The “Break it Down” Blog

1up has some information on the upcoming Street Fighter 4 (Above is an in-game screenshot). Some of the interesting tid-bits is that yes it’s still a 2D style fighter with the standard 6-button controls (woohoo!) but the world is modeled in 3D, as you can tell from the screenshot above. Look’s like a little cell-shaded action going on (look at the sharp outlines on his feet).

I think it was a smart move to keep it the 2D fighting style (meaning horz fighting, no free-roaming 3D world in every direction). That is the style that gamers have always played in the Street Fighter series… unless Capcom decided on reinventing the game completely (which could be a bad thing) then sticking to your roots and evolving the existing Street Fighter material a few generations is all candy coating.

There is a core design element of the 2D fighter that makes it so appealing… it becomes about the split-second reaction times, counter attacks and button mashing… because the world (up, down, left, right) is so simple, it’s easy to focus and hone your skills at the combos you learn and your response time instead of worrying about walking around a 3D world, attacking from all different angles. So thanks Capcom for keeping things old-school.

Hell, cartoon hand-animated Street Fighters have served us just fine for the last decade! If you hadn’t seen this before, this is basically one of the most incredible Street Fighter moments in history, during a tournament, 1 player (almost dead Ken) performs a full-parry against Chun-Li’s super attack then counters with a super for the win… the timing to perform that has to be perfect, and gives you an idea of just how much pressure is on Capcom to nail timing and things like that in these games: