One of these days I'm going to max out how long a blog post title can be.  

It’s been a long road to get to this point.  I’ll be the first to admit that things didn’t go as smoothly as it could’ve, but every set back and delay created the opportunity to make a better game.  As a producer, a delay in a release date is the last thing you want to hear.  But in the big picture, the product that’s going to be release next week is a far superior version to what would’ve been released had we released when we originally planned a year ago. 

So as you probably read in Seth’s post a little while ago, the official release date will be as follows: 

PSN US: 11/25/08  (Sorry guys, the EU and Asia dates are still TBD at the moment)

360: 11/26/08 

That’s just in time to get your Street Fighter on during Thanksgiving break.  It will all be for the very reasonable price of $15 for the PSN version and 1200 points for the LIVE version.  That measly exchange of digital currency will get you a list of stuff so long, I needed the lead designer, David Sirlin, to help me out by sending a list of all the goodies to remind me of everything that’s packed in there. 

1) Two games in one. You get the gameplay of the classic Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, just like the arcade, and the brand new sequel to that game, Street Fighter HD Remix, both in one package. (They are called Classic and Remixed in the menus.) That means you get the nostalgia of the old, awesome gameplay AND you get a new, rebalanced game guided by the wisdom tournament pros have accumulated over the last 14 years. 

We simply cannot overstate how much help the Street Fighter community was in creating the Remixed mode.  On the development side, we have David Sirlin who’s made his name in the tournament scene playing Super Turbo for over a decade now.  Here at Capcom, we have Seth Killian, who’s not only a cynical community manager, but also has a long history with the Evolution tournament scene and has represented the US at international Super Turbo tournaments.  To round out the internal cast, we have the QA lead Derek Neal who is frustratingly good at the game and has an almost OCD affliction to creating combo videos.  He has a number of highly regarded videos on youtube and has created the combo videos that you’ve seen on SFHD so far.

Apart from guys actually paid to work on the game, we’ve also received help from guys that you’ll see top ranked in almost every SF tournament they participate in. Just to name a few names, we had help from John Choi, Alex and Graham Wolf, Tokido, and Jason Cole.  

The goal of all this effort was to bring you a new mode to the game that is effectively a new Street Fighter II game.  For more detail, check out previous blog entries on the changes. 

2) HD graphics. Every single piece of art in the game is redrawn in 1080p HD by the folks at Udon Comics.  That includes backgrounds, characters, endings, menus, and—well—everything.  When we started the project, we started talking to fans very early.  We got both good and bad feedback on art very early and some of this feedback made it into game.

3) Remixed music. All the music in the entire game is new. Every stage, every ending, and the menus. All from the guys at www.OCRemix.org.  They are a community of musicians that have love of video game music and creating their own spin on it.  We had tossed around the idea of adding Remixed music to the game, but didn’t have the time or the resources to make it happen.  When the artists at OCRemix came to our attention, we realized that they would be perfect for the job. We loved their music and they were passionate about Street Fighter.  

You can check out an original track and the Remix version. 

4) Widescreen mode. On an HDTV, you can play the game in its original 4:3 aspect ratio, or switch to widescreen mode to fill your screen during gameplay. Widescreen mode zooms in and has slightly different camera behavior, but has no effect whatsoever on gameplay. 

 

5) Every combination of the features above. Whether you’re playing Remixed or the Classic game, you can turn HD sprites on or off. If you turn them off, you’ll get the original game’s sprites scaled up in all their blocky glory. This has no impact on gameplay, it’s just visual. Regardless of whether you play in Classic/Remix and HD sprites on/off, you can also turn remixed music on/off. If you prefer the original game’s tunes, go for it, it’s up to you. Finally, no matter which of any of those modes you’re in, you can play in widescreen mode or 4:3 mode. All of this stuff is independent so you can customize these options however you want. 

Also note that when you play online, your opponent won’t even know what your choices are regarding HD sprites on/off, remixed music on/off or widescreen mode on/off. All three of those affect your experience only, and your opponent might have different settings for those options on his end. 

6) Advanced networking. The delays in this project gave us a chance to experiment with several different networking techniques and we chose the best. We went with a predictive/rollback system that has the advantage of reducing input delay. I know that sounds pretty jargon-filled, so in plain English, it makes the game feel responsive and look smooth, even during lag. We were able to refine this from the feedback on our open beta test, and also from a few experimental things we tried in the patch to the open beta. 

