joe randel's art dump

Street fighter 4 has been announced.  Everyone in the game world knows this by now.  If not then, come out from under your rock and see what you’ve missed.

Now I’ll be the first to stand in line an proclaim my love for Street Fighter.  I remember why back in high school I would wander down to the corner store and play it’s hack version of SF2.  I actually never knew it was a hack until years later.  It played just like a regular version.  No cheats or crazy stuff but it did have some art missing.  Anyway, I would go and play that machine every freak’n time I had.  I bought every version on the SNES and went crazy for the Alpha series.  Then Street Fighter 3 came along.  It was truly Street Fighter perfected.  The art, the animation, the tight controls and balanced game play.  Perfect.

So now that there’s number 4 you would think that I’m super happy.  Sadly I am not.  The more I see of SF4 the less I’m impressed with it.  But I tell myself, self… it’ll be awesome.  It’ll be tight.  It’ll be Street Fighter.  But I can’t shake the early feelings that I have for this game.

It makes me sad that it’s gone 3D.  I personally think the 3D look ridiculous.  The backgrounds and environments are very nice, but the characters lack that certain quality that the 2D had.  I also remember seeing an interview with some of the development team and they said they felt that they took 2D as far as it could go with the series.  I don’t believe this to be true for a moment and it brings a tear to my eye when I think about it.  What also bugs me is the fact that they’ve brought back the whole crew from SF2.  This kind of thing never bothered me before.  All the different versions of SF2 in the past never got my goat, but this time… come on.  SF3 saw a new cast and it was great!  We can’t go back now!  It’s like Capcom is remaking SF2 in 3D but throwing in some new characters and calling it number 4.  Even the new environments are takes on the old SF2 ones.

Sigh… maybe I’m just too hardcore for my own good.  Maybe I’m taking it too personal.  Naw!  SF4 will be a great game I’m sure, but it just doesn’t get my vote.  I’ll sit here and play my SF3 thank you.

2D forever!