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VideoGamer.com: From a personal point of view, now the game is out, what's your biggest regret and your most proud achievement?

DS: My proudest achievement is that there is this rebalanced mode at all. To me it's all about that, it's not the art or the networking or anything like that to me personally. It's that I was able to create it in the first place and I was able to combat the huge negative press it got. People seemed to have no idea what we were trying to do, and so that's why I wrote this series of 20 articles, that's actually longer than my book it's like 60,000 words about this game. It's really crazy. I don't know who else does that. So the components of my answer are that this mode exists at all, that I was able to turn the tide of the press, and I know Capcom likes to say we, but it wasn't we it was me. I wrote those articles, I'm the one that sent that message. And then the third thing, the real test is is it going to last? We don't know that yet it just came out, but the very least what I can say is I've got hundreds of messages that are basically apologies, 'oh we were questioning this balance change but now we see it and play it it's great'. That's a great relief. I look on the forums to see what people think, is there some character that's too good or something. And now it's a state of total chaos. Akuma's the worst, Akuma's the best...

VideoGamer.com: Dhalsim's noogie...

DS: Yeah Dhalsim can't compete any more, Dhalsim's still the best. Everyone disagrees. So many of them seem unaware of all the rest of their comments. One person has messaged me saying they were hoping for a patch and they wanted a couple of bugs fixed, but they also thought it was vitally important that they changed some property of Cammy and Honda. But then there was a whole bunch of other people that thought exactly the opposite of him.

VideoGamer.com: You can't please everyone!

DS: I take that as a good sign. That's really the goal, is to have it be very unclear which characters are the best. For the first week, I'm proud of that. We don't know the future. Maybe Blanka's the best or ruins the game, who knows what will happen later, but for now it's looking good.

VideoGamer.com: What about regrets?

DS: I guess I regret that it was so hard of a project when I didn't feel that it had to be. If we had used a lot of that energy of conflict, all being on the same page, I think we could have got even farther than we did. I don't know how to do it in broad strokes, but just one tiny example maybe would paint a picture. In the beta test, when you're in the lobby and waiting to play, if it's your turn to play next, what happens if your opponent doesn't press start? The answer is that the match does not start. You have to both press start. So this obviously caused problems. It would be your turn, and the other guy, maybe he was getting a sandwich and he's not even there and everyone had to quit. It was obviously a problem, more than a year and a half before that beta. Capcom and I had specifically discussed this issue in Hyper Fighting and how we knew how to fix it in HD Remix, that you can't have people stalling in lobbies and preventing the game from going on. So we need to fix this obviously. And then you could ask, 'well how hard is it to address that?'. I talked to the programmers and they said, 'well we've already addressed it in the tournament mode'. So actually we would just copy and paste the code and it would take maybe five minutes plus another five to verify that it did what we thought and that would be that. And I said, 'great! Let's do it', but then because of political arguing that has nothing to do with really anything, that particular change took months and months. It took fighting, it took me going to the head of our company, even then I couldn't get it through. All of this effort to get that one thing fixed that would have taken five minutes. So that is a regret, that there was a lot of wasted energy.

VideoGamer.com: What sort of political conflict caused that to take months to get through?

DS: It wasn't about the change itself, it wasn't about whether that would have made a better game or worse game. It was just about that it was a change at all, that we've got a schedule to stick to, you do X, Y and Z in this order, Capcom's paying for certain things and not for others and it's just not part of our plan and stop wasting our time. We finally fixed that just before release so now either player can start the match. It is crucial. It was very frustrating in the beta. It happened to me all the time. Even if you annoyed other players, like throwing them too much or something, they would just intentionally not start the match when it was their turn again. It's a very small thing that is a major problem in online play. So imagine that multiplied across many other things like that, and think of all the energy it took to resolve them.

VideoGamer.com: Any other regrets?

DS: I guess regret is a strong word for me.

VideoGamer.com: How about I rephrase it? Was there anything that you'd love to have made it into the final game that didn't?

DS: Yeah there were two particular features. They're minor but I really did want them and I tried for a long time. I guess that in the end I had to be OK with them not being there because so many of the other things I pushed for are there. But those two things were, in training mode when you're looking at those hit boxes, you want to pause the game and look real closely and then step a frame ahead to see the next frame. You can't do that, and we could do that in our debug menus. And I really wanted the final game to have that but we just never got around to it.

The other thing was a feature that's been requested for I think four years now, and I've tried to put it in every single Capcom Collection and Street Fighter HD Remix and never got it in in any of them, is something the players call Tournament Pause. What that means is, this would by default be off so ordinary people would not even know about it, if you're holding an event, maybe it's on stage and there's a thousand people watching like we have at Evolution, and somebody accidentally pauses the game, we have to give them a loss for that round and it's very anti-climactic. But if there was an option you could say that you can't pause the game unless you hold the button down for two or three seconds then all of these accidental pauses that happen at events, we wouldn't have to worry about any more. So that was strictly for the hardcore community that goes to tournaments, but they all ask for it for years, in every version. And I just never get it in! And there's a lot of issues with the console manufacturers. They have all these rules so it's hard to get that kind of thing approved. Those are two little features I wish were in. If you want to use a bigger word of regret, it's that it was just so traumatic and hard work on things that shouldn't have been. Maybe the result of all that conflict energy is that I'm not there making their next Street Fighter right now, so maybe that's a regret.

Be sure to check back next week for the third and final part of our Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix post-mortem with lead designer David Sirlin.

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