Anybody familiar with the Street Fighter series will know there's a new game in the pipeline. Upon the discovery of an arcade cabinet of Street Fighter II just a few months after release was undoubtably the point my love of computer games blossomed. The game was streets ahead (urgh) of anything at the time of release and if anything I'll always remember how surprised I was of the inclusion of a green beast that could electrocute people, possibly the first and last time such an obscure character could possibly be included credibly within a video game.
Time moved fast for the series, incrementations were added almost bi-yearly to the game with friends boasting they'd played hacked versions with airbourne fireballs and new characters eventually being added in the form of the now infamous naming conventions spanning Super, Turbo, Dash juxtaposed against various edition titles.
Further into the series the alpha and shortly after EX editions arrived, both proving fairly successful but still no closer to any signs of an official sequel. Street Fighter III made its appearance in 1997 after much hype destined to become a cult classic but untimely in it's execution. It was released quite a distance from any console capable of recreating the experience faithfully and by the time it did hit Capcom (the developers) had much more graphically pleasing games such as resident evil ruling the roost. The Dreamcast in what life it had became the system Street Fighter would see life on for it's short rise and fall.
Fast forwarding on a fair number of years Street Fighter was easily down and out, even the emulation side had struggled to keep the CPS3 (arcade hardware) game alive and gradually Soul Calibur, Tekken and even the once scorned upon Virtua Fighter came to fruition to replace the once world dominating game.
Just a few years back Capcom (so busy with resident evil and it's surrogate children such as Devil May Cry) out of the blue released some conversions for the PS2 and XBox bringing Street Fighter back to the forefront for a brief time. Shortly after some word of Street Fighter IV made an appearance...
The next month every gaming press and website was abuzz of the speculation for the game "Would it be 3D?" being the question on most minds. Throughout the late end of 2007 upto this moment the news on the game had gone from a trickle to full stream, so where's this game heading?
As you must've gathered from the screens it's looking great especially considering that my own personal gripe from the initial news was that this would be almost an external production from Capcom (primarily a Japanese company).
The current and final arcade build from promotional videos looks to be a game worth anybody's time and with a console release (not to mention PC version) on the horizon this will really be a great event for all gamers.
Look forward to a console release on the PS3 and XBox360 in the coming year