The early nineteen nineties were an exciting and somewhat confusing time for gamers caught up in the so-called “console wars”. Console exclusivity was was treated much more differently back in the day, with companies like Nintendo and Sega caught up in a game of one-upmanship when it came to getting exclusive titles.
One game that both companies fought over was Capcom’s Street Fighter II. When the game released on the SNES in 1992, Nintendo had a policy that meant that any titles released on the console, would remain exclusive to it. To get around this, and beat out Nintendo, Sega had sought to get Street Fighter II: Champion Edition on the Sega Genesis. Now, any Street Fighter fan from the day will remember that we actually didn’t get Champion Edition, but instead got an enhanced version with features from Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting. This is while the Genesis port was being developed, Nintendo got Capcom to work on Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting for the SNES. This caused Sega to ask Capcom to bring Turbo to the Genesis instead.
Now, this is where things get complicated. Rather than simply add the Turbo features into the Champion Edition port, which was outsourced to an unknown company, Capcom chose to restart internal development on their own Hyper Fighting port for the Genesis, named Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition to get around Nintendo’s exclusivity rules. However, a ROM dump of the abandoned Champion Edition port to the Genesis eventually found its way into the internet, one that shows signs that it may have been in the process of being turned into Hyper Fighting before being canned.
In the video below, RetrowareTV’s Nostalgia Nerd takes a closer look at the ROM of the abandoned Genesis Champion Edition port and takes a look at the differences between it and the eventually released Special Champion Edition version. Along the way, they find some clues on why the port may have been abandoned as well as who the unnamed development studio for it may have been (signs pointing to Minakuchi Engineering, the same developer who worked on Mega Man: the Wily Wars for the Genesis).
Today, the last Pokkén World Championship for the Wii U version of Pokkén Tournament will be held! Throughout the year, players have been competing and earning spots for this event through major tournaments in North America, Europe, and Japan; now that the last of the 16 slots of the Pokkén Worlds Championships are filled with qualified players via the Last Chance Qualifier, this is the day to sort out who’s the very best.
North America Qualifiers
Suicune Master – Lucario
Thulius – Mewtwo
Rasenryu – Gardevoir
SlippingBug – Pikachu Libre
European Union Qualifiers
Fabilous – Suicune, Mewtwo, Pikachu Libre
Xabsoluted – Lucario
Elm – Suicune
Goreson – Machamp
Japan Qualifiers
APOLLO – Gengar
Messa – Charizard
Mikukey – Chandelure
Itou – Gardevoir
Last Chance Qualifiers
S-KI (Japan) – Blaziken
RPG|Azazel (Japan) – Machamp, Sceptile
Wzurds (United States) – Lucario
Tonosama (Japan) – Braixen
The Pokkén action today will be split across two different streams. From 9:00 AM until 3:30 PM PDT, the tournament will run until top 4 on the main Pokkén Channel.
For those that want to follow updates for Pokkén Worlds closely, you are advised to check out the Twitter of one Alex Jebailey, who is overseeing the Worlds Finals.
130 players from all over the world in the LCQ. Good luck and see you tomorrow morning on day 1! Bracket link will be shared online at 10 am
Just three more events remain in the online portion of the 2017 Capcom Pro Tour. Today’s event is the second to last for Asia, open to players from Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Here are the remaining players in the Top 8:
Top 8 Winners
RZR|Xian vs. MindRPG
AronManurung vs. Brandon
Top 8 Losers
Komphat vs .Dixon
leslie vs. hismit
If you’re looking to catch the action, head over to the Capcom Fighters Twitch channel.
Few characters take advantage of the combo system of Pokkén Tournament the way Sceptile does. This trap-flinging, damage-dealing grass-type has sat at top tier for a very long time in the meta, and even if his stock has somewhat lowered in recent months, he remains a strong, relevant force.
In his latest combo video for Pokkén Tournament, UFOrange breaks out every link, dash cancel, juggle, and assist exploit Sceptile has, showing off the flexible creativity Pokkén has to offer for combo creators. With Pokkén Tournament DX being a little over a month away, Sceptile is a good character to introduce yourself to what this series’ offense has to offer. When you stop to consider that the most recent patch in arcades arguably made this great character even stronger, Sceptile remains an important fighter to study for new and future Pokkén players.
Get your leaf blades ready, because Sceptile is good now, and likely will remain good on September 22nd when DX drops.
With a new game on the horizon and the current meta having stratified, it’s easy to forget just how much depth there still is left to dig into in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Even in these final months, players are still able to dig deep and create amazing things in the game.
One such player is Jonathan “Cloud805” Morales, a well known player and innovator for the team of Zero, Dante, and Vergil — otherwise known as “Zero May Cry.” In a recent tweet, Cloud805 demonstrated an amazing 298-hit combo for the team.
The combo itself is led mostly by Dante, with Zero and Vergil coming in at specific point to extend the combo. While the combo does not use X-Factor, Cloud does utilize a number of tricks such as multiple off-the-ground hits, ground bounces, empty air tags, TAC infinite loops, and even a TAC glitch to keep it going.
