Super Street Fighter II Turbo High Definition Remix
So last weekend we hung out with Lloyd, and he ended up staying the night. During which we played an awful lot of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix.
Allow me to tangent on the brief history of Street Fighter II for a second.
This is a game series I'm sure most people have at least played once, and they went like this:
Street Fighter II - The World Warrior
The original arcade machine. With Ryu and Ken being identical in all but appearance (due to the limitation that two players couldn't pick one character), with the "Four Devas" being unplayable bastards, and it had that strange intro of that blond guy punching out that black guy, with neither of them actually being in the game. But to break it down to point form, it:
- had 8 playable characters
Street Fighter II - Championship Edition
Added:
- different colour characters so two people could use the same character
- the "Four Devas" as playable characters
Street Fighter II - Hyper Fighting
Added:
- new special moves to most characters (Chun Li fireball, Yoga teleport, air hurricane kicks)
- more colours
- variable speed settings
THIS is the one I spent practically an entire summer playing on Jack's borrowed Sega Megadrive (not my nephew Jack). This is made even more hardcore by the fact that the Megadrive pad only had 3 buttons, so you had to press start to flick between punches and kicks; and I got bloody good at doing it.
Hyper Fighting on the Megadrive and an illegally altered arcade cabinet of the same game (where Balrog shot two fireballs with every dash punch) in a Castleisland chipper was where I amassed all my Street Fighting time and knowledge.
Super Street Fighter II - The New Challengers
Added:
- 4 new characters (Deejay, T.Hawk, Fei Long and Cammy)
- combo displays (previously combos were an unintended glitch)
- refined moves for the "Four Devas", who had previously been hastily changed from Boss characters to playable ones without giving them a complete move roster (Vega couldn't do standing kicks, Sagat AND Vega couldn't do jumping punches).
Super Street Fighter II Turbo
Added:
- Super moves
- Air juggling (hitting someone who's been hit in the air more than once)
- Throw softening (the ability to half the damage you take from throws if you react fast enough)
- Akuma (Street Fighter's first secret character)
SSF2T (called Super Turbo, or ST for short) pretty much became the standard of SF for competitive play from that point onwards; and is still played competitively 15 years after its release. As someone who still plays Smash Bros Melee and organises tournaments for it (going on) seven years after its release; I can appreciate this.
I never really experienced the content of Super Turbo (or SSF2) though, as I didn't actually own any of the required consoles, nor did my local arcade have it.
So I missed all the new additions to one of my favourite fighters, like the 4 new challengers, super moves, Akuma, and Vega being able to kick (omg!).
The Street Fighter series as a whole passed me by for the next decade or so. I never got into the Alpha series, the EX series, and I'm embarrased to admit I didn't even KNOW there was a Street Fighter III until I came across its finale iteration (SF III: Third Strike) when it was already quite old in an arcade in Toronto, while waiting for a bus very late at night.
Street Fighter IV has also been released quite recently, and while I own it, I have yet to open the disc case because all my Street Fighting needs thusfar have been met by Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix, which came as a free download with my limited edition Capcom Red Xbox 360 Elite.
I really like the idea behind Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix (which I will now refer to as HDR), because it goes something like this:
Capcom were originally just going to rerelease Super Turbo, with improved graphics, but along the way they decided to completely remake the game in a number of ways.
(1) The graphics were redrawn by hand by UDON comics, the crowd who have done a bunch of pretty quality SF comics, and all the endings were rewritten to make them canon to current SF lore, and some confusions resulting from old mistranslations were fixed (except for the pretty legendary "You must defeat Shen Long to stand a chance")
(2) The music was redone by the Overclocked Remix community of fans; which I think is a really awesome move on Capcom's part: allowing fans to take part in the remake. I'm a big fan of OCRemix anyway, so it's a double bonus for me. This sound track is free to download and hella sweet.
(3) The gameplay was rebalanced by a team of high ranking tournament players, led by David Sirlin who fairly thoroughly blogged about the process on his site. I found it all very interesting.
