Kotaku has posted hands-on impressions of the final arcade version of Street Fighter IV, which was shown off at Captivate ’08, a press event Capcom held in Las Vegas last week.
At the very least this alleviates concerns I had about the arcade version in the US to a point. It seems that there is still no distributor for the game but Capcom was obviously interested in showing off the arcade version to people as opposed to the console version. From the report it appears as though they have designed the game to play much like SF2, but with the newer graphics and a few extra features and as they state:
Street Fighter IV may sound like it’s been a bit dumbed down for the masses, but with Focus attacks, EX moves, Super attacks and Ultra combos all thrown into the mix, there’s more than enough fighting strategy here for those who have the will to unlock it.
The roster is a little small (if you’re used to the KOF series) sporting 16 characters which includes the original 12 characters from SF2: Championship Edition and four new characters.
So now we just need Capcom to find a distributor so that importing the game won’t have to be the path most operators take.
[Kotaku’s Hands-on impressions of SFIV arcade] [Discuss on the Forum]
I’m glad to hear it plays more like SF2. I found all the parrying in SF3 a little too much to handle. I don’t think making the game simpler to play necessarily dumbs it down. Ultimately it’s meant to be about reading your opponent, making the inputs for attack/defence very difficult isn’t the right sort of complexity to be adding in my opinion.
I don’t understand, why does the arcade version of SFIV cost $14,000? Is it made out of solid gold? Does it create free energy? With pinballs, which cost 80 times more to build (via the labor), only costing around $4000, WTF and WHY does SF IV cost $10,000 more?
Neil,
Probably for the same reason that Tekken 6 costs $15,000 – each game holds the name to a beloved franchise of some sort and they feel that since the arcade version won’t sell even close to the numbers of a console version would, they “only way” for them to make up the money is overcharge for the games.
Now naturally they can charge whatever they feel like but I don’t think it makes sense for a few reasons – at this price so few people can afford it that sales will be even lower thus not making up for development costs; most of these huge titles are released on the console anyways which recuperates development costs; price drops on RaceTV goes to show how much over the top companies like Sega are charging for their games; other developers like GlobalVR and Raw Thrills’ have shown and will continue to show that you don’t have to charge these prices either, which for those that know about this, it leaves egg on the face of Sega/Namco/Capcom, etc. There is really no way that anyone can pay off $14,000 on an SFIV cab before the console version is released – no one likes paying $2/$3 a play for an arcade game, especially where gas is at right now but an operator will probably feel like they need to charge that much to try and make up what they can.
If Capcom finally does decide to release SFIVArc in the US and they do not launch it with a lower price tag, the only thing I can see myself doing is buying a Samsung HD cabinet from Japan for about $2500 and an SFIV kit for about $2300 – thus I get the game for cheap and I save a bundle.