The final version of the game has another feature called “smoothing” that lets you turn the input delay up or down. We found that best results were when there’s a very small input delay of 2 frames.  It’s a small delay that is still responsive, but can help mask network lag.  But you can set this to suit your own tastes. 

We once again reached out to the Street Fighter community for their input on this. Tony Cannon, another EVO founder and overall nice guy, created the PC based networking gaming code known as GGPO.  He was extremely helpful in giving us suggestions to improve what we had in SFHD.  We’re confident in saying that the result is unquestionably the best console online fighting game netcode to date. 

7) Double-blind character selection online. When you’re playing online, don’t you hate it when your opponent refuses to pick a character until the last possible moment because he’s trying to make you pick first? He wants to see who you pick so he can pick the best character to beat yours. In HD Remix, all online play has double-blind character selection. That means that you cannot see who your opponent picked or even where his character selection box is until both of you finish picking your characters. Now there’s no reason to stall on this screen, you might as well just pick your character right away. 

8) 8-player tournaments, Ranked Matches, and Unranked Matches with up to 4 spectators.  As you saw from the open beta test, you can create your own 8-player, single elimination tournaments as well as Ranked and Unranked Matches.  The results for Tournaments go to the leaderboards but those results don’t contribute to any kind of actual rank (you get to choose who enters your tournaments so we can’t really make them ranked) but after the tournament is over, anyone can see the bracket to verify who won.  Ranked Matches of course will track your win/loss record and assign you a rank based on your record and who you’ve played. 

9) A new announcer. We got overwhelming feedback that people did NOT like the voice of the high-pitched announcer in the original game. He’s usually referred to as “Big Bird.” We replaced him with a more gruff sounding voice. While we were at it, we replaced Guile’s girly sounding “Sonic Boom” with the more manly version from Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting. Give this one some time, and you’ll realize that almost anything is better than Big Bird. 

10) Revised endings. Udon revised and rewrote the story and text of the endings to make it consistent with the current canon. And of course they redrew them, too.

 

11) Original costume colors. The original game has 8 costume colors for each character, but these costumes do NOT include the original iconic colors from the first Street Fighter 2. So if you want to play Ryu wearing white or Ken wearing red, your only choice was to play the “old” versions of those characters by using a code. The old versions had slightly different (usually worse) gameplay. First of all, you no longer need a code to select the old characters in Classic mode, you choose between two different game logos: Super Turbo and Super SF2. 

The cooler news here is about the costume colors in the Remixed game though. You can’t play the old characters at all in that game, but of course you want to be able to pick those iconic colors. You can. Select your character with the jab button to get that character’s old-school costume. If you want the color that used to be on jab, hold any punch button for 2 seconds. That means in the Remixed game, you have access to 9 different costume colors in total. 

10) The CPU difficulty. In the original game, the difficulty of the computer AI is ridiculously hard. It’s harder than in any other Street Fighter game ever. Beating the first opponent is hard and beating the third one is usually beyond hard. Well, it’s just as hard as ever if you pick Classic mode, but in Remixed mode, we fixed up the difficulty so that easy is actually easy, medium is actually medium, and so on. Try playing the HD Remix arcade mode (where you fight all the CPU opponents), then if you want to risk breaking your controller in frustration, switch to Classic arcade mode. 

12) Hitbox display. In training mode, you can turn a display of the game’s hitboxes to see what’s really going on under the hood. Blue boxes are where your character can be hit and red boxes are where you can hit the opponent. This is our gift to the hardcore community, so they can refine their strategies more than ever.

 

13) Game speed. The game speeds match the arcade version of the game, but this is confusing so bear with me. In SF HD Remix, speed 3 is the default and is intended for tournament play and online play. It’s the same speed as Japanese arcade speed 3, which is also known as US arcade speed 2. You don’t really have to understand what’s going on with all that, just play at the default speed 3 and be happy that it matches the arcade. 

Furthermore, there is a speed 0 in there for the hardcore players. On all speeds except 0, the game uses its own system of dropping frames in order to increase speed (we didn’t touch this, the arcade version did it too). This does affect whether some combos are possible/impossible. Speed 0 is slow, but it will let combo masters and makers of combo videos take frame-dropping out of the equation when they are trying to figure out which crazy combos are possible. 

14) Dipswitches. The Dreamcast version has several secret dipswitches for turning bug fixes on and off. We took the dipswitches that actually affect gameplay and put them in a menu for you to adjust, if you want. These only affect offline matches, so you can’t use them online. Note that the default setting for many of these is for a given bug to be fixed in Remixed mode but still unfixed in Classic mode (have to stay true to the original!).  Here’s a rundown of all the dipswitch settings: 

 Ability to throw an opponent who was dizzied by a throw

Ability to store Honda's super

Ability to store Honda's command throw

Ability to store Chun Li's super

When Bison does a headstomp that hits a rising opponent only a few pixels above ground level, he briefly pauses

Old Characters in Classic Mode can cancel the same normal moves into special moves as...Super/Super Turbo characters

Slowdown during hit-stun

Percentage chance that the first frame of Old Ryu's air hurricane kick is unblockable

Percentage chance that the first frame of Old Ken's air hurricane kick is unblockable

Percentage chance that the first frame of Akuma's air hurricane kick is unblockable

Percentage chance that the first frame of Blanka's horizontal ball is unblockable

Percentage chance that the first frame of Blanka's vertical ball is unblockable

Vega's super drains the meter when he...touches wall/grabs opponent

Ability for Sagat to perform a reversal Super

Can do Sagat’s super using a kick button during a 1 frame window

Dhalsim’s reversal super

Ken’s reversal super

Some moves, such as Chun Li’s throw, which normally require a forward/back input can be done with an up input. 

15) The dipswitch “hat.” We didn’t want to have to worry about tournament situations where someone changes the dipswitches to their advantage without anyone realizing it. In SF HD Remix, if you change even one dipswitch, a blue dot with a chrome enclosure will appear at the top middle of the screen, above the KO. It looks kind of like a hat for the KO icon. Anyway, if you see that, you immediately know that someone has changed the dipswitches.

 

16) Button config. You get the best button config screen we could think of. Both players can set their buttons at the same time. It’s NOT that horrible kind of button config where it lists the buttons, then you have to scroll through various functions for that button. That kind is bad because when it says Y Button, or whatever, you might not even know which button that is if you have an arcade joystick. Even if you know, it takes a moment to think about it and figure out what is what. 

Our button config works like this. You don’t have to know what any buttons are called and you don’t have to care about the layout on your controller or joystick. You simply press the buttons on your controller in this order: jab, strong, fierce, short, forward, roundhouse. That’s it. You don’t even have to tap down in between: we do that for you automatically. Furthermore, after you press those 6 buttons, you’ll end up on something called “unassigned.” If you press the remaining two buttons on your controller, we’ll unassign those for you so they don’t do anything if you accidentally hit them. If you unassign those (so you did 8 presses total) then we’ll move the menu highlight to ACCEPT for you automatically. Also note that we even support mapping more than one button to a function if you want. If you want two fierce buttons, then go for it! 

17) Bragging rights.  Aside from the in game leaderboards/scoreboards, we are going to be supporting an external website that will track your rank and records. This website (URL to be announced) will not only track your win/loss record, but will go into granular stats, like how many times you’ve thrown a character or how many projectiles you’ve launched.  This website will be the definitive place to flaunt your Street Fighter prowess. 

18) Timer in the character selection screen. This is pretty much a no brainer, but something our last online fighting game didn't have.  There wil be a timer during the character selection screen to prevent any griefing.

19) Competition. Everyone is going to be playing this thing, so you’ll have no problem finding competition. Super Street Fighter Turbo is still played in tournaments 14 years after its release, so we hope that you’ll be playing SF HD Remix for that long as well. 

I’m sure there’s stuff we’re missing too, but even with that, it’s pretty easy to see that SFHD is more than just Super Turbo with a new coat of paint.  Like I opened, it’s been a long road, but one that I’m confident has created a Street Fighter worth waiting for.  

Lot’s of thanks all of you guys, the fans, for being patience and still keeping up the hype.  From working on this game, I’ve personally met a lot of cool SF heads I wouldn’t have met otherwise and I have to say, the Street Fighter franchise is fortunate for having you guys to support it.  I'll be in and out of this post today and try to answer any questions you guys may have.

Just in case you’ve missed it, here’s all the media you need to familiarize yourself with all that is Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. 

 http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/900/900199/vids_1.html 

Capcombo Video from Derek Neal on Vimeo. 

 

Screenshots