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Capcom's US chief on Dead Rising 2, Lost Planet 2, HD Remixes and Street Fighter V.

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We've already brought you our interview with Capcom's Christian Svensson, vice president, business development and strategic planning, on all things PC, but the Capcom love doesn't stop there. Oh no. Here, in the second part of our mammoth chat with Svensson, we talk all things console, from Lost Planet 2 to Dead Rising 2, taking in Street Fighter IV and HD Remixes along the way. Love Capcom? Then love this interview.

VideoGamer.com: What's the latest on bringing Tatsunoko vs. Capcom to the west?

Christian Svensson: Aha! Do not rule it out. That is all I can say right now. We are still actively working on having that happen. I can't say it's happening definitively. I couldn't give you a time frame, but as badly as the fans want it, we want to bring it.

VideoGamer.com: What are the challenges associated there? Is it simply a case of not enough interest?

CS: No. There are licensing issues to contend with. The Tatsunoko rights are split as far as how they are held in the west. Tatsunoko obviously holds all of the rights in Japan so they can grant all of those characters usage through Japan very easily. But when they license those properties out to various stakeholders in the west, aligning all of those things properly, and to be fair the team that did it is working on something else now, so actually also clawing back the resources to do a localised version, to make any changes that are needed to get through those licensing issues, these are all things that need to be aligned before we can actually profit from this happening. The team that did it is a very talented team in high demand. And unfortunately they're not an internal team so we don't have 100 per cent control of saying OK just pull those guys back in. They have their own business to run.

VideoGamer.com: The recent HD Remix of Super Street Fighter II Turbo has proven incredibly popular. Is the HD Remix treatment something Capcom is looking to apply to other fighting games in its back catalogue or are you done with it?

CS: I'm going to say potentially. Not every game needs it.

VideoGamer.com: Give me an example of a game that doesn't need it.

CS: Let me ask you this: I'm going to hold back on giving you a game that doesn't need it, simply because that tips my hand a bit more than I'm able to do right now. Let's just say that HD Remix taught us a lot of things. It taught us a lot of things about online technology for fighting games. It gave us a really good insight into what fans found valuable and how they actually really played, how they enjoyed it, what they found value in most, what has helped reinvigorate the competitive community, and not everything has to do with the HD-ification of the art.

Some of the other things we learned are changing what people know and love as dramatically as we did polarises people. People love it or they hate it. There seems to be no middle ground. We also learned what it takes in terms of cost, manpower and effort. Effort as attention to every last detail in a project of that nature. I will say it is no less than what it takes for a full retail release. It's a massive undertaking. When we started that project we in truth underestimated that pretty grossly. We had to back to the drawing board budgetarily, schedule wise. It was a great, fantastic learning process. Are we done doing HD Remixes? No we're not done. But the next ones that we do will be even better, based on what we learned.

VideoGamer.com: It would be great to see a HD Remix of Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Is that one of the games that doesn't need it?

CS: I won't say it doesn't need it. Marvel would be great to do. There's obviously a fan base for it. It's probably our most requested title. But unfortunately I wish I had news to share on that front but I don't.

VideoGamer.com: What are the chances of doing a brand new Marvel vs. Capcom game?

CS: I would never say never but I would say the barriers to doing that are much higher than the barriers for MvC2.

VideoGamer.com: Have you seen David Sirlin's blog lately?

CS: Lately? I haven't looked at it myself but I understand he has some issues with Street Fighter IV.

VideoGamer.com: His main beef is it's not as accessible as it should be. He's saying things like pressing two buttons to throw, three to do an Ultra, make it too hard.

CS: I'll back that up two seconds. On some level he's partially right in the sense that... let's refer to HD Remix. Part of HD Remix's goal was to make the move input a bit more accessible, a little less memorisation on very specific moves, such that you basically had quarter circles and dragon punch moves mapped to what were traditionally much more difficult moves to do. We reduced the number of button inputs on certain things such that they were easier to do. All of those are steps towards accessibility. In that regard I think that Sirlin has a point. I think it is less accessible than HD Remix is.

Doing a Focus Attack and understanding how that works versus how parries worked in three, I think it's drastically more accessible than 3 ever was. And what's more, on a single-player AI basis having as many levels as difficulty as we do, easy, very easy and easiest, I'm not going to say a brain dead monkey could win on easiest but pretty close. You can get enjoyment bashing out some moves, making it quite frankly pretty accessible. Being successful is the fun part. You don't need to understand how to Focus Attack Dash Cancel to have a good time with Street Fighter IV. That was never the objective. We didn't want to make it so hard. At the same time for guys like Sirlin we needed to have depth that could make this a competitive title that people are going to play for years. To some degree some of those goals are mutually exclusive.

VideoGamer.com: You sound like you know your stuff when it comes to fighting games.

CS: I spend some time with them.

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