Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix: Impressions part 1

HD Remix released yesterday for Xbox Live arcade and the day before on Playstation Network.

I’ll say this: during the game’s development, many people disliked the direction that the game was taking concerning the spritework.  While lacking the classic appeal of the original sprites (which by the way, you can enable in the options menu), the new HD sprites do a good job of representing the characters. The only really BAD looking sprite is Akuma’s winpose; it looks like he grew some extra mutant muscle below his armpit. Given that the devs only had so many frames of animation to work with, the animation’s not bad, although some frames of certain animations (shoto idle animation in particular) seem to have a strange “pop” to them and consequently, look pretty jerky. The character portraits are spot-on however.

The music, comprised of fan composed tracks are hit or miss, Much of the music is instrumentals based on OverClocked Remix’s ST tribute album, Blood on the Asphalt. Some themes, like the Las Vegas theme or the remix to Ken’s theme work very well within the context of the game. However, the music from the Spain stage lost much of the tempo and urgency of the original, and the England theme has no place in a fighting game.

If you hate the new artwork and the music, you’re in luck: the game has many options, so you can change the music and sprites between their “remixed” versions and the originals through a menu. In addition, the original version of ST is included (branded as “Classic” mode in the menu). The training mode has one of the coolest options in a training mode of any fighting game I’ve played (and I’ve played many); there’s an option to make visible the hitboxes so you can see just how much range is on Honda’s far standing HK and how he can be hit out of it.

Part 2′s going to talk about the characters and online play. Stay tuned.

Filed by Viewtiful Dru at November 27th, 2008 under Capcom, Microsoft, Playstation 3, ST, Sony, Xbox 360, online