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Street Fighter IV: Captivate Preview

• By Chris Morell
• June 03, 2008 14:16 PM PST
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GamePro gets a peek at the Xbox 360 version of Street Figther IV, along with hours of time with the final arcade version!

"We want to get people back into fighting games," says Street Fighter IV's producer.

Last week we enjoyed a mega overload of Street Fighter IV at Capcom's "Captivate" press event at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas. As a treat, they brought along four Street Fighter IV arcade machines, letting us at the game whenever we had free time. Joy! Later, though, we got a nice update of the console versions of the game, specifically focused on the Xbox 360 version.

A new trailer led off the presentation by the game's producer, Yoshinori Ono, introducing the new characters: Abel, Rufus, Crimson Viper and El Fuerte, providing a little bit of back story for each. There were also some artistic introductions of all the returning characters, which was pretty dang cool.

Out With the New

Ono said one of the development team's biggest goals is to bring back the old Street Fighter audience. "We want to get people back into fighting games, and the pure fun from Street Fighter II...a similar gameplay experience from SFII on the SNES," Ono said. He also believes Street Fighter IV is a good entry point to get people back into the series. "It'll have the appropriate online feature," Ono added, unable to reveal any specifics about the game's online mode.

Fans should know that Street Fighter IV is keeping the series patented 2D gameplay, but using 3D elements, like 3D models and polygons, to bring it up to graphical speed. And after spending lots of time with the arcade version, which is incredibly fun. I played with a lot of the returning characters: Ken, Ryu, Guile, E. Honda, Dhalsim and Chun Li, to a couple of the new characters. My favorite new character so far is Crimson Viper, who has some furiously fast fiery kicks. I fought GamePro editor Travis Moses, who wailed on me with E. Honda, but I eventually got mine when I got in a rhythm with Ken.

Capcom was receiving a lot of flak for the early collision detection in the game, but they've completely retooled since. Originally the development team was using 3D collision detection, but it just didn't feel like Street Fighter. So now, they've replaced it with old 2D detection, and it's playing much, much better.

Street Fighter IV is keeping the series patented 2D gameplay, but using 3D elements to bring it up to graphical speed.

Animated Endings

In the arcade version of the game, each character has more of a slideshow-style ending, but in the console versions, each gets a full video ending. "We're working on full animated endings," said Ono. This way, there's more value and meaning to each character's individual story. Sure, it's an extra for console owners, but Ono said it wasn't created for this purpose. The budget for the arcade game was running out, so they couldn't afford to create animated endings for the arcade version. But us console owners reap the benefit of Capcom's console support. And as an additional bonus, we'll see animated prologues that shed even more light on character background.

Ono ended his presentation by teasing us with the game's new boss, called simply "Seth," for now. Hopefully we'll get more info on that front when the Street Fighter IV arcade machines launch next month in Japan.

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