1/1/2008 - Ryu vs M. Bison

Happy New Year, everybody... I am back! It's getting harder to find good videos, but I've managed to accumulate a good number of them over the break. Let's start out with the big gaming news of the last month, and that's the coming of the long awaited Street Fighter IV this year. The trailer came out a couple of months ago, and while it looked amazing, we were all wondering if it was a 2-D game or a 3-D game. That was answered just last week with the first video footage of the game which revealed a 2-D fighting engine with 3-D characters and backgrounds. That came as a relief to a lot of fans who believe that SF should remain true to its 2-D roots.

There is one BIG problem that I see with the video, however. The fighting engine might be 2-D (no side-stepping or 3-D movement), but the camera actively pans around the environment in a semi-3-D way. I can see this as a problem because Street Fighter has always been about judging horizontal distances between the fighters; knowing how far your character jumps, the reach of your various punches and kicks, how far away you have to be from Zangief's spinning piledriver grab. If the camera is not straight on the two characters in a purely 2-D way, there's an unneeded extra element of guesswork that has to take place to play the game. I can appreciate the need to show off the technology at work, but that should never distract from the gameplay.

2.5-D may be the "in" thing to do nowadays, but with Street Fighter they should have drawn a line. Either go pure 2-D like Street Fighter II and III, or pure 3-D like Street Fighter EX. Otherwise, you might as well have a game like this: