Xbox 360 Fanboy

With all the fuss surrounding Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, we decided to shoot a few questions over to the folks at Capcom Digital. Despite the gorgeous new look, there are a few concerns about the new iteration of the series. Hardcore fans are worried about how new sprites will affect years of heavy practice and study. Will the redesign render you years of hard earned skill moot? What kind of Live support will the game have? What about revisiting other franchises? We got the answers from SSFIITHDR's producer, Rey Jimenez.

How did the idea for SFII HD come about? How long has it been in the works?

The idea of doing something like this has been around for a while, but it really solidified when our group moved on to working on download titles. When it became an initiative of Capcom to release download titles, we realized that this concept of SFHD that we've been bouncing around for a while would fit perfectly.

How does SFII HD take advantage of Xbox Live? We assume there will be versus play, but what about tournaments, etc?

Of course online play will be the main LIVE feature, but we are also working to make the leaderboards as robust as possible. We're actually working on that part now and should know pretty soon what we'll be able to support. Tournament mode is something we're still looking into.

A lot of Street Fighter fans are worried that the new sprites will injure the game's balance or change its timing. Is this fear well-founded? Will there be any animation differences or is SFII HD a frame-by-frame conversion?

To keep the original gameplay intact, we are not adding any new frames to the game. All of the timing and hitboxes will remain the same. In fact, a key part of the testing will be with various SF players that know more than is humanly and/or sanely possible about the game. They will be brought in to make sure that the game feels right and everything plays like the original game.

What sort of achievements can we expect in SFII HD? Will they be based on leaderboards and challenges, or will they be more creative?

We held a contest on our blog about this recently. A game like Street Fighter really opens up a ton of very creative and hard achievements. Of course we will have some easier and typical ones, but we are looking to cover as many different types as we can. There's not a huge list that we can put in, but I'm trying to make sure that we also have some endurance, skill, and insanely hard ones.

[The contest was announced after this interview was conducted, find more details here.]

Might we see other iterations of Street Fighter get the HD treatment? What about Street Fighter Alpha, for example?

That's always a possibility. The better that SFHD does, the better the possilibty.

What are the chances of Capcom digging further into its library of fighters for XBLA? After all, Puzzle Fighter will introduce XBLA gamers to characters from Darkstalkers....

That goes with the above question. It's up to the fans to really tell us if they really like this kind of thing and to the execs that make the decisions on what games we publish, game sales acts like a megaphone.

We'd like to thank Rey for taking the time to answer our questions.