History Repeats With Super Street Fighter IV
September 29, 2009
Do you remember the 16-bit glory days of video gaming when Capcom brought the arcade smash Street Fighter II to the Super NES? And do you remember how the company then turned around and brought Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition to the Sega Genesis and Street Fighter II Turbo to the Super NES in which the four boss characters were available as playable characters, meaning that the original Super NES version suddenly became obsolete? And then do you remember how Super Street Fighter II for the Super NES and Genesis with its additional four new playable characters followed not too long after that, turning the previous releases into yesterday's unwanted scrap? Capcom got a lot of miles out of yearly Street Fighter II revisions, as rabid fans of the franchise bought each and every upgrade for $50+ each. Thankfully we've come a long way since then, so now that Capcom has announced Super Street Fighter IV as an upgrade to Street Fighter IV for the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360, I'm sure that all of us who bought the original title earlier this year will be able to update our games through the modern miracle of downloadable content. They wouldn't really expect us to have to buy another new disc, right?
Let's get the bad news out of the way first - as feared, Super Street Fighter IV is in fact a full on-disc game, and its new contents will not be made available as downloadable content for existing versions. This is because the original game was not set up to receive downloadable character additions, and as such, Capcom was forced to make SSFIV available on disc only.
We're really doing this all over again, Capcom? Really? On the plus side, Super Street Fighter IV will not cost the full price of a new game and there will be an unannounced bonus for those who own both the original Street Fighter IV and the new Super update, but I am very conflicted over this at the moment. On the one hand, I really do want to play this new version of the game, but on the other, I remember the expensive horrors of the Street Fighter II update cycle and am not about to get sucked into the modern day version of it. The advent of DLC was supposed to fix problems like this. I'm going to need more time to sort all of this out before I decide how to proceed.