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VideoGamer.com: What's your favourite beat-em-up apart from Street Fighter and why? What's your opinion on the big 3D fighters? For example Tekken, Virtua Fighter or Soul Calibur?
DS: To me, "beat-em-up" is the term for 1p and cooperative games like Final Fight. My favourite fighting game other than Street Fighter is Guilty Gear. It really stands alone in how much is going on with each character. One character has pool balls he can bounce around, another controls two characters at once, another has infinite guard reversals, another has a mechanic where you summon these cards that power up your moves, and it goes on and on. It has more variety than any fighting game I know of, yet it's still balanced enough for very high level tournament play.
AdvertisementI love Soul Calibur. My favourite version is Soul Calibur 1 for Dreamcast because SC2 and 3 have too many game-breaking glitches and SC2 made ring outs much, much less important (making positioning less important). But as a whole, Soul Calibur has so many wonderful qualities. The art and animation is amazing. The 8-way run movement system is intuitive and just feels right. The focus on attacks being either horizontal (you can duck them) or vertical (you can sidestep them) is easy to understand and works well. I also like that the moves are mostly very easy to do and that you have access to dozens of moves by doing nothing more complicated than tapping or holding a direction and pressing a button.
Virtua Fighter is also great and gives the player more chance to show off yomi (reading the mind of the opponent) than probably any other fighting game. Even though I think the game is incredibly well thought out and I played it for years, I am really turned off by the emphasis on execution. When VF4 came out, designer Yu Suzuki explained a telling detail about Pai and Lau's 4-hit sequence with pppk. He said that with Pai, if you press ppppk (an extra p), you will still get the pppk combo (all 4 hits). But with Lau, if you press ppppk (an extra p) then you will only get ppp (the crescent kick with k won't come out) because "Lau is a skill character." Well, I disagree on the nature of what skills should be measured. Soul Calibur as a game seems to want me to do my moves and Virtua Fighter seems happiest when it's creating a barrier between me and the moves I want to do. If only VF could move away from being so incredibly execution heavy, I think more people would discover what a terrific game it really is.
VideoGamer.com: In your opinion, what can Street Fighter learn from its 3D rivals that will help make it a better game?
DS: It's a shame that 2D games lagged so far behind 3D games just in resolution. I don't think 2D games have even gone beyond 480p yet (until SSF2T:HD Remix). Gameplay-wise, the question is mostly backwards. The concept of controlling space, rather than relying on close-up high/low mixups and so-called frame advantage makes 2D style gameplay easier to understand than 3D, and there's hardly any reason it can't be done with 3D graphics, if only someone tried.
One specific feature I think 2D games could consider taking from 3D games though, is the "wakeup" situation when your character gets up from a knockdown. In SF, we have moves that are invulnerable at the start and safe on block. So if you are knocked down and the enemy is close to you, there is no strategy here, the best thing is always to do that move. It's currently balanced by making it physically hard to do. If the enemy is attacking you as you get up, you have only a one frame window to execute that Dragon Punch, so that's why you don't see it done 100% of the time. In 3D fighting games, though, characters have rising attacks with huge windows of like 60 or 120 frames. With just a simple button press somewhere in a huge window, you can get up with what amounts to a dragon punch on wakeup (a high priority rising kick). The existence of this separate rising attack lets them balance the wakeup game by making the rising attack unsafe on block (or some other disadvantage). A system like this would still allow a character like Ken to have an awesome Dragon Punch for general use and another character to NOT have a general use Dragon Punch, but still have some form of rising attack. This would be an improvement because rather than a simple dexterity test (I should always Dragon Punch on wakeup if I can execute it), it become a mental test (should I press the button to get a wakeup attack or not?).
VideoGamer.com: How do you think Street Fighter fits in with today's HD, super-powered console market? Is it still relevant to the mainstream?
DS: Of course it's still relevant. To be mainstream, you need good graphics (we're working on that!), good networking for multiplayer games (working on that too!), and to be accessible to beginners. In the future, Street Fighter can become even more accessible to beginners by having better one-player modes, but for now the easier controls will help.
In my opinion, one of the worst ideas inflicted on the Shoryukening gaming public was Sony's idea to turn the d-pad into four buttons with no diagonal piece.
The heart of this whole question though, is that Street Fighter fills a core need for many gamers: the need to pick up a game that's easy to understand, compete in it, and get better. You don't have to level up your Chun Li for 400 hours to play. You don't have to sit at a character creation screen, tailoring every detail before you get to the real game. All you have to do is select your character, click a button, and you're immediately playing. If anything, the "mainstream" should take a lesson from that: there's something wonderful about being able to get into a game right away with no barriers.
Also, we're seeing more and more team-based games. Coordinating and being part of a team involves real skills for sure, but there's something to be said for the purity of one-on-one competition. You don't need to worry about the logistics of your team's real-life free time. You can't blame anyone else when you lose, and you get (and deserve) all the credit when you win. The only way to keep winning is within you — you have to keep improving your skills and strive toward mastery. That simple journey — unobstructed by artificial barriers of levelling up or external factors like the performance of other people — that journey still resonates with gamers. Street Fighter is one of the best games around at offering this journey, so its relevance is, if anything, stronger now that so many other games are going the route of team-based or have RPG mechanics that get in the way of player-skill.
VideoGamer.com: What's your opinion on the 360's pad versus the PS3's controller? In your opinion what's best for Street Fighter? I know I hate the 360 d-pad for beat 'em-ups...
DS: In my opinion, one of the worst ideas inflicted on the Shoryukening gaming public was Sony's idea to turn the d-pad into four buttons with no diagonal piece. I hated it on the PlayStation. I hated it on the PlayStation 2. I hate it on the PlayStation 3. Microsoft's d-pad has a much better shape (including the diagonals) and yet somehow, it isn't any better in practice. There's something amiss about the mechanism underneath the Xbox 360's d-pad that makes it mysteriously imprecise. My final tally is that both d-pads tie for badness.
This is at least part of the reason why some special moves are more forgiving in SSF2T:HD Remix. You should have an easier time using a d-pad in this game than in other Street Fighters such as SF2: Hyper Fighting, but if you really want to be a pro, my best advice is to get an arcade-style stick. I've been using the Hori DOA and VF5 Xbox 360 sticks throughout the development of the game.
VideoGamer.com: And finally... what's your take on Street Fighter 4? I assume you've seen the screens and the gameplay info that has come out recently!
DS: I've never seen the game myself, though I'd be happy to help with its design and balance if anyone asks. ;)
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