12/7/2008 - Street Fighter remix (piano)

So after playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix for almost two weeks, I can give my take on it. I had hyped it up so much in my mind that you'd think there might be some disappointment when it finally came out. That is not the case with this game, however. I bought the Playstation 3 specifically for this game and I can honestly say it was worth it. Regular readers of this blog know of my love for the Street Fighter franchise, and that has it pretty much dominated my gaming life since it first came out in 1991. Sure, I've had mini-obsessions with other games over the years, but I have always come back to the Capcom fighters.

When I first saw the artwork that was going to go into this game, I was amazed already. I have always appreciated the art style that went into the Street Fighter series and I knew that the HD visuals would be in good hands with the manga artists at UDON. You can tell that they care about the characters, and there is no single character in the game that looks out of place. I was quite pleased that they beefed up characters like Sagat, Dhalsim, and M. Bison to look more like their anime counterparts. What I really appreciate, though, is that everything looks consistent now. Back when Super Street Fighter II Turbo was introduced, the sprites of the characters looked pretty much as they did in the first Street Fighter II. And yet, when some of the new moves were introduced, they were more stylized in the anime form and it looked jarringly out of place (see Honda's Ochio Throw, for example). Now that all of the sprites have been redrawn in the anime style, those moves no longer look like add-ons.

Much has been made about the "rebalancing" of the characters in the game. I've always thought that what made Street Fighter uniquely better than most other fighter games is that the characters were so different from one another (besides Ken and Ryu, of course). Take the Mortal Kombat games, for example. They pretty much all have the same moveset except for the special moves and the combos. By and large, though, the number of special moves are the same for the characters, and their combos are just different button combinations from each other. My point is that Mortal Kombat is "pre-balanced" in a way that offers little incentive to pick certain characters because they might have an advantage over others.

In Street Fighter, however, the characters are not just different in movesets alone. Some move faster than others. Some jump higher than others. They have different throwing ranges. With all these differences, it's natural that some characters are going to be be mismatched against others. For example, I can usually fight fairly well as Guile versus someone at my skill level. However, if they choose Chun-Li, I have a much harder time because of her higher jumps. Guile has no effective way to trap Chun-Li as he does against most of the other fighters. That's why I had to learn to use other fighters like Blanka who are better to use against Chun-Li. But I can't solely use Blanka because he's weak against Bison. This kind of rock-paper-scissors element to Street Fighter is one of its strengths, in my opinion and I'm glad to see that the "rebalancing" of the game was a lot more subtle that I thought it would be. Sure, it might have changed the competitive scene forever, but since I'm not at the pro level where I can count frames and remember hitboxes, the rebalancing did not affect my gameplay too much, and certainly not for the worse.

What really excited me about HD remix was that for the first time, I would have the ability to play online against other Street Fighter fans. Sure, I've played in the arcades here in Tucson and back in Las Vegas when I was living there, but that has been the extent of my experience. Believe it or not, there are different Street Fighter "fighting styles" in different regions of the world. For example, a Los Angeles player first introduced me and to the Tucson arcades a way of playing as Guile offensively that was almost invincible (this was before they toned him down in the later games). This changed everything for me as I had long since been a Ryu player, thinking that Guile was only a defensive player.

What I found interesting was that not everybody in the rest of the country knew of this style of Guile playing, even years later when I was at this years Iron Man of Gaming in Dallas. They had a Street Fighter II Turbo console there and I was having quite an easy time as Guile because nobody expected that kind of gameplay. With the ability to play online now, there is no more "regional" style of playing, since you're playing against the whole world. I have been watching many YouTube videos of high ranking players, trying to see how others outside of the Southwest USA are playing, and boy, were my eyes widened. I'm constantly amazed to see the gameplay of folks like Daigo and the other EVO competitors. I know that I would lose to players like that, but at least I wouldn't have to travel to California to do so. With Street Fighter online, it's fun to beat newbies, but it's equally fun losing to pros.

I can't say that the online experience is perfect, however. There are lag issues, especially with those who have slow broadband connections. And there are definitely bugs which lead to disconnects and issues with the HUD. All these issues, I hope, will be fixed by a patch. That's something I'm really looking forward to, because when it works, it works beautifully. It actually amazes me, since Street Fighter has always been about precise timing and complicated controller motions for the special moves and the combos. It bodes well for the upcoming Street Fighter 4 in February.

And finally, we come to the music of the game. When I first heard that they were going to remix the music, I was apprehensive. The Street Fighter soundtrack is probably my second favorite video game soundtrack after Mega Man 2 and it something I could listen to daily without getting tired of it. Remixes are rarely better than the original and I hoped that it would not sound too radically different. I was quite pleased to learn that the remixed soundtrack would be an option for the game and that you could go back to the original arranged soundtrack. In fact, the game has tremendous value in that the non-balanced game remains and you can even turn on those old non-HD sprites if you want! While I prefer the original soundtrack, the remixes are too bad at all, and I'll turn it on if I'm in the mood for it.

That brings me to today's video (finally). Like I said, I could listen to the Street Fighter soundtrack forever and I like to listen to some of the renditions of it on YouTube. There are remixes done on guitar, and some even done on the Mario Paint composer! I never thought there would be a great remix done on the paino, though, and that's what we have here:



I've always thought of the Street Fighter soundtrack as being so universal that anybody would appreciate it (they are World Warriors, after all). I am intensely curious to know whether or not the entire audience knew that this was from a video game... and if they didn't, what was their reaction when they learned that it was.