The Negative Edge News Report 5.02.07
Posted by Tommy Coloma on 05.02.2007
Another Street Fighter 2 remix, Sub-Zeroed farm animals, your last chance to be part of the Halo 3 beta in-crowd, and More!
Welcome to another edition of The Negative Edge. I picked up 360 over the weekend. So, that makes two new systems over the past two weeks. It was a really bad idea considering the fact that the startup that I'm working for is sort of in flux right now (apparently a common thing for startups as one of my coworkers has already been in several that have gone under). However, I'll justify the purchase by saying that I'll be using the 360 and XNA to learn C# so that I have something extra to add to my resume. Yeah. It'll be a learning tool. But, first and foremost, it's a gaming machine (at least it is to me). I'll admit that I got a 360 Elite. It was easy enough to pick one up in my town. So, is the extra $80 worth it? Hell no! I should not have to spend more than $200 for a gaming machine. But, when compared to the price of the Premium, I think that it is worth it. The HDMI cable alone is worth $40 so that leaves $40 for 100 extra gigs of space. Of course, the price of the hard drive is already over-inflated. The way Sony handles hard drive upgrades on for the PS3 is infinitely better. Anyway, I've put the extra space to good use as I've already downloaded 40+ gigs worth of demos and previews. Oh, and before you ask, I do not see any difference between component and HDMI. The only good thing is that with HDMI you only have to plug in one cable for both video and audio. How awesome is that? I was also able to use the same free cable to connect my laptop to my TV. I'm glad that Microsoft didn't spring for a proprietary HDMI connector for the back of the 360. As far as games are concerned, I just got a few Live Arcade games for now - Castlevania, TMNT, and Street Fighter. There are also more than enough demos for me to mess around with. I have too much on my plate as it is. However, I am looking for a game that I can throw on for 5-30 minutes at a time without having to be concerned about finishing it. A game that's fun to play just for the hell of it. The only thing I can think of is DOA 4. I'll probably pick that up but if you happen to have any suggestions, drop me a line and tell me about them.
Alright, time for some news -
Old-school play mechanics but prettied up for the younger crowd
Super Street Fighter II Turbo in HD for the Xbox 360 and PS3. This was in the news a little while ago, but I never covered it for one reason or another. I guess that's a good thing because a lot of the facts about it weren't really available until a little bit after the official announcement was made. So, here's a little breakdown for those of you who care. Note that most of this info was gathered from sirlin.net, a site (owned/operated/maintained?) by David Sirlin, a producer and game designer at Backbone Entertainment. On the site there's a response section where he addresses questions and suggestions. It's a long read but fear not - I've gone through the whole thing in order to give you the good stuff. There's also someone in the 411mania staff that works at Backbone (he's actually name dropped somewhere in Sirlin's site), but I didn't want to put him in a compromising position, so this'll have to do -
- "Put new art into SSF2T, make it online, and make it conform to 360/PS3 standards." That is pretty much the only thing that they are allowed to do. No gameplay changes. They were only asked to make changes to the sprites while keeping the original gameplay intact. From my perspective, that's great. To this day, SSF2T is the most balanced Street Fighter game around. All of the characters can be played competitively if you're good enough unlike games like CVS2 where a crouching fierce from Blanka or Sagat can annihilate most of the characters with ease and half the cast, while cool looking, suck ass. The only bad thing about SSF2T is the fact that visually, it hasn't really aged very well. Back when I was still in college I always thought about how great it would be to have something that plays like Super Turbo but with Guilty Gear-like graphics. Now we can have great gameplay along with great graphics. Isn't that great?
- The graphics will be done by Udon, the same people that did the ending graphics for Capcom Fighting Jam. You can take a look at some of their stuff here and a comparison shot between the new and old graphics here. Looks nice? Yes it does. Yes it does.
- "Akuma will be in check." Imagine being able to select a character in Halo that always has the Plasma Sword equipped. Nobody likes fighting people that only use top-tier characters. I'm glad that someone realizes that overpowered characters have no place in regular online games (I'm looking at you and your Tengu, Itagaki!).
- Sirlin is also the producer of Capcom Classics Collection 2, home of the best conversion of Super Street Fighter II Turbo in existence (so far). So, we have someone that already has experience with the game. I used to frequent the shoryuken.com forums regularly, and I'd always find people whining and bitching about how there's never a good home version of SSF2T. Most of it seemed to stop once CCC2 was released, though they still find little things to complain about.
