Saturday night turned out to be full of surprises, but one of the most fun was a stop by Super7's 7th anniversary party. For those not in the know, Super7 is THE spot for crazy kaiju collectors, vinyl toys, and geek t-shirt armageddon. It's a small shop, but full of magic. As soon as you step inside, you're immediately transported into another world, one you may not have even known existed, but one that's clearly chock full of backstories, mystery, and love, all fueled by the transportive smells of vinyl and electricity in the air. In addition to getting the Flynn's makeover with rad OG arcade cabinets, the party also featured special appearances from designers Kiyoka Ikeda and Koji Harmon, as well as everyone's favorite special guest, free beer!

In the spirit of Flynn's Arcade, Super7 staff was running scoring contests on the OG arcade cabinets. I can get a little... "competitive" at those things, but as a secret pro in a room full of regular people, I limited myself to dominating the Ms. Pac-Man machine, while my buddy Alex handled the competition on Frogger. Super7 came correct in the prize department, and Alex took home a brand-new Wii, and I scored a giant sack full of their best t-shirts, including a complete set of the TRON series (tank, lightcycle, recognizer, and MCP), and some great art books. They were all very cool, and anyone in San Francsicso's Japantown owes it to themselves to stop by and smell the magic.

Melanie (aka Croik from Ace Attorney supersite court-records.net), wrote up an amazingly in-depth review of the CAPTIVATE08 event from her unique perspective. We didn't even bribe her! Check it out here. Here's a quote from her write-up, which I like because it says a lot about the new, community-scented breezes blowing at Capcom:

After introductions were made of the main Capcom players and event heads, I was a little mortified when they asked for us Community folks to stand up and get introduced as well. So I stood up in my Trigun Tshirt, tiniest person there, and waved hello to the gaming press like a sixth grader at the first day of school, while being introduced as "[she] runs the large Ace Attorney site." To my shock, murmurs of recognition went through the crowd. People in suits recognized what that meant. I think I almost died (in a good way).

Community ftw!

Don't be fooled by my boring old screenshot, this is the real deal: a brand new artistic SFIV trailer! Head over to the flash-tastic streetfighter.com, click on the "Street Fighter IV: Let's Do This" tab at the top of the page, and you'll find a beautiful, brand-new, never-before-seen SFIV trailer of Guile battling Abel, rendered in a "sand painting" style. Go now!

As you may have heard, this past week was our epic CAPTIVATE08 press event. Held in the Palms’ hotel + casino’s “Sky Villa” (aka the 20k/night suite detailed here), CAPTIVATE is where we show off our latest and greatest inventions to an elite group of press from around the world. Well, elite press, and… you. This year we were proud to invite 5 specially selected members of our Capcom Community to join us in Vegas, where they got all-access passes to our darkest secrets. After threatening them with zombie dismemberment if they leaked stuff early, I’m happy to report that they all turned out to be fun, delightfully-scented, supremely well-informed, and just overall cool. Basically our idea with community is to treat them like… gasp… real people who love Capcom as much as we do, and as people who occasionally even have non-idiotic ideas. Beyond that, we just want to have as much fun as possible, and I think this week was a big success.

Team Community flew in from around the country on Wednesday afternoon and began drifting up to the Sky Villa, but did not all unite to form Capcom Unity Voltron until later that evening at our “welcome to Vegas reception.” The crowd at the reception included designers and producers from our major teams, as well as superstars like Keiji Inafune, MMA champion Cung Le (more on that later!), and a bunch of filthy marketing creeps. Ace Attorney superfan Melanie got to hear insider dirt on the crazy English voice recording sessions for Phoenix Wright from the voices themselves, and Capcom VPs like Nique Fajors and Christian Svensson stopped by to chat them up, as well as producers including Ono-san (Street Fighter IV) and Ben Judd (Bionic Commando and BC Rearmed). Of course Ben Judd overstayed his welcome at the Community table and had to be bounced, but after the reception it was back to the Sky Villa, where our SFIV machines (among many other great games) were in full effect until the wee, wee hours of the morning. The presentations began bright and early the next morning, so it was time to chug some aspirin and pay attention. You’ll hear more details about what we saw there tomorrow (like watching Dark Void in full effect, and Kawata-san playing through some truly scary RE5 scenarios), but after that wrapped, we hit lunch, and while the suckers from the press were filing their little reports, we headed over to the “Star Trek Experience.” Well… probably the less said about that, the better. “The Experience” has a lot of grade-A memorabilia, but the rides were a bit, how do you say… sucky? The Star Trek-themed café was also closed, which was a weaksauce ending, but we were able to laugh about it, and Travis kept talking all things Capcom right on through the whole thing. That’s the love! After the Star Trek experience we got dragged back to the boring old Sky Villa filled with top secret new games, but we weren’t forced to stay for long, because we had to run back downstairs to catch our ride over to the gun range. Why put a bunch of community fans and press at the controls of some serious firepower? Because who else is going to shoot up those Capcom zombie practice targets?

