I did intend on putting a review in here yesterday, but have been cursed with a bad week which includes computer failure at home. While I'm sorting a replacement, I went back to my slightly neglected 360; partly it was about getting my gaming fix, and more significantly about being able to catch up with some friends on there.
I hadn't spoken to my friend Zane - who does occasional video reviews on Youtube as DontMessWithLuigi - for some time, and a quick catch up-cum-discussion on video capture turned into a prolonged trans-Atlantic head-to-head session. So, with our modern consoles and high speed internet, what do we play? Street Fighter 2.
Ok, not exactly - we ended up playing Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix... and yes, writing that down is an eye opener. Jokes about the sheer volume of suffixes Capcom add to series' titles have been going around since Special Championship Edition in the mid-90s, and you have to wonder if Capcom is now in on the joke and playing it up? Certainly, their awareness of the community - getting the soundtrack done by the OCRemix community, and the artwork by UDON Entertainment (who do the Street Fighter comics) - is commendable.
Naming conventions aside, it does highlight a concern I have for the current state of the games industry - how little progression there feels to have been. For all the piles of shop-bought games demonstrating the power of the technology we own, we chose to play a repackaged version of something that came out over two decades ago. Ok, that isn't the concern for the games industry - the concern is that it highlights just how fun games don't age.
Things do feel stale - the current big titles to wait for all seem to be sequels (Modern Warfare 3; Halo 4; Gears of War 3; Uncharted 3; Mass Effect 3; Guild Wars 2) - and while I have no doubt they will all add to what their respective franchises can offer, it is hard to feel how any of them will make the overall industry progress. Using more advanced technology is fine, but if all we get is something repackaging much the same experience from a couple of years ago, it also opens up why we can just save our money to replay and re-experience that specific something from a couple of years ago (or indeed, decades).
Yes, it is perhaps contradictory to be thinking all of this, when the game that triggered the thought is itself a sequel. But even though it has offered us numerous sequels itself, it is a tweaked version which remains at heart Street Fighter 2 - it doesn't even feel the need to increment the number - that still catches both the attention and an evening of gameplay.
I've been playing Street Fighter since 1990. I don't think Zane would have even started school then. Once again, my life as a gamer makes me feel old as I look back on how much things have - and haven't - changed in the meantime.
His winning 35-11 stung a little too. A rematch is in order.
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