nestlekwik

"Kush said:
For a casual fan whats the diffrence? Ive never noticed the diffrence between the varous SF2 installments since im only casual. Unless your hardcore who will notice?"

"I havent even been able to play the worthless demo yet. I waited for an hour or two (shitty connection) to download it but I have no one to play against and I cant even add a second controller in and just go "ooo shiny graphics" since the only other controller(s) in my house are connected to my brothers 360 who wont play me because he thinks fighting games are shit :|"

Tournaments are awaiting SF4, not SF2.

The demo is merely the summer's beta test version with the networking stripped out of it.  That's pretty lazy, yes, as players should probably know how difficult the computer can be in single player.

I think the thought behind the demo was to give a way to play it with another person or let a single person beat up on someone who won't fight back in order to test out the character changes (which are pretty deep, actually).  It just still further fuels the fact that the game was developed and released to appeal to tournament players as opposed to the casual player.

That being said, though, as a fighting game fan, this game has been worth every penny for me.  I'm just left thinking that there could have been more Capcom could have done to appeal to casual players.

A few years ago, I interviewed Jason Enos of Konami, who has headed the US DDR releases for quite some time.  He stated Konami can't produce wireless pads because Microsoft utilizes a proprietary wireless technology with the system.  If you don't have Microsoft's blessing, you can' t produce wireless devices for the system.  It's different for Rock Band and Guitar Hero since they sell a bizillion accessories along with a bizillion games for the system.

Thankfully, it won't be Americanized that much.  I talk to Michael Yum of PM Studios semi-frequently and he gives me a lot of confidence that this will be a stellar game.  Maybe Konami will start learning that you don't have to butcher a Japanese game to bring it over to the United States.

I joined up!

Say, are we going to do any challenges? :)

The demo is only for two players because all Capcom essentially did was make the beta version of the game public while disabling the online portion.  Yeah, it's lazy, but, they've spent a year and a half working on the actual game.  After going way over their the and budget allotment, I'm guessing Capcom just mailed it in on the demo at the last moment.  I would say players really need to see the difficulty of the arcade mode before jumping into the game as Turbo has never been a very beginner-friendly game.

As for audio, I have also noticed a few slips, but I mostly noticed a very brief period of time where the characters didn't have speech during victory poses (Xbox 360 version).

If you get a Blanka with green hair, his leg hair resembles pine trees ...

Otherwise, I've been playing the 360 version all day and the rebalancing changes are great for the most part.  I was able to get some good licks in with Dee Jay, T. Hawk and Zangief, characters I wouldn't normally give much play time too.  At first I was worried the achievements would be absolutely absurd, but I've snagged all but one of the offline achievements (for those wondering - 8 offline, 4 online) and a few of them are fairly fun (such as playing as Ryu and finishing Sagat with a fierce shoryuken).  I need a good online connection to tear into the multiplayer some, but I've been playing with a few friends and we've been rocking the game pretty fierce.

The thing I would question, however, is the difficulty.  I can still beat the game and everything, but David Sirlin promised the difficulties have been tooled to where easy was easy, normal was normal, etc.  While the difficulty has been toned, even easy may still be a little frustrating to those who only casually play Street Fighter.  What is most notable about HD Remix is it was essentially built by tournament players so it mostly serves tournament players and, of course, these players can rock the CPU without a moment's hesitation.  With the difficulty and the fact most changes will only be noticeable to the competitive crowd, $15 might seem a little much for a casual player.  Of course the removal of 360 command motions and moves such as the fake hadoken are extremely noticeable, but those who don't follow the game will doubtedly pick up on tweaks such as the removal of random time windows for shoryuken inputs, retoolings of moves such as Guile's roundhouse flash kick and recoveries of Blanka's rolling attacks.

The game is indeed worth $15, however, it just doesn't seem like most people understand what they are purchasing - the rebalanced mode has officially been labeled by Capcom bloggers as a true "sequel" to Street Fighter II.  The game is much more than Super Street Fighter II Turbo with Udon graphics and the developer has gone the extra mile to incorporate every possible competitive facet it could (double blind character selecting online, character rebalancings, notifications of dip switch settings to see if anyone's buffing certain characters, networking tweaks stemming from the beta, hitbox displays in the training mode, etc.).  If you love competitive fighting games, you should really pick this one up as this certainly won't be a game people stop playing online after one week.

As for the control issue, the version is developed with a more leinent command input timing window and I've found the analog sticks to be very sufficient for the most part.  My major hangup is in the dragon punch motion where I can't get it to pull off about 1 or 2 times out every 10 times I go for it.  When both fighters' health meters are low and you're in a scramble, anxiety might up the ratio of not being up to pull off a move, but, overall, I've found it to be quite satisfactory, even on the 360's brutal (for fighters and rhythm games) controller.