XBLA SF2

Anyone who knows me well knows I’m a die-hard Street Fighter II addict; more specifically, a Street Fighter II turbo edition addict. The Turbo (or Hyper Fighting, as it’s also called) edition, for me, was the ultimate achievement in game complexity and balance.

I was at the beach one summer and wondered into the arcade; I hadn’t been inside an arcade for a year or more, simply because the industry hadn’t produced anything interesting in a long time. I played a few rounds against the AI and left. A few days later, I decided to return and found a small group of people trying to figure out the controls. We quickly became obsessed with the game, and I’d bump into the same people every day at the same machine. Over the next year or so we began to unravel the various moves and combinations within with no instructions or internet to speak of. I think it was a solid year before anyone could do the uppercut reliably.

After a while, we got to know each other pretty well; we started venturing to other arcades, where we heard there was someone who could play a certain character really well. I went off to college and continued to learn new subtleties of the game; such as how to crash the machine with a certain combo, or other tricks for those that have mastered pretty much the entire game. I met the only person who could regularly beat me at the game, as he played a nearly flawless Dhalsim, pointing and laughing each time you made a mistake.

For me, this magical thing happens when you play a really good match of SF2. It’s as if time slows down and you’re looking directly into the mechanical, moving parts of your opponent’s brain. You dance around this clockwork in an effort to prevent your own behavior from following any strict patterns. To be truly good at the game, you have to remain loose and playful and free your mind from following any routine. If you fail to read your opponents mind, time suddenly speeds up and you’re caught in a whirlwind of confusion.

Editions after the Turbo edition didn’t work for me. Part of this was that they re-drew the art and changed the frame rate, destroying my mental map of the game’s finer details. While I’m sure this came from an amicable goal (make the game look better), I don’t think the developers realized exactly how it affected the players perception of the game. Extremely tight timings were harder to read due to the extra frames, and because they were all re-drawn, you had to rememorize the entire map of the game’s moves. I’m not talking about big details here, but subtle ones that many people don’t realize exist, such as the exact frame and spacing needed to kick someone’s foot after they miss a sweep. If you don’t play SF2 really well, you probably don’t even realize how precise the game actually is. I cooled off on the game for a few years as they continued to destroy the franchise.

About 6 years ago, we were playing SF2 on emulation. It sucked. So I figure, hey, I’m in the industry, I should just buy the real thing. I found a place in Philly selling the machine for $500, and it just happened that my co-worker’s roommate was in Philly driving a van with no seats in the back. It was destiny, and I began a regular schooling of all those in the office that would oppose me.

About a year later I was in an arcade in Japan, and noticed a man playing SF2 Turbo. Watching him for a moment, I noticed he actually knew how to play, so I jumped in for some matched. We had some great games, with me choosing some particularly uphill battles and coming through at the end. I don’t speak any Japanese, and he didn’t really speak English, but I was inside this guys head the same as anyone else. By the end of those matches, we knew each other’s minds better than many old friends do. He finally got up to leave, turned around and mustered up his only words in English to me: “You are…… very strong…”

I miss these types of matches; I miss the challenge and community once created by the game. So when they announced SF2 for Xbox360 with online play, I was intrigued. Now, having worked in the industry for so long, and having worked on latency management solutions, I knew there was no way the experience would be the same. But still, I wanted to see what it would be like, so when it was released yesterday I figured I’d give it a whirl.

Boy did they drop the ball on this one. First off, the game is about 20-30% faster than the original. This makes the game feel frantic, and leads me to believe there using one of the standard emulators as the base for the game, since they also run a bit faster than the original. They also did a bunch of annoying things, like changing the sounds around, which really serves no purpose as they don’t sound any better; just different.

Now, where the game really falls down is online. It’s bad enough playing SF2 on the 360 controller, but with lag it’s nearly impossible. The funny thing is, the lag really isn’t that bad from a technical standpoint. Most matches feel as if I’m getting a reasonable ping time and response. But SF2 turbo is a fast game, and at that speed, you just can’t play, and can’t compensate enough for the lag. If you press an attack button while leaving the ground on a jump, it’ll probably go off as its landing.

This is, of course, compounded by the fast that the game is sped up. What should have been implemented was an emulation speed option allowing you to slow the game down. The turbo edition is about 40% faster than the original SF2; meaning that this version is about 80% faster than the original SF2. If there was an option to run the emulation at the original game’s speed, this would cut the lag by almost half when compared to game time. For me, that would actually make the game playable. I can compensate for a bit of lag.

I’m sure many gamers are going to complain that the lag is the fault of bad programming; but no programming can overcome lag of the type of lag we have here. What exists here is a design problem, not a technical one. It requires a design solution, and the least invasive on such a master design is to slow the game down. While the lag isn’t reduced, the perception of lag is.