News: Street Fighter II on Xbox 360

January 06, 2006, 02:01 AM

by chazumaru, via Capcom -
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The Xbox 360 has been in the spotlight for various positive and negative reasons lately, from the announcement of an HD-DVD expansion at this week's CES, to its catastrophic start in Japan and odd stories following its successful debut on the US market. The quality of the line-up so far is debatable - and therefore vehemently debated on the web - but one thing that gets pretty much everyone's appraisal is the Live Arcade service. It allows users to play a few independant games, as well as old arcade classics on the cheap, and Capcom was one of the companies announced by Microsoft as potential partners for the service. The japanese game maker indeed announced the beginning of its collaboration with Microsoft's service via the upcoming Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting (which most of you know instead as Street Fighter II' Turbo - Hyper Fighting). Although the game has indeed also been released without the word "Turbo" in some of its original arcade boards, it's pretty odd that they chose to remove this popular mention from the new Live Arcade version. It's somewhat reminiscent of when Capcom had called the Megadrive/Genesis version Street Fighter II' Plus - Champion Edition (whereas it was clearly a port of SFII Turbo rather than SFII'CE), presumably because Nintendo owned the exclusive rights to the "Turbo" name for the popular Super Famicom port.

The Live Arcade version has a bunch of interesting features detailed in the press release, and the most remarkable one is certainly the "quarter match" online mode, aiming at recreating the feeling of the arcades. Players will be allowed to watch games and try to challenge the current winner when their turn comes, like in the old times. Let's just hope the virtual quarters to use in this mode stay symbolic, and not a reminiscent form of micropayment.