I want to talk about Capcom fighting games that came out in 90s. What the hell happened? We have SF2 which popularized the genre in 1991 and set certain standards. Other companies quickly latched to the new fad and made their own games with unique mechanics and pretty graphics. Capcom, on the other hand, was clinging to SF2 for three more years, releasing nothing but updated versions of the game. Of course, when 1994 came, they realized that the competition was too strong and that they need new games in their fighting lineup. Night Warriors and Children of the Atom were released in the same year, and they look astonishing. Both games' designs were bold, every second of character and background animation looked smooth, expressive and alive. And don't forget about the fantastic music. On the other hand, the successor to SF2, the biggest hit in arcades, the game that brought tons of money to Capcom, came out a year later. Street Fighter Alpha looks dull and boring both in designs and animations. Backgrounds were nice though. You can't say that it was a big step up from the previous entry in the series. So why didn't Capcom put more effort in SFA? Maybe both Night Warriors and X-Men didn't do well in the arcades, so they had to quickly make a new SF entry to ride on the name recognition? Maybe they didn't care and knew that people will drop they quarters into SF machine no matter the quality of the product?
Capcom and sprites
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>not her idle animation
you already fucked up.
There you go. Everything that was not SFA was animated beautifully. Even SFA2 newcomers didn't look that good. They weren't bad by any means, though.
Wut? But they made Alpha 2 and eventually A2G and those were amazing.
Sure, but that was in 1996. The animations were still lacking, especially compared to competitors and their own games. And they sure as hell didn't care about balance. Nobody cared back in the day though.
Uhh is this game about sprites or the games themselves?
SF3 got the best sprite work of any capcom game
What the fuck are you talking about? Who said anything about SFIII?
I miss Spiral. how can Dhalsim even compete?
Alpha was a quick, cheap project that was actually originally intended for the CPS1. Mid-production they switched to a dual CPS1/CPS2 development, and eventually the CPS2 version became the main release. The PCS1 version was released only for the CPS Changer, the home console version of the CPS1. Then it sold a lot better than they were expecting, so it got sequels.
I'm not talking currently about SF3. SF3 sprites are amazing, CPS3 games in general are eye-candy, they are a huge step-up from their previous titles.
The weird thing is, graphics didn't sell those games. Nobody remembers Red Earth or HFTF, 3s is the only one that is still popular. But, as far as I know, back in the day the SF3 line-up was mostly overlooked in favour of Marvel crossover games and SFA3. I guess people really only care about brand recognition. Didn't help that the first versions of SF3 and JoJo sucked.
I didn't know that. That explains why CPS Changer version doesn't look different from CPS2. Why would they make a cheap products when SF was so popular? I thought they had faith in the franchise since SF2 conquered the arcades back in the day.
people only remember Red Earth for Leo rule 34
It was sort of a spur of the moment thing. SF3 might have been in the very early planning phases at that time, but they knew that it wouldn't be coming out anytime soon. Meanwhile Bengus had done some updated art for the SF1 cast for a magazine article about the history of Street Fighter, and people really liked it. So they decided to do this prequel thing sort of as a spinoff rather than a direct successor to SF2.
One other thing I forgot to mention is that the reason for originally developing on the CPS1 was to help sell off the remaining stock of CPS1 boards. Capcom was pretty much done using that board by that time, but they still had leftover stock of them lying around.
That's interesting to know. Maybe SF wasn't that important to Capcom back in the day. I wish their other games got more recognition nowadays. Darkstalkers are dead, HFTF has a very small fanbase and lots of stray anime fans that don't know how to play. Rival Schools, Cyberbors, Powerstone are completely forgotten, even though they are fun games.
Thought it was funny that akuma's sprite from sf2 was used for COTA
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It was certainly important to Capcom, but unlike now they were also experimenting with other fighting games, like the ones you mentioned. Amidst all of these other fighting games, and with a real true sequel to SF2 still some ways away, they figured it wouldn't hurt to let some of their newer devs do something small with the SF IP in the meantime. Then that small project went on to sell well, and also served as fodder for lots of popular and cheap to make crossover games, whereas the true sequel to SF2 they poured so much time and money into ended up doing poorly. But that's how things work out sometimes.
That was the only sprite he had at the time.
Man i love sprites, they are more imersive than fucking 3D.
3D in fighting games was a mistake.
Experimenting is an expensive thing, I wish modern publishers took more risks. Capcom is playing safe now, I doubt we'll hear anything not SF or Marvel related in the next five years. I'd kill for something fun and crazy like HFTF. I wonder how good anime fighting games are, like Uniel or Arcana Heart. Skullgirls was a really pleasant surprise.
Spiral's background story is some seriously fucked up shit.
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I wonder how much time it took Capcom to make all those animations for CPS3 games. 3s looks ridiculously good, not to mention that New Generation also had astonishing backgrounds. I wish they kept those for 3s.
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SFA might have my favorite artstyle. Really nice exaggerated proportions. Good cartoony aesthetics and generally cohesive designs.
Characters are really expressive too.
Pretty much all newcomers except for maybe Sakura and Karin perfectly fit into the series.
You must also be high if you think that SFA wasnt a gigantic step up from SF2 in every single regard when it comes to visuals.
The animations arent 3s tier or anything, but they are far above SF2.
They are a step up, but compared to Marvel games they kinda pale in comparison.