After a surprisingly brief safety briefing, they turned us all loose on a variety of full-auto submachine guns. I got stuck with the nearly un-aimable full-auto Glock 9mm machine pistol. As it turns out, something that explodes by firing 20 rounds in 3 seconds and only weighs about 3 ounces is, well, a bit hard to steer. That’s my defense for my shamefully wide target spread, anyway. It could also be that I just suck, but everybody else trying to ride the wild Glock pony reported similar trouble. Team Community did a little better and saved face. After dinner at Little Buddha, we headed up to Moon nightclub. In addition to the open bar and balcony overlooking the Playboy Club’s go-go dancers, the club has about the best view of Vegas in town and a retractable roof. Why does the roof retract? Because it’s awesome. Friday also meant more aspirin and more presentations about everything happening with our new games, but it also had an hour for a special meeting between “the Capcom Stalker” Shawn Baxter and RE5 super-producer Takeuchi-san. Their discussions were top secret, but they involved two translators, an orange, a box of mysterious stuff from Kinkos, and the most terrifying ringtone I’ve ever heard. After the Friday presentations ended, everyone ate and settled back down for their last chance to play the new games. The day only ended when we finally had to shut down the SFIV machines to load them on the truck. As Chris went around turning off their power, community and gaming editors alike literally stood there with their mouths open, hoping somehow fate would intervene to keep the machines on (which were occupied like literally every minute of the week). Even after the power was off, a few kept standing around hoping somehow this would change via some kind of Christmas miracle. It was so funny I had to laugh out loud. They’ll get plenty of time to play more, but for the moment, they’ll just have to wait like everybody else.

After some tears (okay, nobody cried, though there were some hugs), we said our goodbyes and packed off team Community to the airport. As a Capcom fan turned employee myself, I just want to give them the experience I wish I could have had, and I think this weekend was a big success. It was really great finally meeting them in person and having them there, and I think they did a great job representing fans from a lot of different Capcom franchises to the press and to everyone at Capcom. Shoutouts are owed to a lot of people at Capcom as well—instead of a handshake and fake smile for a few publicity shots, they truly gave our community the real experience, and the community guys (and girl) were getting enthusiastically grilled for their thoughts by the dev teams every time I turned around. Click here to check out the first of our gigantic deluge of CAPTIVATE08 pics! Favorite quote of the weekend: Melanie to Ben Judd: "It was nice meeting you." Ben Judd: "Yes. Yes it was." Melanie: "…" Travis also had some reservations about Ben:

Classic Judd!

It's Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix producer Rey Jimenez, checking in to detail yet another supercool piece of fanservice he's packing into the game for you. Can this thing GET any better? Maybe if it made my XBox smell like cinnamon during the download. At any rate, smell what Rey is cooking:

Just wanted to update you guys with a quick look at the new hitbox display feature we’re implementing for training mode in SFHD. Just to give you a breakdown of what’s going on, the blue boxes represent the characters hitbox. This is the areas where the characters can be hit. The red box is the offensive hit box. It shows the areas of the character that are attacking. Whenever a redbox overlaps the opponents blue box, the result will be a hit. When a red box overlaps an opponents red box, they will almost always trade hits (where both players get hit). There are exceptions to this that I’ll let you guys figure out when the game comes out. For those looking to become great at the game, you’ll find this to be an invaluable tool to figure out spacing (very key to the game) and exactly when and for how long a move is able to hit the opponent. Well, that’s it for now. Be on the look out very soon for more assets being released on the game. You guys haven’t been using the blog to ask questions lately, and I’d like to open the blog back up to that sort of dialog. I’ll do my best to address what I can in the comments (except for the release date ;P).

On behalf of all my fellow fighting game scientists out there, "Thanks Rey!"