- The game will not be stretched to give it a wider playing field. It will not be in widescreen format, though they may include the option to stretch the image to fill a wide screen. I like the fact that they aren't making tweaks to the playing field. I don't really want to spend the whole game chasing someone across the screen. There are two things that I'm worried about though - I've download a few Live Arcade games and what really pisses me off is the inability to keep the correct aspect ratio and the inability to zoom in. You can't tell me that the awesome processing power of the 360 cannot be used to maintain the correct aspect ratio or allow you to just zoom in, cropping the top and bottom of the screen in the process. I can make due with part of the life bars and some of the floor being cropped off. My widescreen TV gives me the option to zoom in and it looks nice while playing Guilty Gear XX remix remix 5000%. Also, what's up with Live Arcade games putting crap on the sides of the screen without the option to have pure black borders instead? Haven't they heard of screen burn in? I've only seen one game that gives me the option to remove borders.
- They're taking disconnections seriously. The producer seems to be in favor of the way MS/Bungie do things - disconnecting is treated as a loss and a disconnect. Major offenders will be kept from creating matches and may eventually be banned. Now, I've owned pretty much every 2D fighting game on the Xbox, and there is one thing that none of them have done properly - banning specific people from entering your games. I mean honestly, I play these games to have fun and there are a few people that just aren't fun to play. These people are the ones that RAT (roll and throw), use lag tactics (eg. ratting or just using Honda's head butt all day), or pick characters that aren't fun to play against, like Tengu in DOA 4 (not a 2D game, I know). Or how about when someone continually spams invitations? It's hard to find people to play when someone keeps doing that. We need the option to keep these people from entering our games permanently. It'd also be nice to be able to let those people know who has banned them so that they'll think twice about being a jackass online once the bans start rolling in. This is an option that I'm sure will take another generation to see realized, but it's still nice to ponder the possibilities of having a completely enjoyable experience while playing online.
- They have to abide by Microsoft's 150 MB download limit. Fuck! I've been playing Symphony of the Night for the past few days and I can hear the effects of the size limit. It just hurts my ears. How the hell are they going to fit all the high-rez graphics AND music into this one without it sounding like crap? At least the PS3 doesn't have a size limit, but will Backbone just use the same assets for that version as well?
Even if it doesn't end up being arcade perfect (I'm not that anal about this stuff), I'll be happy to download it once it becomes available as long as it plays nicely online. To this day, the best experience I've had with 2D online games is with ZSNES, an emulator created by amateurs. Why is it that they can create the best experience available with nothing while Xbox Live lags so much? Anyway, this is another game to look forward to later this year.
Beheadings are only cool IN video games!
Sony's image took another beating over the past week thanks to its use of a beheaded goat during a European God of War II event. The goat was apparently already dead and was provided by a real butcher. Unfortunately, news about the Sub-Zeroed goat and stories about attendees drinking soup from its carcass in China bowls spread like wildfire across the nets. They probably meant well, but seriously, using a real goat is kinda out there. Let's just be thankful that the creators of Doom didn't decide to do something similar when they were promoting Doom 3.
This week's releases
Nothing this week unless you want to take a chance on a game based on a movie.
Fortunately, the lack of decent games this week gives us more time to finish everything before Odin Sphere comes out later this month...
A hand drawn 2D side-scrolling action RPG on the PS2 in America? Wow! How many goats did they have to sacrifice to make this a reality?
Here's your chance to avoid Halo 3 Beta scalper prices. I heard that Crackdown is a decent game too.
I haven't personally confirmed that the Halo 3 Beta invite comes with this game. However, according to the people at CAG and the description at Play-Asia, it does. CAG is a pretty reliable source, but here is my disclaimer just in case they're wrong!
According to Wikipedia, Crackdown was created by David Jones, the same person who created the OG Grand Theft Auto. The developers of this game, Realtime Worlds, have made it known that this will probably be a long running series. I'm sure that Microsoft wants to build this future franchise into a major Xbox 360 exclusive but I seriously think that this is not the way to do it. I mean, did the Final Fantasy XII demo that came with Dragon Quest VIII really help the DQ franchise out in America? They should have spent more time making a game that stands out on its own merits and not something that people are "forced" to buy.
Anyway, Halo 3 Beta + Crackdown = $30 + 3.10 for shipping = not feeling left out in 2 weeks.
This week's background wallpaper
Since I'll be using these images as my computer's desktop wallpaper as well as my 360's background wallpaper, I thought that a name change was in order.
I've already spent 40+ hours on Zelda and I still do not see any end in sight. Collect this stuff, collect that stuff. Oh, here are a few more things you need to collect. This character helps to liven things up a little. She (I think it's a she) has more personality than all the previous Links put together. You know it's true!
