Arcade ST vs. Remix

Classic Fighting Games SSF2T: HD Remix
61

This is pretty much the crux of it for me. ST has always been a game about clawing for advantage. Both players are eager to position themselves in such a way that they have the extreme advantage–whether it’s walldive mixups, fireball traps, crossup opportunities or what have you, it is a game where you aim to put your opponent at an extreme disadvantage and yourself at an extreme advantage, and hopefully take that position to victory. Yes, some of those situations are easier than others to set up, and some are extremely difficult to get out of once you’re there, but if both players are gunning for their individual advantage, that’s where the real fight happens.

This is still present, to some extent in HDR, but it’s much less drastic. Now I can completely understand why some people like it better that way. It makes comebacks more likely, it makes the game easier to learn, it makes it more appealing to the newcomers, and it still retains a significant degree of that ST flavor. But compared to ST, it feels like a step back for me. I’m trying to avoid the term “watered down,” because it carries a negative connotation that I don’t particularly want to apply to HDR, since I do respect the design goal of the game, but it feels like the ST concept toned down a bit, which is something that I personally am not a fan of.

62

I think the fakes moves are a great addition to the game. They have their uses. I can understand that they do no damage or may not give a “hard” advantage. But their use in terms of mind games that are present at higher levels of play makes them invaluable.

At the higher levels of play, both competitors know the same moves and matchups, and the best way to play a mind game without committing is through the use of fakes.

Can you imagine the mind games that can be played when a match is down to the wire and a single move can cost a match? A fake move can provide a use if used strategically. But for the average matches they are useless. You can just beat noobs down with the usual BS, while mind games requiring high level of play with fakeouts are displayed at the pro level.

63

Somehow being weaker…u mean the shitty CW’s and flame kick are somehow a good thing. Honestly anyone who hasn’t played Fei should not speak on this matter, Jumpsuit says he got worst and every other respectable fei player I know has said something smilar…should we just forget the majority opinion now.

64

Right, but those are athletes, and we’re talking about a video game. Street Fighter would be better parralleled (sp) with games like Chess or Risk in that all players have equal or near equal options and abilities. As stated before, the destinguishing factors should be things like yomi and knowlege of the match up.

65

The problem with this reasoning is that it assumes that “in-game” fakes are needed. People have been faking fireballs for fifteen years without the aid of a fake fireball animation. I haven’t seen the mind-games in HDR becoming more advanced or potent than in ST, I just see an animation to go along with the fakes already in place.

66

I guess this is going over my head. What was the ST concept in the first place? Please elaborate.

Wasn’t each remake of Street Fighter an attempt to add new characters while trying to find a perfect balance in terms of gameplay?

67

The ST concept is what I’m referring to in the first paragraph. ST is essentially a game about understanding the situations in which your character has an extreme advantage, and trying to steer the fight into that situation. In HDR this is still there to a large degree, but the advantage when you’ve gained these positions is often lessened.

68

With most of the changes that allow people to escape negative situations (fireball traps, Hawk’s throw loop, Claw’s wall dive etc.), they were changed to better balance the payoff matrix. The risks rewards in ST were out of wack in the first place, and Sirlin simply tried to fix them. Maybe its the Guile in me talking, but I like to see battles won in inches. When someone makes a mistake, I do believe they should be punished, but some punishments were far too harsh in ST. At the end of the day, its all about the relative values of benefits and risks associated with each deciaison. Anyone who’s studied game theory understands this.

And je110, the extreme advantages and extreme disadvantages are ok as long the risks rewards to get into those situations are in balance. I think hd remix has done a good job correcting this.

69

I disagree that risk/reward ratio is “out of wack” in ST. Yes, once a player is in a dominant position, they stand to win handily, and certain tactics can be very devastating, and difficult to escape. That’s not a problem in and of itself. Having dominant tactics means that both players are vying for their advantage, and the one who manages to steer the fight better wins. Fatboy’s example of Dhalsim vs. Vega earlier is a very good example of this. Both characters have a tactic that, if they manage to set it up, can potentially wreck the other character, but the process of getting there is where the real fight usually is.

Generally speaking, if you have easy to execute offensive abilities that are difficult to get out of, you have a game that heavily favors the offense, and ST is emblematic of that. That’s what many of us like about it.

70

I see. Thanks for clarifying

71

That was kind of the point of compressing the tier list.

