Sonic Boom - Reflection

Feature by Patrick Coakley, published on Sunday 22nd March 2009

So it’s been a while since my last Sonic Boom column, and a lot of things seemed to have changed since then. Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix has come and gone, and Street Fighter IV has finally been released after much waiting. Then you have worldwide release dates for BlazBlue and King of Fighters XII, and the all-but-confirmed re-release of Marvel vs Capcom 2 for PSN and XBLA. The world of fighters is going to be very crowded soon, a problem the genre hasn’t faced since the early-to-mid ‘90s. And that’s not even including Tekken 6 and the possible Virtua Fighter 5: R for the end of the year.

Finally released almost at the end of 2008, HD Remix wasn’t exactly the ideal situation for most Street Fighter fans. While it made a big splash at first, the many bugs and apparent issues with the game forfeited any chance of it being picked up for the long term. Broken leaderboards, bad desynching, glitching lifebars, and weak tournament options made many players give up within the first month. While it was finally patched just last week, SFIV has clearly taken over the top spot for online fighters on the 360 and PS3.

Speaking of Street Fighter IV, the game seems to be very popular with casuals and even some hardcore fans, which is what the genre needs. I personally have a list of grievances I have with it, but then again I am very particular about what Street Fighter games I like. While I wouldn’t give Capcom/DIMPS any awards for what they’ve done with the online play, it still stands up really well all things considered, and I’m hopeful that anything they do in the future will now be almost on par with GGPO.

Marvel vs Capcom 2 as a downloadable title is certainly something I’m hoping isn’t false, and at this point it seems to have a possible release this July. While some people want a rebalanced version, I’m all for getting the original arcade release. Rebalancing Marvel would take an incredibly long time and wouldn’t be worth it just because people always find problems with balancing anyways. Custom soundtracks will make everything about this game that much better.

With King of Fighters XII coming out this summer, I can only say that I’m cautiously optimistic about this one. It’s missing quite a few characters that everyone would love to have included that aren’t, like Yamazaki. Since this is a dream match, nobody should be excluded, but it’s sort of understandable considering the work that must go into all those new HD sprites. For all these new 2D fighters high-definition sprites has finally become an important objective in development, some of the more creative and beautiful coming from BlazBlue, the so-called “spiritual successor” to Guilty Gear. While I’m not the biggest fan of Arc’s stuff, I’ll definitely be giving this a shot when it comes out this summer.

On the 3D front, not much is coming until fall at the earliest. Namco is taking its sweet time getting Tekken 6 onto the PS3 and 360, and SEGA is being incredibly non-talkative about porting over Virtua Fighter 5: R. Outside of those two, Dead Or Alive is the only other franchise in the 3D fighter genre that seems to have any developments for the near future. Despite Itagaki’s departure from Tecmo, a new DOA was at least confirmed to be in the making last year. Whether or not it will be exclusive remains to be seen as the formerly 360-exlusive Ninja Gaiden II is going to the PS3, and the recent economic changes have pushed developers to making more multi-platform games regardless of said series’ prior history.

And with that, the year in fighters is basically done. There’s no Arcana Heart 2 console release for the US, no news on any other downloadable games, and no new details on Dissidia’s US release coming this August. While this seems like it’s a year packed full of good fighters, I’m still left wanting more. Where’s some semblance of effort on getting Tatsunoko vs Capcom out of Japan? Why is the only new Dragon Ball game a terrible 3D fighter exclusive to the PSP that’s based on the upcoming disaster movie? All of these games and there’s still no details on a lot of things. Here’s hoping that we get some answers by the next article.