All three of these changes can be turned on and off individually (if you're more interested in playing the original ST than the remade HDR), so you can choose to play with any combination of old or new sprites, music and gameplay. The only thing weirdly you can't change, is the stage backgrounds or character portraits. So you can have the original models scaled up in all their blocky glory, fighting old-school with the original tunes playing; while being surrounded by 1080dpi beautifully hand-drawn levels. It's weird.
Their general redesign principle with the gameplay changes was:
(A) Rebalance the characters:
- Remove or tone down mindless abusable stuff from the best characters
- Give the worst characters tricks to deal with more of their bad match-ups
(B) Make stuff easier
- One thing I NEVER knew until reading the HDR notes is that some special moves had a random window of input in which they'd actually work, of anywhere between 8 and 15 frames (with getting 15 being quite rare). So if you've ever played Street Fighter and swore blind that the moves just "WEREN'T WORKING!" chances are you could have actually been right.
All these moves were give the maximum input window in their previously random range (in this case, 15).
- Some moves had weird unintuitive motions that only seemed to effect the lowest ranked characters. Zangief's Spinning piledriver for example required you to rotate your controller 360 degrees, which often resulted in a lot of accidental jumping. In these cases they were made into easier quartercircle/semi-circle motions.
- Button mash moves require less button presses per second to activate (Honda's hand-slap, Blanka's electricity, Chun-Li's lightning kick, Deejay's uppercut).
(c) Give all the characters something new and fun, as long as it doesn't screw around with the balance. Ryu for example was give a fake Hadoken move, where he puts his hands together and thrusts them forward in typical "Hadoken" fashion, but it shoots no projectile and does no damage. It does however let him recover afterwards twice as fast as a regular Hadoken. Since a common counter to the Hadoken is to jump over the fireball and kick Ryu in the head, he can use fake ones to bait people into jumping so he can cleanly knock them out of the air. On the other hand, if Ryu reads his opponent wrong, and they predict the fake they can just walk into a move that does no damage and punish Ryu for it.
A lot of things like this seem to have been added, that are designed to keep "mind games" going between the players, and promote more risk/reward actions instead of constant repetitions of strategies that used to be guaranteed safe.
Despite me knowing all of this, I am not a good Street Fighter player. Being good at Smash Bros Melee has given me a much more realistic world view of how I measure up to the general state of competition for a particular activity. In Street Fighter I am pretty definitely "Below Average", or maybe worse.
Lloyd is about the same, but in our mediocrity, we are surprisingly evenly matched, which makes for a lot of fun. Out of 40 matches at one point, we had 20 victories each (I remember pretty clearly too that in a "Hyper Fighting" session on the SNES over a decade ago, in a 50 game session, we were 25/25).
I'm definitely worse than Vince who I lose to in Street Fighter most of the time (the first time I played him in Hyper Fighting was extremely humbling, since at that point I had the mistaken notion I was good); but weirdly Vince and Lloyd are evenly matched as well; which overall probably makes me the worst of the three.
Anyway, since I know Lloyd and I suck, I didn't think changes to gameplay and balance (which normally only effect the high levels of play) would be apparent to us.
But they really really were, and it was a hell of a lot fun.
The easier controls, more lenient input windows and ease of mash moves meant that special moves came out when we wanted them to; so the real crux of our matches stopped being whether or not we could do the moves (we could!) but came down to the tactical question of when we should do them.
The controls felt tighter, and the characters moved more fluidly. The "4 new challengers", who I had never had any luck playing with in the past were now actual contenders. Towards the end we did a lot of "Double random select matches" that threw up some awesome fights, and at first we'd groan if someone like Cammy or T.Hawk came up; but after a couple of surprisingly even matches, or even cases of the 'underdog' pounding someone more established like Chun-Li into the ground; we realised every character was viable now (at least at our level of play).
The end result of all this was that we stayed up way way later than we should have. I thought I went to bed around 4.30am, but Lloyd insists it went later than that. Regardless, I was up at 8am the next day for work, so I paid for it. Lloyd however slept on my couch until about 5pm the next day. Not that I'm bitter...
My point in all this is that I really really like HDR, and it's great to see a remake that a lot of effort and fan-love went into; and it shows when you play it.
Anyway, I'm going to end this here, but if anybody else has HDR and XBL, they should look me up for a HADOKEN good time!