72

And like I said, I don’t think that HDR is a total failure. I think it accomplished some of the goals it set out to do, and is a great game for it. I just don’t think that it succeeds at replacing ST, at least not for many players, myself included.

73

SF has never been only about mind games and knowlege of a match up. There has always been physical dextierity/ hand-eye coordination threshhold to overcome.

POEPLE ACTUALLY LIKE IT. If they didn’t they would play something else. If they didn’t, every single person in this thread would be talking about Chess or the Yomi card game.

POEPLE LIKE TO PHYSICALLY AND SKILLFULLY MANIPUTALE CHARACTERS ON A SCREEN.

If they didn’t, videogames as we know them would not exstist.

Don’t make SF into chess. It shares the simular elements of strategy and contolling space. But, it is a game that takes a moderate level of phyical dexterity and skill to play. Always will, always has.

If poeple didn’t like that , we would all be playg a SF card game fight now or turn based RTS.

74

Uh, what would the fake wall dive offer in these situations over the steered fake?

In the first situation, Noguchi had executed a perfectly spaced wall dive trying to bait an anti-air. When he came down and saw Kurahashi wasn’t taking the bait, he anticipated a sonic boom at the end to punish his whiffed wall dive recovery so he stuck out a claw at the last second. This increased his hitbox to catch the sonic boom startup but also increased his vulnerability box. If Kurahashi had thrown out a sonic boom at the last second to punish the lengthy wall dive recovery hop, then Noguchi would have scored the knockdown. Kurahashi instead decided to flash kick, which was very bold since Noguchi was diving just outside HK flash kick range and would have whiffed had Noguchi done nothing. That means meaning Kurahashi anticipated the late wall dive attempt and with his correct guess, beat the dive.

In the second situation, Noguchi did the usual wall dive swerve, baited a super, and punished (although c.HP seems like it would’ve been the optimal punishment at that range).

Now what all this has to do with fake wall dives is what I’m wondering. In the first situation, you already saw Kurahashi wait until the very end just like I was saying (that good players don’t fall for a fake halfway across the screen). If Noguchi faked short, how’s that any different from steering the wall dive short? It takes about the same amount of time to land (outside the corner) and is more obvious than a normal wall dive. In the second situation, if Noguchi had faked short, he’d either have blocked the last hit and punished just the same or gotten hit by the last hit of the super depending on when he did it; if you notice, Kurahashi waits until Noguchi gets fairly close before deciding to do anything so he wouldn’t have just pulled off a super from half-screen the moment Noguchi jumped towards the wall.

So again, I stand by my assessment of the uselessness of the wall dive and no claw player has shown me differently (which I would very much like to see). The main problem is that it falls down far too slowly and that the normal steering on the wall dive was already highly effective. Since it doesn’t really do anything beyond what a normal steered wall dive already did (except in corner situations where it’s not smart to whiff a wall dive in the first place), it’s of no use.

75

When I reflect on this thread, I think to myself “You just can’t please everyone.” This is always going to hold true. Every game will have its imbalances and strengths.You have to admit it is still one of the best deals around at $15.00 with the opportunity to fight in Vanilla ST makes it one helluva value :lovin:

76

Oh, absolutely. I completely agree that HDR is a great, worthwhile fighter, and would recommend it to anyone looking to pick up a good fighting game. I don’t want to give the impression that I think HDR is some horrible abomination or anything like that. I really like the game a lot, but if the topic is “which do you prefer,” I gotta give the edge to ST. It’s like if someone asked “Which do you like better, Pumpkin Pie or Cheesecake?” I ain’t saying there’s anything wrong with Pumpkin Pie, but Cheesecake makes my tongue its bitch.

77

I’ve gone over my reasons for like HDR over ST a few times in other threads, but what the hell, everyone else is retreading.

I’ll state up front that I did not start playing ST until last year. Prior to that I stuck with Hyper Fighting, and eventually AE (wherein I didn’t pick the ST guys anyway). Once I got the Dreamcast ST port my friends and I started playing it, and Michigan actually hosted an ST tourney - which is something, considering the game was never popular here in the first place, and still isn’t.

So when I say I have no particular bias for the older game, because I haven’t been getting used to everything about it for years upon years, bear that in mind. Quite simply, I agree with Sirlin’s overall objectives for HD Remix: compress the tiers, weaken fireball games, and make it easier for new people to get into the game.

