arstal said:
SF3 was quite possibly the most divisive game in the history of fighters. For every person who thought it was the shit, there was someone else who thought it was shit. This is one partial reason SFIV is doing so well- the older players are lapping it up because it isn't SF3.
The one thing I"m wondering about now is whether Capcom will muck up the PC release, whether players will accept it, and whether someone who hack GGPO into it. (I think that's gonna happen)
SF3...I think SF was divisive when they kept releasing SF2 upgrades while SNK and Midway were releasing new iterations of their titles. During the SF run, SNK released Fatal Fury, Fatal Fury 2 and Fatal Fury Special. We had two Samurai Showdowns (both were really good). Two Art of Fighting. A couple of World Heroes. MK came with one and two (Two basically became the "it" fighter upon its release).
Instead of capitalizing on their game's popularity (and possibly stopping with Hyper), Capcom just kept milking the series and the number of players returning to play the series kept reducing upon each new upgrade.
If we were doing sales age, we'd see the Alpha series didn't really move many units (except three).
Three exacerbated it because they created an entirely "new" game by having Ryu and Ken be the only returning characters from II. The parries, overheads, super jumps, small jumps, juggles, super cancels, super arts probably didn't help anything either. It also didn't help that the cast of SFIII weren't instantly likeable (Necro, Oro, etc). Most looked at the cast as a group of freaks. It was like a huge leap (hell, I still don't know what happened in II's story when III came out).
I love SF but Capcom didn't hedge the right bets.
Ono has to be congratulated for trying to resurrect the series. His desire was to make a game that appealed to both the hardcore and the mainstream (and look at all of the traffic in this thread...whereas the HD remix thread consists of myself, Arstal, Tekno, Seiken, N3ss, Haunts, Mox, Ferrio, CO Andy, Eggo, etc).