I'm going to unwrap Street Fighter IV soon and see how the gameplay has progressed in the 15 years since ST.
Allow me to tangent on the brief history of Street Fighter II for a second.
This is a game series I'm sure most people have at least played once, and they went like this:
Street Fighter II - The World Warrior
The original arcade machine. With Ryu and Ken being identical in all but appearance (due to the limitation that two players couldn't pick one character), with the "Four Devas" being unplayable bastards, and it had that strange intro of that blond guy punching out that black guy, with neither of them actually being in the game. But to break it down to point form, it:
- had 8 playable characters
Street Fighter II - Championship Edition
Added:
- different colour characters so two people could use the same character
- the "Four Devas" as playable characters
Street Fighter II - Hyper Fighting
Added:
- new special moves to most characters (Chun Li fireball, Yoga teleport, air hurricane kicks)
- more colours
- variable speed settings
THIS is the one I spent practically an entire summer playing on Jack's borrowed Sega Megadrive (not my nephew Jack). This is made even more hardcore by the fact that the Megadrive pad only had 3 buttons, so you had to press start to flick between punches and kicks; and I got bloody good at doing it.
Hyper Fighting on the Megadrive and an illegally altered arcade cabinet of the same game (where Balrog shot two fireballs with every dash punch) in a Castleisland chipper was where I amassed all my Street Fighting time and knowledge.
Super Street Fighter II - The New Challengers
Added:
- 4 new characters (Deejay, T.Hawk, Fei Long and Cammy)
- combo displays (previously combos were an unintended glitch)
- refined moves for the "Four Devas", who had previously been hastily changed from Boss characters to playable ones without giving them a complete move roster (Vega couldn't do standing kicks, Sagat AND Vega couldn't do jumping punches).
Super Street Fighter II Turbo
Added:
- Super moves
- Air juggling (hitting someone who's been hit in the air more than once)
- Throw softening (the ability to half the damage you take from throws if you react fast enough)
- Akuma (Street Fighter's first secret character)
SSF2T (called Super Turbo, or ST for short) pretty much became the standard of SF for competitive play from that point onwards; and is still played competitively 15 years after its release. As someone who still plays Smash Bros Melee and organises tournaments for it (going on) seven years after its release; I can appreciate this.
I never really experienced the content of Super Turbo (or SSF2) though, as I didn't actually own any of the required consoles, nor did my local arcade have it.
So I missed all the new additions to one of my favourite fighters, like the 4 new challengers, super moves, Akuma, and Vega being able to kick (omg!).
The Street Fighter series as a whole passed me by for the next decade or so. I never got into the Alpha series, the EX series, and I'm embarrased to admit I didn't even KNOW there was a Street Fighter III until I came across its finale iteration (SF III: Third Strike) when it was already quite old in an arcade in Toronto, while waiting for a bus very late at night.
Street Fighter IV has also been released quite recently, and while I own it, I have yet to open the disc case because all my Street Fighting needs thusfar have been met by Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix, which came as a free download with my limited edition Capcom Red Xbox 360 Elite.
I really like the idea behind Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix (which I will now refer to as HDR), because it goes something like this:
Capcom were originally just going to rerelease Super Turbo, with improved graphics, but along the way they decided to completely remake the game in a number of ways.
(1) The graphics were redrawn by hand by UDON comics, the crowd who have done a bunch of pretty quality SF comics, and all the endings were rewritten to make them canon to current SF lore, and some confusions resulting from old mistranslations were fixed (except for the pretty legendary "You must defeat Shen Long to stand a chance")
(2) The music was redone by the Overclocked Remix community of fans; which I think is a really awesome move on Capcom's part: allowing fans to take part in the remake. I'm a big fan of OCRemix anyway, so it's a double bonus for me. This sound track is free to download and hella sweet.
(3) The gameplay was rebalanced by a team of high ranking tournament players, led by David Sirlin who fairly thoroughly blogged about the process on his site. I found it all very interesting.
All three of these changes can be turned on and off individually (if you're more interested in playing the original ST than the remade HDR), so you can choose to play with any combination of old or new sprites, music and gameplay. The only thing weirdly you can't change, is the stage backgrounds or character portraits. So you can have the original models scaled up in all their blocky glory, fighting old-school with the original tunes playing; while being surrounded by 1080dpi beautifully hand-drawn levels. It's weird.
