As you may have heard, this past week was our epic CAPTIVATE08 press event. Held in the Palms’ hotel + casino’s “Sky Villa” (aka the 20k/night suite detailed here), CAPTIVATE is where we show off our latest and greatest inventions to an elite group of press from around the world. Well, elite press, and… you.
This year we were proud to invite 5 specially selected members of our Capcom Community to join us in Vegas, where they got all-access passes to our darkest secrets. After threatening them with zombie dismemberment if they leaked stuff early, I’m happy to report that they all turned out to be fun, delightfully-scented, supremely well-informed, and just overall cool. Basically our idea with community is to treat them like… gasp… real people who love Capcom as much as we do, and as people who occasionally even have non-idiotic ideas. Beyond that, we just want to have as much fun as possible, and I think this week was a big success.
During his whirlwind European tour, Adam Boyes (Capcom’s US Director of Production) sat down with gamesindustry.biz to talk about what he looks for in a development partner, from the mix of studio talents right down to pitching the idea itself.
This is a bit “games biz” insider-y (shocking from gamesindustry.biz!), but if you want to see what making games is REALLY all about, it’s solid gold. Check it out here!
You’ve got your Videogames Live, where they run through a few popular favorites from different games, different companies, different genres, and even different decades. You call that being a hardcore game fan? I might have agreed with you before, but now I can tell you: it’s junior league. If you want to talk hardcore fandom, you should have been at Shinjuku’s Bunka Hall on April 20th, 2008.
If you were, you would have seen a concert. A videogame concert. But this concert wasn’t some mish-mash of music from a hundred random franchises. It was music from one just one. One *awesome* franchise: Ace Attorney.
How could Ace Attorney—which is not a next-gen, 1080p juggernaut, was only released for portables, and has only a handful of games—manage a sold-out concert of its own music, performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra? Simple: by being THAT awesome.
Hit the jump for the full story, plus pictures and a fan-subbed trailer:
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.
So we blew the secret Street Fighter dog-whistle this last weekend. Audible only to tournament champions (and, strangely, possums), the whistle attracted a slew of top Street Fighter players from across the country, with representatives flying in from across the east coast, midwest, west coast, and Texas (which is kind of its own thing) to help us test Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix to its limits.
Everyone was rabid for the game, and in addition to some intense and productive testing sessions, the guys (yes, they were all dudes) also made a stop at Northern California’s premier underground arcade. Names have been omitted to protect those lying to friends and family members about exactly what they were up to this weekend.
This is part eleven 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 we revisit the enigma wrapped inside a mystery that is T. Hawk, the world’s biggest Native American (who is apparently from Mexico). Hawk has spent a lot of time in the rebalancing lab, and Sirlin walks you through the dizzying highs and devastating lows of trying to get him juuuust right.
Part 11: The T.Hawk Chronicles
T.Hawk has been one of the hardest characters to balance (along with Fei Long and Honda). On the one hand, he has an extremely damaging command throw, a great Dragon Punch-type move, and an aerial dive. These moves could conspire to make him terrifying, so I understand why the original SF2 developers were so careful to keep him check. Hit the jump to get the full story…
This is part ten 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.
Much time has passed since these articles were first written, but tweaking of the game has continued non-stop, even for the characters whose changes have already been revealed. As a result, in honor of the tenth article, this article provides a quick recap of “the changes to the changes!”
Part 10: The Story So Far
A lot of time has passed since I wrote the first parts of this series about the balance changes in Street Fighter: HD Remix (remember, I wrote them many weeks before they were posted). Some things have changed since then, so here are the updates.
Ryu
No change. He still just has the fake fireball, and it’s great. It tricks people like Honda into jumping at the wrong times and Zangief into doing lariat at the wrong times. He can also use it to pressure with stuff like low roundhouse, cancel into fake fireball, walk up throw.
Ken
I have a “watch list” of things that might be too good. (hit the jump to read more!)
This is part nine 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 focuses on the character so cliched that he stands out even among a strong field of cliche contenders: Hitenryu kung-fu master Fei Long!
Balancing Fei has been a long and rocky road, so this is a long entry, but it’s also a ton of fun for Fei Long fans and game design nerds alike. Read on!
Part 9: Fei Long
Fei Long is usually considered one of the five worst characters in the original Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, but he’s still pretty deadly if he can get close to the opponent and get his offense going. The trouble is, it’s very hard for him to ever get close enough to most characters to get it going. Also, his Flying Kicks move (aka Dragon Kicks, aka “Chicken Wing”) is just too hard for most players (including myself) to physically execute. Unlike the other Tiger Knee-like moves, the Flying Kicks required you to start with *back* on the stick, then go down/back, down, down/forward, forward, up/forward + kick.
A dramatic battle of corporate strategy could be developing over at the MTV Multiplayer blog.
Or not? Read up for the full story, but it seems Jeff Karp, EA’s head of North American publishing, has some different ideas about product longevity than those recently voiced by Capcom’s Christian Svensson in his own recent interview on the Multiplayer blog (which he expanded on here).
Exciting snippets include:
“A good chunk of EA’s business is annualized franchises and expanded content.”
Cue the dramatic music! And this one:
“With Spore, EA already has plans internally to develop new content for at least 10 years.”
Maybe that’s a different strategy, or maybe a 10-year development time requires a 10-year recoupment plan? *Zing*!
Obviously EA are masters of successful franchising, and any way you slice it this is great reading for gamebiz nerds everywhere. Check it out.
A local news team went inside Vancouver’s A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Studio, who developed Rocketmen: Axis of Evil! You can get a quick look around the studio, see some of their appropriately pasty faces, and get a bit of background on how the studio came to be.
**Warning: this clip is stinky with Canadians. I mean like almost every person in it is a Canadian, and is speaking Canadiese. There are no subtitles.
This is part twelve in an extended series of articles from 
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