Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting - Xbox Live Arcade Feature Preview

Shoryuken!

Get the full lowdown on the Xbox 360 version of Street Fighter II in this exclusive interview.

• Watch
• Download

One of the most anticipated games on the horizon for Xbox Live Arcade is Capcom's upcoming conversion of Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting. The classic 2D fighter has a special place in the hearts of gamers of a certain generation, as it was the fighter to cut your teeth on in the early '90s. The title was the third iteration of the Street Fighter II series and is widely considered to be the best in the bunch. We've had the chance to see the game a few times since it was announced earlier this year at Microsoft's CES keynote, but hadn't yet been able to try it online. Thankfully, we recently had the chance to try out a near-final work-in-progress version of the game to see if it can live up to our lofty expectations, and we made a record of our experience in a host of new gameplay movies that you shall not miss.

For those that haven't followed the Street Fighter series too closely, Hyper Fighting was the last of the series to appear on Capcom's CPS1 arcade hardware, and, in keeping with Capcom's tradition, contained a number of tweaks to the SFII formula. The game was released in response to the various hacks arcade operators were installing on the game's predecessor, Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, that were messing with the delicately tuned gameplay balance. In an effort to restore some order, Capcom released Hyper Fighting, which incorporated some of the popular elements from the hacks while keeping things balanced. The key additions to the experience were faster gameplay; new special moves for some of the roster, including Chun Li's fireball and Dhalsim's yoga teleport; the ability for some characters to perform existing special moves in midair, such as Chun Li's spinning bird kick and Ryu and Ken's hurricane kick; and new costume colors for the fighters. The end result of all these tweaks and additions was a finely honed installment most have come to view as the best in the series.

The work-in-progress version of Hyper Fighting we played was basically complete but was still in the process of being optimized. So while we've been able to go over it with a fine-tooth comb, it's still not running the way it should be, as Capcom is still tweaking everything. Still, complete or not, we've been able to get a good idea of how it's looking.

When you fire the game up, the title screen will feature the basic selection of options that you'll find in most Live Arcade games. You'll find two game-mode choices, arcade and Xbox Live, as well as leaderboard, achievement, and help & options. Arcade mode is the offline component of the game. When you hop in, you'll find three initially selectable modes: arcade, versus, and training. Arcade is a re-creation of the classic arcade game and features 12 playable characters--the international cast of eight world warriors and four bosses. The mode will send you on a world tour of butt-kicking as you face off against your opponents in their native countries. Purists will notice that the typos that were part of the original game's charm have been corrected. Versus is an offline two-player competition and training is a practice mode where you can hone your fighting skills against a CPU opponent whose behavior you can set. In addition to those three modes, you can unlock CPU Battle, which lets you face off against an artificial intelligence opponent.

Zangief grinds Ryu's face into pulp in Ryu's classic Japan stage.

When you select an Xbox Live game, you'll be taken to an online menu that features several options, these being my ranked stats, ranked match, player match, and quarter match. My ranked stats lets you review the eight bits of info the game will track on your performance. You'll see your overall rank, overall skill rating, average opponent rating, total points scored, total matches played, total wins, total losses, and total draws. The ranking system in the game is a new addition to the typical stat-tracking and uses a variant of the ELO rating system that's used in chess. Basically, all players will start with a default rating of 1200. As you play, your rating will go up and down based on your wins and losses and on the rating of the players you're fighting. Players that choose to prey on less-skilled fighters won't see their rating increase as much as those that take on players that are their equal or greater in rating.