Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (Xbox 360)
High-res 2D Street Fighter! First details and interview. By Matt Leone
Any time Capcom announces a new Street Fighter, it's a big deal. But what happens when that game is not actually new, but looks as different as anything the series has seen? We're about to find out.
At a press conference yesterday, Capcom announced Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, a downloadable version of the classic fighting game for Xbox Live Arcade and Sony's PlayStation Network. As the title indicates, the game will introduce an entirely new look for the series, with new art and high-resolution character sprites drawn by the artists at Udon Comics to allow the game to run comfortably in 1080p.
In a slide on display during the conference, Capcom showed character sprites from an older Street Fighter game and Guilty Gear next to the projected quality of what the company is looking to create with this HD Remix version -- which in the slide simply looked like hand drawn artwork. The point behind it all is that the company intends for the visuals to be the next step up from Guilty Gear as 2D fighting games go.
COMIC: We don't have any screenshots of Street Fighter in HD yet, but if you want to get a sense of what to expect, check out the art above from the Street Fighter comic. The art in the game is coming from Udon Comics, the company responsible for the sample page above.
While the game is very early in development at this point, Capcom has confirmed online play, a training mode, voice chat, rankings/leaderboards, different matchmaking options, and stat tracking, with a Fall release planned. Because of timing differences in the download schedules on PS3 and 360, the two versions may not hit on the exact same day, but according to Capcom senior director of strategic planning and research, Christian Svensson, "We will be coordinating such that they are within a week of each other."
After the conference, we sat down with Svensson to discuss the game.
1UP: From what I've heard [all development is underway at] Backbone. Is that correct?
CS: The programming and the project management is all being handled by Backbone, but there are multiple people working on this project. As I mentioned [in my speech earlier], Udon Comics is handling the majority of the art tasks as far as root creating all the art. Backbone will be pulling it all together, and making it all work.
1UP: Which team is this?
CS: This is one of the Emeryville teams. And specifically, it's a team that actually has some members of EVO on it, so the point is it's a team that has people who are going to be as critical of what the end product is as anyone out there would be, and that's important to us.
1UP: It's the same team working on Puzzle Fighter and Street Fighter?
CS: It's the same team.
1UP: [Are the HD Remix versions of Street Fighter and Puzzle Fighter] going to be strictly downloadable games? We're not going to see an arcade version of Street Fighter or something like that?
CS: They are strictly downloadable games. There are no arcade plans for either of these projects.
1UP: Are these planned for a Japanese release?
CS: It's something we're still discussing. You know, a lot of the projects we have make sense for Japan, but frankly they have some different sensitivities and we need to make sure that it's okay for their market before we actually go stepping into it.
PUZZLE: This screen from Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix shows off high-res character art that looks similar to the images Capcom showed as its goal for Street Fighter. We should note that the in-game sprites in Puzzle Fighter are not being redrawn to be high-res, but the artwork in match-up screens like this is.
1UP: For Street Fighter, it seems like an ambitious plan to get these new sprites that we haven't seen in 10 years or however long... why the decision to apply them to a classic game rather than a new game?
CS: The nice thing is that we know the mechanics works, and there's a lot less uncertainty in building on top of something that already exists than starting from scratch and worrying about game balance and things of those nature. The nice thing that Super Street Fighter II Turbo gives us is we know it works. Everybody loves it. So that's a starting point. What the future holds -- we'll see how we do with this.
1UP: When you say "it already works," does that mean pixel for pixel this is going to control the same exact way?
CS: The exact, exact way. Pixel for pixel.
1UP: Roughly how long has Street Fighter been in development at this point?
CS: We have been moving forward officially for about a month and a half, so it's very very early. We'd actually done some exploratory work on some of the art side before actually we'd gotten the full green light, because we had to pull together all the materials for actually getting everything approved internally and budgets set, etc. But full actual, full speed ahead, we're going -- about a month and a half.
1UP: And it's going to look better than Guilty Gear?
CS: I will tell you that our sprites will be far more detailed, far larger, and again, [feature] 1080p support.