I like that throw loops are weaker, even though I myself play Balrog and go for his all the time. I like that Vega’s dive is weaker, that Chun Li’s neckbreaker and super are less powerful, and that Gief has more to work with. I like moves having motions that are intuitive and not hurt by the random input window. So called “pointless” changes like Machine Gun Upper or Ryu’s fake didn’t hurt the game at all, so I can’t complain there. And I especially like that randomized move inputs are gone. Could the game use some more tweaking? Of course; Akuma could get toned down some more, and Fei, Cammy, and Hawk could use a little more of a push (even though, from my experience, they’re actually usable now). But considering that I actually play most of the cast now as opposed to like, 2 people from old ST because so many felt so limited in what they could do, I’d call remixing a success.

And who can really miss the O. characters when the only ones that got used were O.Sagat (almost exclusively because he was so ridiculously good), O. Ken, and sometimes O. Hawk? If they were left in, it’d just be more remixing effort for little gain. I don’t know, it seems like most of the complaints I’ve seen leveled against HDR have been by players who don’t like that their game, that they’ve been playing for years, was changed up. Alternately, the complaints stem from areas where arcades are actually still relevant, and the lack of HDR arcade keeps people on ST.

Whether or not the game ultimately replaces ST isn’t something that’s going to happen overnight. Midwest had practically equal numbers of entrants for both, so I don’t think that the scene has split so severely that most of the playerbase is only going to play one or the other. But I imagine most newer players will just go straight to HD, since it’s more accessible.

78

I’m not denying that there is a physical element, I’m just saying that it is should be relativly minor compared to the other factors that contribute to success. We’re just argueing differences in degrees here.

Whenever there is an uneven match up, risks rewards is out of wack. The character with the disadvantage must always risk more than he will (on average) be rewarded. When we say a match is 7-3, the “3” guy wins those 3 times because most if not all of his risks paid off. However, in the longrun, because risks rewards are not in his favor, he will lose more often than not (like when you gamble in a casino). I think that generally speaking, in ST, matches are more uneven than they are in HDR. Risks rewards has been corrected somewhat in many cases. If that means diminishing the rewards for knocking someone down with a wall dive or putting someone in a fireball trap, so be it. This doesn’t mean eliminating dominate strategies, just fixing the pay off matrix.

79

Honestly, as a package i can’t see any reason why anyone wouldn’t think HDR was a godsend to the street fighter gaming community. I honestly can’t understand how people prefer the old blocky graphics and stuff to the new updated ones, and even if you do, nobody ever seems to make much out of the fact that you can have any combination of old and new rules, graphics, and music in the game. I think this thread should be about “which rules are better to play in HDR, old or new?” plain and simple, because HDR as a package beats any street fighter game i’ve ever bought, and i can’t even see the point of arguing on that, in terms of sheer value and play options it’s unbeatable.

I’m all for classic gaming, i’m OG enough to have played street fighter since world warrior in the arcades, but HDR is the best of both worlds. The amazing original (or remixed) gameplay, with fantastic graphics, and great netplay and community features. Given that you can play the way you want, i don’t even understand why anyone would even want to play on an emulated rom of ST instead of playing HDR on an XBox (assuming a relatively decent connection of course), other than because it just plain isn’t as accessible or easy for casual gamers to get into. Maybe they’re comfortable without those new players coming in to the scene, and either scrubbing it up, or worse, offering them serious competition. (no offense to anyone here intended, SRK players kick ass). I waded through tons of scrubs for the first 3 months on HDR, but lately the standard has really lifted as the scrubs melt away and the hardcore stay on. The competition is at a really good level in general now, it’s easy to find really tough rooms, and the XBL features make it even better to keep in touch with challenging players.

Original ST hasn’t got all the new features like cool graphics and great netcode, and of course it isn’t as easy to get going on the difficult to set up GGPO, instead of just switching on an Xbox. These are all things that keep a niche game just that, niche. I personally love that HDR has brought new blood back into the scene and updated the game a bit for the modern age while keeping almost all of what was great about the original, and ditching a lot of the shit.

80

I think they should have kept O. versions for some characters.

O. Ken and O. Fei play completely different from their N iterations and their Remix versions didn’t really fuse them together like with R. Sagat or R. Hawk who are theoretically a combination of both. Its still mindboggling that Sirlin didn’t take UltraDavid’s suggestion of giving R. Honda his Old normals

Should have had Old version of grapplers with no throw whiff animations