This is part twelve in an extended series of articles from David Sirlin, detailing the changes we’ve made to the rebalanced mode of the new Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix project. The previous articles can be found here.

This week’s article discusses America’s supersonic superstar, Colonel Guile. Already armed with the best haircut in fighting games, HD Remix Guile is powering up in a few new ways. Read all about it:

Part 12: Guile

Guile is a solid mid-tier character in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST), but it takes quite a bit of player-skill for him to fulfill that potential. As a mid-tier character, he’s eligible for a few upgrades, especially in his bad matchups. More than that, he’s eligible for some fun.

Crazy New Flash Kick
Guile’s roundhouse flash kick goes straight up very high in ST, and has no use I’m aware of. I’ve never seen a good US or Japanese Guile player use it in a real match, so it’s a ripe place for some new spice. Instead of traveling straight up, it now travels very far forward and diagonally up just a bit.

Guile players salivate at this newfound range, but it comes with a price. Great flash kicks come with great recovery. If blocked, it’s the most vulnerable move in the game. A fierce Dragon Punch is pretty vulnerable if you block it too, but Guile’s roundhouse flash kick leaves him pushed right up against you so that it’s very easy to time a combo as he recovers.

The new flash kick means you can’t jump straight up and down at mid-range versus him anymore. He can use it as an escape if you try to cross him up. He can use it to trade or even clean hit Dhalsim’s Yoga Fire and Sagat’s Low Tiger at mid-range. He can use it easily hit Vega’s slide, while his old flash kicks often missed in that situation.

Vega was a very bad match for Guile before, and a lot of it had to do with how hard it is to counter Vega’s slide. It’s good news that he now has a better answer. Sagat was a very tough mach as well, though not so much anymore due to Sagat’s slightly worse fireball recovery. The change in Sagat’s fireball recovery combined with Guile’s new roundhouse flash kick might give Guile the advantage now, but that remains to be seen. Guile’s worst match was probably versus Dhalsim, so his ability to do *something* at mid-range now combined with Dhalsim’s inability to low punch cleanly under Sonic Booms brings this match from near-hopeless to near-fair. Blanka is still a tough match for Guile. You can’t win ‘em all.

Upside-Down Kick
The upside down kick (hold toward or away + roundhouse while close) always looked like an overhead attack…and now it finally is. The opponent now must block this move high. In addition, you can now also activate it from any range by holding toward + roundhouse (it still has really long range). This kick had 15 frames of startup in ST, which would make it the fastest (and longest range) overhead in the game. I slowed it down to 20 frame startup which puts 2 frames slower than the slowest overhead in the game (Fei Long’s).

Guile is such a defensive character that it’s a breath of fresh air to have a new offensive option. The opponent really should be able to block this overhead most of the time, but Guile can tack it on after making the opponent block a Sonic Boom almost any time he wants, as long as he’s willing to lose his charge. (You have to be pretty close to get the overhead to come out when you’re holding back, remember.)

I also had to monkey with the hitbox below Guile during this move. After the first pass, we realized that he could cleanly upside down kick over Sagat’s Low Tiger Shots every single time on reaction. It was a bit too crazy for me, so now those Low Tigers will hit Guile in this situation. There’s still a very tiny window where Guile can go over the Tiger Shot cleanly, but it’s impractical to do in a real match. Also note that even though Guile appears to be off the ground during this move, he can still be thrown. I didn’t change that; it was true in ST also.

Super
Guile’s super move fails to connect correctly all the time in ST. It took about four tries to fix this, but it finally works as it seems like it always should have. The super move consists of two consecutive flash kicks, and the second one has a bit more range now. All the hits also knock down and juggle now, and I even had to do some subtlety about changing how fast the enemy falls when he’s hit by this move. You won’t notice that, but without it, the super would miss air juggle hits on certain characters only. Vega was one of those characters, but now Vega gets juggled like everyone else.

In equally big news, there’s now an optional new motion to perform the super. You can still do the old motion, but the new one is hell of a lot more practical: charge down/back, then down, down/forward, forward, up/forward. In other words, charge down/back, then do the old Tiger Knee motion + kick. Ironically, I removed all other Tiger Knee motions, but it seemed appropriate here considering how complicated the old motion was. (The old motion could be performed charge db, df, ub OR charge db, df, db, any up.)

You might ask, “Won’t I get the super to come out accidentally?” I have never had this happen even once, so I don’t think so. You might also worry that Guile can now easily combo into this super. For the most part, comboing normal moves into supers is not practical in ST (yes, I know you can do it). We could have made it very easy for everyone to combo normals into supers, but the lack of this feature is, in my opinion, one of the nice and defining qualities of the SF2 series. It’s not about poking with safe attacks and comboing into a super. Supers are, for the most part, an additional move in your arsenal rather than a combo ender.

So doesn’t Guile break this rule by easily comboing low strong into super with his new motion? You’d think so, but some deep mysterious property of ST’s engine saves us. I cannot figure why this is true, but you cannot combo normal attacks into Guile’s super using this new motion. If you try, you will always get a flash kick instead. Even more deeply mysterious is that if you try to combo a normal move into super using the old, difficult motion, you CAN. This really should be true, but somehow it is. So combing into super is no easier or more difficult than it ever was for Guile. We may never know why.

Things That Didn’t Change
One of the most common requests from players was to change around the commands of Guile’s standing kicks. In ST (and HD Remix), the kicks are:

• Back + short = knee (advances Guile while charging)
• Back + medium kick = backward sobat (Guile jumps slightly off the ground and moves back while kicking)
• Back + roundhouse = lunging kick (Guiles moves forward a bit while charging and kicks)

The common request is to find some way to make back + short into Old Guile’s rapid fire kicks. This would allow Guile to rapidly standing short to stop incoming slides while keeping his charge. I admit, this would be useful against Blanka, and Blanka is a bad match for Guile, but we can’t fix everything. The new roundhouse flash kick hits the other slides anyway.

More to the point though, no one could ever agree on which move Guile should lose of the above three. The knee is incredibly useful and basic to his gameplay, so that needs to stay for sure. The back sobat is not used much by most players, but the experts find it indispensable because of a few important, specific things it counters (Dhalsim’s drill at a certain range is one, and there are others). And Guile players were not willing to lose the back + roundhouse lunge kick either. Rather than assign the knee to back + jab + short (strange for a normal move), I just left all those kicks as-is.

I hope Guile players won’t complain about that, because with a huge new flash kick, a long range overhead kick, and an easier, better super, Guile players should thank their lucky stars.

–Sirlin

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Developer Blog, Capcom Digital, Behind-the-scenes, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.