Their general redesign principle with the gameplay changes was:
(A) Rebalance the characters:
- Remove or tone down mindless abusable stuff from the best characters
- Give the worst characters tricks to deal with more of their bad match-ups
(B) Make stuff easier
- One thing I NEVER knew until reading the HDR notes is that some special moves had a random window of input in which they'd actually work, of anywhere between 8 and 15 frames (with getting 15 being quite rare). So if you've ever played Street Fighter and swore blind that the moves just "WEREN'T WORKING!" chances are you could have actually been right.
All these moves were give the maximum input window in their previously random range (in this case, 15).
- Some moves had weird unintuitive motions that only seemed to effect the lowest ranked characters. Zangief's Spinning piledriver for example required you to rotate your controller 360 degrees, which often resulted in a lot of accidental jumping. In these cases they were made into easier quartercircle/semi-circle motions.
- Button mash moves require less button presses per second to activate (Honda's hand-slap, Blanka's electricity, Chun-Li's lightning kick, Deejay's uppercut).
(c) Give all the characters something new and fun, as long as it doesn't screw around with the balance. Ryu for example was give a fake Hadoken move, where he puts his hands together and thrusts them forward in typical "Hadoken" fashion, but it shoots no projectile and does no damage. It does however let him recover afterwards twice as fast as a regular Hadoken. Since a common counter to the Hadoken is to jump over the fireball and kick Ryu in the head, he can use fake ones to bait people into jumping so he can cleanly knock them out of the air. On the other hand, if Ryu reads his opponent wrong, and they predict the fake they can just walk into a move that does no damage and punish Ryu for it.
A lot of things like this seem to have been added, that are designed to keep "mind games" going between the players, and promote more risk/reward actions instead of constant repetitions of strategies that used to be guaranteed safe.
Despite me knowing all of this, I am not a good Street Fighter player. Being good at Smash Bros Melee has given me a much more realistic world view of how I measure up to the general state of competition for a particular activity. In Street Fighter I am pretty definitely "Below Average", or maybe worse.
Lloyd is about the same, but in our mediocrity, we are surprisingly evenly matched, which makes for a lot of fun. Out of 40 matches at one point, we had 20 victories each (I remember pretty clearly too that in a "Hyper Fighting" session on the SNES over a decade ago, in a 50 game session, we were 25/25).
I'm definitely worse than Vince who I lose to in Street Fighter most of the time (the first time I played him in Hyper Fighting was extremely humbling, since at that point I had the mistaken notion I was good); but weirdly Vince and Lloyd are evenly matched as well; which overall probably makes me the worst of the three.
Anyway, since I know Lloyd and I suck, I didn't think changes to gameplay and balance (which normally only effect the high levels of play) would be apparent to us.
But they really really were, and it was a hell of a lot fun.
The easier controls, more lenient input windows and ease of mash moves meant that special moves came out when we wanted them to; so the real crux of our matches stopped being whether or not we could do the moves (we could!) but came down to the tactical question of when we should do them.
The controls felt tighter, and the characters moved more fluidly. The "4 new challengers", who I had never had any luck playing with in the past were now actual contenders. Towards the end we did a lot of "Double random select matches" that threw up some awesome fights, and at first we'd groan if someone like Cammy or T.Hawk came up; but after a couple of surprisingly even matches, or even cases of the 'underdog' pounding someone more established like Chun-Li into the ground; we realised every character was viable now (at least at our level of play).
The end result of all this was that we stayed up way way later than we should have. I thought I went to bed around 4.30am, but Lloyd insists it went later than that. Regardless, I was up at 8am the next day for work, so I paid for it. Lloyd however slept on my couch until about 5pm the next day. Not that I'm bitter...
My point in all this is that I really really like HDR, and it's great to see a remake that a lot of effort and fan-love went into; and it shows when you play it.
Anyway, I'm going to end this here, but if anybody else has HDR and XBL, they should look me up for a HADOKEN good time!
I'm going to unwrap Street Fighter IV soon and see how the gameplay has progressed in the 15 years since ST.