Fox's Review: Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (PS3, 360)

[Fusion]

Udon!  Street Fighter II!  Ryu!  Ken!  Chun-Li!  Guile!  M.Bison!  Akuma!  The only characters anybody really cares about return in yet another iteration of Street Fighter II that has even less going for it than Capcom's original repeated updates!  I'll explain it.

(Graphics 6/10):

Somehow, they screwed this up.  From the first released artwork, we'd found that they were just using some old Street Fighter heads for artwork reference, and even though they've redrawn the heads since then, I'm not entirely convinced that it's worked out all that well.  The graphics of everything have been bumped up to HD levels, though when I look closely, there's some nasty tearinig and some blending issues that make the sprites look even worse than they should.  At least with the Widescreen mode, and you'd think those graphics would be correct considering that's the more arcade-appropriate mode.  Oops!

The animations aren't improved in any way even with the HD makeover.  Udon decided that faithfulness to the original game outweighed making sure everything flowed nicely in motion.  Everybody's animations look awkward and strange in their stances as a result.  Keeping the frame counts the same but with better transitional frames would've helped a lot in this category.

There's also another problem, where Street Fighter II's style hit as realistic and cartoonish in the same boat, HD remix decides that all of it is cartoonish, and some of the wow factor the original backgrounds had are lost.  Simply put, Street Fighter II doesn't look good in HD.  The original character graphics feature is even dumber, since now you can see all the pixelation the original sprites had in HD.  This feature doesn't change the backgrounds or lifebars or anything else, in fact, some of the hitsparks and effects remain in high res.

The biggest drawback of them all is that the stages are completely messed up.   Dhalsim's stage had sets of elephants on both sides, each trumpeting with a synched up animation.  But now almost every stage has 3 frames that all repeat at the same time or at random intervals, meaning that all of the elephants are silently trumpeting.  All of the background characters have been turned into an anime style which does not fit in at all with the fighters' own art styles.


(Sound 6/10):

I'll only say that the music is both good and bad, most of it is taken from OC Remix and the arcade version of Super Street Fighter II Turbo (there's 2 music modes).  The new announcer I don't like very much at all, simply put.  The character sounds clearly also sound dated, Balrog's in particular sounding VERY low quality.


(Gameplay 5/10):

It's Street Fighter II.  Does it ever change between releases?  Only a little.  This installment changes nothing but Chun-Li's Spinning Star Kick and Guile's Flash Kick, everything else is practically the same, except some motions don't even come out like they should.

A completely pointless addition is the ability to view hit boxes.  Why bother adding that?  Most of the Street Fighter II fanbase already knows what hits where and what doesn't.  That just seems a really pointless addition.  I mean, nobody's started a SSF2THD-to-MUGEN conversion spree yet, have they?  That's the only thing I can think of where having displayed hit boxes would be useful.


(Overall 5/10):

Good try, Udon.  Your attempt came out as good as Capcom Fighting Jam did.

[c001357]

good one.