While the release of Street Fighter 4 slowly approaches, media molecule found a way to tease us with new sackboys inspired to the popular beat’em up. Chun Li, Ryu, Guile and Zangief will be available from this week PSN update at the price of 2$ each or 6$ for the whole crew. I already hear the tapping on the pads to create new levels just for them.

Now, a poll update! I really appreciate the feedback you gave me about the site style through the poll but I see someone don’t like it completely or don’t like it at all so please comment. I’d like to know what you find ugly or hard to read, navigate and so on.

The new poll I added comes from a question I saw many times in forums and chats and nobody took the time to count the hands of those who are favourable or contrary. C’mon, cast your vote. I know the majority of the people passing by here are males.

A lot of things happened since august 15th but if we see it from an all different perspective we could also say that nothing special happened. Let’s go step by step.

Final Fantasy XIII got a japanese release date. It’s December 17th. It’s like any other date for me but not for japanese people. They’d better start saving money for corrupting the guys ahead of them in the queue.

Sega is working on a new 2D Sonic game in HD. They didn’t promise us that it won’t suck though. A couple of words for Sonic: “Stop hanging out with Tails & co and get the hell out of Nintendo games.”

Valve showed off more of L4D2 at Pax. New special infecteds and new campaigns with a working funfair. I don’t get why they didn’t do it all DLC. Oh, yeah, they like the moneys. Also, I’m working on an expo like pax: the GIX. It reads just like geeks, which is hilarious, see? People will come from the other side of earth just to spell it.

I renewed my hatred for macs. Nothing can justify €2000 for a low-profile laptop, not even DDR3 memory (NEDM, I’m sure it’s correct this way).

I bought Street Fighter 4. Zangief is still over-powered, Dhalsim is still a mummy and Cammy has still got buns. So fun with a friend next to you, so painful over the net. Small lag often prevents you from inputting combos and that’s not funny at all.

Ps3 slim: new console, same games. Hirai, what were you thinking about that day?

Final Fantasy Dissidia is out. Please, people, stop making fighting games with ultra-cool dudes compensating with their huge swords and sexy babes. Also, you’ll never defeat the colorful colors of Katamary Damacy, so focus a little more on style. Sad but true, Street Fighter 4 is the best fighting game you can stick to lately.

And, last but not least, Valve declared as “cheat” the external idler known as “steamstats”. I won’t discuss if this is correct or not, I’ll just say that adding frustration to frustration isn’t a good thing. Every player that used the idler had a little clean-up in his inventory and every player that didn’t use it got a limited-edition fake-halo hat called “cheater’s lament”, promptly modded as a real-fag hat by the community. Who got this hat? Uninterested, inactive and unaware players. They really deserve it after the hundreds of hats they dropped in 3 months. Seriously, Valve, make a “best player gets a hat” system and I’ll be back playing. Fuck your medals and exclusive status symbol hats, as for now TF2 has been replaced by Mass Effect on my HDD.

Also, new poll opened. You may request other options commenting here.

Remember that we got a steam group! Join if you feel like playing with us once in a while.

You heard about Super Street Fighter IV, right? And probably you’re complaining about it, right? Let’s see this thing from some different perspectives analysing three cases.

Case 1: Super Mario Galaxy 2

Super Mario Galaxy was a great game, complete and pleased the players. That’s why we said “welcome new galaxy” when SMG2 was revealed. That’s the point: it was flawless and nobody can be angry if such a product gets a sequel. “More of the same”, in this case, is justified by Miyamoto saying that during the development they had so many ideas that couldn’t fit in one disk.

Case 2: Left 4 Dead 2

“You promised us updates and you’re going to release a sequel within an year since its launch?”

This was the main reason people got angry with valve after the L4D2 trailer, saying that it should all be DLC or paid update, not full game. Let’s be serious: software houses are firms. They need you to pay them so then can keep on coding. The point is that L4D2 is really a whole new game, just having the five infecteds from L4D as old material. On top of that, L4D’s flaws have been patched via steam, updates have been made in a one every four month average and there are more coming. The only defect is that the community will be split in two, which it’s a sad thing for two games with the same background, gameplay and platform.

