Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Street Fighter IV: incredibly pretty and refreshingly onliney, but a singleplayer mode tarnished by laughably long combo animations, a hateful boss fight, nasty AI and a seemingly total ignorance that some people haven’t spent the last decade playing every bewildering, ultra-hardcore derivation of Street Fighter to death. Boo.

Street Fighter II: Biff! Kerpow! Thwack! Spinning biiird keeeck! That’s the stuff. Pretend Street Fighter never stopped being The People’s Fighting Game with the surprisingly robust (and official) Flash version below. The baying hordes should, however, be aware that this doesnae support controllers, so it’s keyboard only.
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So I had planned to have a Wot I Think on Prototype up this evening, but my efforts have been stymied by The Worst Boss Fight Of All Time (TM) leaving me too tired and annoyed to celebrate the good stuff about the game. Tomorrow morning, when I am fresh and cheerful again… Until then, I shall type quickly but stoutly upon smaller subjects. First up, the demo/benchmark tool for the much-delayed Streetfighter IV PC. These curious 400Mb contain no playable code, but instead a technical demonstration of how the man-slapping opus looks and runs, complete with framerates should you care about such a thing. It’s surprisingly pretty, I found – colourful yet detailed, and with a real physicality despite being a 2D wolf in 3D sheep’s clothing. Seems to run very smoothly on my machine too, but then I do currently have a PC that could eat God. /Me flexes. Anyway, it’s all yours from here. Oh – turn off Vsync, or you’ll max out at 60fps.

Capcom have stated that Resident Evil 5, Bionic Commando, and Streetfighter IV will come out on PC across the summer (although only SFIV is firmly dated, for July 2nd, as far as I can see). Bionic Commando will also land in July, with Resident Evil 5 coming “later in the year”. There will be PC-exclusive features for each of the games, as we’d already seen with Streetfighter IV. I asked a Capcom spokesperson about Lost Planet 2 on PC earlier today, and received the reply: “No word on Lost Planet on PC. Yet.”

Full press release below, and thanks to Sub Edii for the tip.
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Now here’s something I managed to forget about completely until I was sitting in Phoenix Airport, lamenting my missed connecting flight. Capcom actually really quite like the PC. I spent a fair bit of time in the Capcom booth having my arse handed to me in Street Fighter IV by a team of people who apparently came to E3 already unstoppably good at the game, and I have to say – it’s absolutely superb, far far better than I thought it was going to be.
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