Sunday, April 26, 2009

This is how we do math... IN THE STREETS

Take this:


Plus this:


and you get THIS:




Ahhhhhh. :) That was a fun Sunday afternoon project. There's a few things I would have done differently, but not much. For a first time mod I'm pretty damn happy with the way it turned out honestly. The fact that I didn't short out the circuit board and catch my hair on fire was a victory in and of itself. I also installed an octagonal restrictor gate on the joystick (to make it feel more like an American-style joystick). It was weird going back to it... I wonder if I've used a square gate for so long that I'm better with them now? It doesn't matter too much because it was the cheapest part of the lot. The new buttons I installed are AWESOME though. They're super sensitive and I'm already noticing some combos are flowing easier because of it. Swapping the gumball for the bat-top on the joystick was a good move too... it feels much more "substantial" in my left hand now. That's staying for sure. As for the art, well I really liked it when I saw it linked in a couple of forum posts, so I just sort of cobbled together some templates that I liked (definitely wanted to keep the Street Fighter 4 "splatter" motif) plus that particular image and worked them together. I think it worked out pretty well. :)

In more Street Fighter news, they released the FREE "Power Pack" update. This adds an online tournament mode. While there are still no online lobbies (a grave oversight in my opinion), the new championship mode really takes care of some big problems I had with the online mode. Mainly, the fact that there's a double blind select now (so you're more likely to see people playing other characters instead of trying to counter your pick) and a disconnect % (so you can see if they're a sore losing wanker who disconnects before they get a loss on their record). Other than that, Championship works very much like regular matchmaking: you can play Arcade mode while you wait for your match in the brackets. The cool thing is that if you win the virtual tournament, you're allowed to save your replay for studying later. Finding replays is not an intuitive process at all but once you know how it's simple to find them. It's really interesting to watch top players' tactics, as you would imagine. Capcom is making a huge push to make Street Fighter 4 as significant as the impact that Street Fighter II had. While I think that's an unattainable goal, they're doing a great job reaching for it. Now put a player match lobby system in there and you'll have crafted the finest fighting game this generation Capcom!

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