, though it would be wiser to include those in your arsenal as well.

lp+lk is throw, mp+mk is tag out, and hp+hk is a universal launcher. What I gather from the match videos on the net is that to emulate a Tekken style juggle state any character in an arial state can be juggled just about by any move. For example in the above video we see Chun li land a head stomp, air hp, hp (air target combo), c. mk, ex spinning bird kick. Ryu can get things like c. mp, hadoken or hurricane kick after connecting with a Shoryuken. Of course these combos can be extended using the tag feature.

In the videos shown players had a 3 bar super meter. It costs 1 level to do ex moves, 1 level to tag cancel (you can cancel any move into a tag to extend your combos with the next character), and 2 levels to do a Super Combo. There wasn't anything available that used all 3 bars of the meter, though likely I'd say it's for the double team Super Combos. Those weren't present either, I'd imagine because work hadn't been completed on the available character's team up Supers.

You can also "charge" your special moves. For example, by doing a Hadoken with Ryu and holding the punch button he will continue to charge the Hadoken in place until you let it go. The character will flash to signal different levels of the charge. Level 2 gives you a meter free ex version of the move and if you charge all the way to level 3 you get the Super Combo version of the move (this seems to take a long time so it doesn't seem like it could be abused as a cheap tactic).

For a very in depth analysis of the fighting system so far click here: http://www.play-mag.co.uk/general/street-fighter-x-tekken-gameplay-notes

I think the gameplay looks really fun at this point. It seems to reward more offensive play in comparison to the more turtle friendly SSFIV. Time will tell if such a free juggle system will end up breaking the game. Right now the lengthy combos are definitely not as devastating as they are in Tekken and there seems to be rules in place that prevent infinite loops (such as the rule in Tekken 6 where you can only "bound" your opponent 1 time per each combo). In one video Ryu attempts a sort of loop with his donkey kick and Shoryuken but it seems to drop for some reason after he tries another rep.

Click here for the official Street Fighter x Tekken website

After what I've seen I think I'm more excited for this new game than I was for MvC3. What are your thoughts?