Case 3: Super Street Fighter IV

We only know about the gameplay fixes (to Zangief and Seth, I guess) and eight to ten new characters, with only three of them revealed. Considering that the disk space that every character takes on my HDD ranges from 30MB to 40MB the ten new characters would need about 375MB of free space to install. 400MB if you wan to throw in special music a other various fixes. I’ve seen bigger DLCs so the disk space is not the problem, at least on PC. What I want to remind you is that they have to balance the books at the end of the fiscal year. Most things of this world are not for free and saying “but valve does it” won’t mean anything to Capcom. You can’t even demand the character fixes for Abel’s ultra combo or Zangief’s spinning top attack. You played until now with them and you wouldn’t say anything if it wasn’t being patched in another game. Still, the problem is that the community will be split, again, and the number of players will decrease, due to a reduced number of challengers and possible matches. It’s simple math: 8 players on one game -> 56 possible matches. 4 players on two games -> 12 possible matches (24 total). It’s up to you now to choose of buying Super Street Fighter IV or waiting for Super Street Fighter IV Turbo.

In summary: the community is the most important customer for online games. Pleasing it can lead your game to success, in a different way than individual players for single-player games. I hope that really Valve and Capcom realize this and find a way to merge the online experiences of the sequels to those of the originals or their new games won’t give the financial support they expect.

Last night I had a nightmare. My PC was on and working fine but then a lighting struck and the whole building had a power failure. When I turned on the PC again it started with Windows ME!!!

Geeky tale aside, I’ve got big geeky news for you. Marriage between humans and videogame characters is now possible. Go take your copy of Tomb Rider to the priest.

I wonder how can he live knowing that his wife is dating over 100.000 other players.

Other “meh” news include the presentation of some of the characters that will join the battle in Super Street Fighter 4. Posting pics wouldn’t do much justice so here’s another vid.

Oh, have you noticed? It’s been a month since I started academy already and I can keep up with 2 comics a week!

My vacation is almost over and I’ll soon be back on the books for my February exams. In the meantime I can play the games I’ve bought  during the steam Holiday sale: Audiosurf and Shattered Horizon (thanks to Emuboy and Nemesix who lent me the money on their pre-paid card).

After the holiday sale craze I though everyone would have got a copy of Left 4 Dead 2 but I found out that some of my steam friends never considered it worth buying, so it’s poll time. We saw that the most awaited game is the mildly dissappointing Final Fantasy XIII (in Japan). We’ll now see how this L4D-L4D2 crack has affected the community. You can select all the answers that fit your gaming habits. Go vote now!

New year, new stuff on the market. Satoru Iwata revealed yesterday that the new Zelda for Wii will be out in 2010 and the successor of the DS is in the works with HD graphics and, probably, a motion sensor. Though I’m usually confident about hardware improvements I have to raise an eyebrow about this one. The DS is a handheld and waggling it around may not be the best choice if a 5-years guarantee isn’t provided. Furthermore, playing it on the bus would mess up the gameplay. We’ll see.

I also managed to remember an old game I played at a friend of mine’s house when I was a kid. It was Skyroads but to play it today i would need a DOS emulator and I’m not certain that it would run flawlessly. That’s why I looked for a remake and found Tasty Static. Give it a try if you feel like it.

Capcom released a small teaser showing off the new features in Super Street Fighter IV. I already love Balrog’s third outfit. Enjoy!

It still has to come out and I’m already waiting for a price cut.

Like Captainface shouted in the shoutbox a couple of days ago, the biggest announcement in the past few days was Portal 2, hinted and slowly spoiled by valve in the last years and more frequently on the last weeks. No release dates have been announced so far but we’ll probably be playing it this holiday season. Lots of people are speculating if this could be sold with Half Life 2 :Episode 3 or will be Episode 3 itself but I think it’s a waste of time to day-dream on a plot where the last villain in the series was an AI addicted to cakes.

The second Valve-related news is the (likely) upcoming Steam support for Macs. The Orange box games have been made object of some Mac-inspired ads so it’s not difficult to guess what Valve is hinting.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light has also been announced recently. It’ll be a downloadable game for XBLA and PSN. The game has already been nicknamed Diablo Raider or Lara of Persia. Allow me to say that I knew that Square-Enix would have screwed up. You’ll get a couple of related comics in the next weeks. You can bet on this.

Before giving you the last sad news of this post, I’d like you to know that Super Street Fighter IV will have some extra content for the players that own Street Fighter 4 for the same platform. Hokuto no Ken costume for Abel. I called this first.

Some people complained that we didn’t get a new video of Metroid Other M at the Nintendo Media Summit this year. Well, it got released a few days after that and it’s full of cinematic. I wouldn’t even consider this game in my must-buy list after seeing this if the game wasn’t directed by Yoshio Sakamoto himself. Still, next time models and animations should be done by Epic Games because I just can’t stand plain reflective surfaces with no detail after the awesome work that Retro Studios did with Metroid Prime.