Month: May 2015

By now, it’s no secret that Ultra Street Fighter IV hasn’t had the best of launches on PlayStation 4. As soon as the title dropped yesterday afternoon, fighting game communities were flooded with complaints regarding extremely slow menu navigation, buggy gameplay, and generally shoddy performance.

In order to get to the bottom of things, the folks over at Display Lag performed a quick latency test with this new release, and came to some rather stark conclusions. According to their research, Ultra Street Fighter IV averages about 133ms (~8 frames) of input delay, but can top out as high as 142ms (~8.5 frames). Looking at their running chart of previous experiments, this PlayStation 4 port is among the worst they’ve seen, and scrapes the bottom of thebarrel when held up against other fighters.

For comparison, the current competitive standard on Xbox 360 averages a latency of 85ms (~5.1 frames), while the PlayStation 3 version, which this port was supposed to have improved upon, averages 107ms (~6.4 frames). We here at Shoryuken cannot independently verify these findings, but in any case, it still shows the PlayStation 4 version did not correct the lag issues present on the previous Sony console.

So, what does this mean in the grand scheme of things? Like most intricate details in fighting games, casual players likely won’t notice any difference, but those on the competitive side of things are sure to feel this disparity quite heavily. This should also be pretty vindicating for those who claimed the port felt “off” without concrete figures to back it up.

Source: Display Lag via PandaxGaming

When SoCal Regionals 2015 was forced to move to October instead of their original June dates, Level|Up Series announced that they would also be holding two Prelude tournaments in June and August. With the first rapidly approaching, online registration is now open to the public.

Prelude I is scheduled for June 6 at the University of California Irvine’s Student Center, featuring tournaments for Ultra Street Fighter IV, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-, and Mortal Kombat X.

Those interested in joining should head on over and register soon; due to the nature of the event, brackets will be capped at 128 entrants per game.

Meanwhile, the main SoCal Regionals 2015 tournament is tentatively scheduled for October 9, with the organizers looking to secure a spot at the Ontario Convention Center in Ontario, California. Stay locked in to Shoryuken for more information is it crops up.

Source: SoCal Regionals

According to new details from Kotaku, there’s a good possibility that the last-generation versions of Mortal Kombat X have been pushed back yet again. This news comes courtesy of multiple GameStop employees, who reportedly had the unfortunate job of notifying customers that the previous summer launch window has been changed to fall.

Their statements are backed up by stealth changes to the game’s listings on the retailer’s website; the ubiquitous release date of December 31 has replaced the previous placeholder of June 2.

This news comes just a couple of months after the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 releases were officially delayed from appearing at the same time as their counterparts in April.

After a botched Steam launch, it’s entirely possible High Voltage Software, the third-party studio enlisted by NetherRealm Studios to handle development outside the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, have been scrambling to correct the same issues in other versions. Continued work on PC may have also drawn their attention away from the home platforms.

In any case, this is far from surprising. NetherRealm creative director Ed Boon made it very clear during the early days of Mortal Kombat X promotion that they had very little to do with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 ports so that they could focus their attention on the versions that have become the competitive standard.

We have reached out to High Voltage for more insight on this matter, and will update this article if we hear back.

Source: Kotaku via Polygon