Street Fighter IV

Today the first glimpse of in-games images from Street Fighter IV were made available. I had been following the hi-res makeovers that Udon Crew had been doing for Street Fighter II HD Remix over at Deviant Art. The majority of their redesigns were amazingly faithful to the original game graphics and added a great amount of detail to each character. Having seen how much life they breathed into my beloved Street Fighter characters made me very hopeful for a true sequel to Street Fighter III, which was released almost 10 years ago.

Well today we get the following screenshot from SFIV:


Although the graphics are clearly "next-gen" (and I truly hate that word) this just doesn't scream Street Fighter to me. I has none of the character of SFII and it's siblings and there isn't any of the 2D pixel magic in the background either. Capcom claims that although the game is rendered with polygons the gameplay is 2D. So in essence they are doing something similar to Street Fighter EX, which I thought was a spectacularly crappy game.

Granted, this is the first shot of the game to be released and I haven't seen any of the other stages or characters yet. But based on this I don't get any impression of the 2D gaming goodness that I grew up with. This looks more like Virtua Fighter or Tekken to me and I could never stand those games. Hopefully some gameplay videos will surface soon, but until then color me unimpressed.