There’s generally two types of combo videos: practical tutorial videos, and impossibly situational entertainment. HapkidoRed‘s latest combo video for Tekken 7’s Heihachi, Mr. The King of Iron Fist himself, leans much closer to the latter — but it is not without its educational merit.
From a technique-flexing standpoint, this video is centered on both the famous Electric Wind God Fist and Heihachi’s just frame version of the Dragon Uppercut. Practically, if you can get your execution down, these two moves allow Heihachi to pump out massive damage in all his juggles. Perhaps the side wall re-splats HapkidoRed shows off here are more fun then functional, but it’s nice to know they exist, too.
If you’re an online Super Smash Bros. for Wii U player who thinks they have what it takes to compete — and are looking to earn some money — you’re in luck. Circa eSports, through a collaboration with their Smash streamers, have created a free online monthly event for players to fight for a share of a $100 prize pool.
The first event will start today: Friday night at 9:00 PM Eastern time (6:00 PM PDT) and will run through to Sunday, August 19th, and will be streamed exclusively on Circa’s Stream.me channel. As this tournament is being hosted online, you will need to sign up through smash.gg and provide your Wii U friend code to participate.
Just over a month after its release on iOS, Street Fighter IV: Champion Edition receives its first character DLC. Guy, Gouken, and Evil Ryu will become free downloads sometime this week, filling up three of the six empty character slots teased in the game’s original launch trailer.
Anyone can take a close look at the other three empty slots and see that the remaining mystery fighters are likely Juri, Rose, and Elena. It’s safe to presume that these three will feature in the next round of DLC, but for now the details of their future in the mobile game remains a mystery.
This free character DLC puts Street Fighter IV: Champion Edition off to a good start, and gives hope that the game will stay both convenient and affordable. Those interested in buying can still pick it up for $4.99 in the app store.
Nowadays, you’re generally out of luck if you’re not a fan of the clicky sound of a modern arcade joystick. That wasn’t always the case, with joysticks like the HAPP Perfect 360 and Sanwa Flash providing silent gaming. Both achieved this by foregoing traditional microswitches for infrared technology, allowing for uniquely quiet play.
These sticks were not without their flaws. Many people couldn’t cope with the fact that the HAPP 360 required you to play without a gate — something that years of playing on a Sanwa JLF or Seimitsu LS-32 made very difficult. On top of this, installation of these sticks required you to do additional modding work besides dropping them into a stick and plugging in the standard jumper that most sticks can use. The Perfect 360 and Flash needed you to supply a 5 volt current to the lever, requiring soldering on almost all commercial sticks. If your joystick circuit board was powered by less voltage, you were forced to use a battery pack — and hope it doesn’t run out of juice in your grand finals match.
With the joystick renaissance that was sparked by MadCatz in 2009 relying on Sanwa JLFs as their stick du jour, optical sticks were relegated to a niche market. Sanwa ultimately abandoned the Flash, and originals were fetching a high premium when found for sale. While Marcus “Toodles” Post created a replacement model of the Flash, it saw a limited run and was available only in kit form, which would require you to also sacrifice a Sanwa JLF to install. For the longest time, people in the market for an alternative were left paying exorbitant prices on either the Flash or the Toodles’ alternative when they could be found.
Those people — as well as people who may not have ever even considered such a thing — may finally see their search come to an end. Bryan Armitage of Paradise Arcade Shop has been long working on an arcade stick that has long been named Project Magenta. It has been a whisper within the Shoryuken.com Tech Talk forums since 2013, and at Evo 2017, it entered the mainstream market with a roar as Armitage arrived with a full production model available for preview at the event.
As a tech aficionado, I couldn’t miss this. I’m always on the search for the perfect joystick. I have played on JLFs, Seimitsus, Myoungshin Fantas, as well as the Crown equivalents in the CWJ-303 and CWJ-309. While I can appreciate every one of them, I always found something lacking about each of them. Even Armitage himself had hyped this joystick up to me at Evo 2016, without letting me actually see the product yet. I was excited, needless to say, but apprehensive that this joystick would live up to the hype.
Did it? Yes, and then some.
To optical or not to optical
First off, let’s start with some of the nitty-gritty technical details of this product. This stick is similar to the optical predecessors in that it does not use microswitches. However, this is where the similarities between the Flash or the P360 end. Whereas these two sticks read inputs from infrared sensors, the Magenta uses Hall Effect technology to determine the sticks location.
Hall Effect technology relies on sensors on the PCB for the Magenta and a shortened JLF shaft with a magnet mounted to the bottom. The relationship of the shaft mounted magnet to the circuit board sensors allows for the Magenta to tell exactly where your stick it is all the time. We’re not just talking a general cardinal or intermediate direction, we’re talking down to degrees as precise as radians on a unit circle. This makes the stick itself fully analog, and quite possibly more accurate than any potentiometer on any Dual Shock or Xbox analog stick.
With these analog inputs, the stick uses a built-in microprocessor to translate all of this into digital cardinal inputs. Thus making it at the onset analog, but ultimately the stick itself operates just like any other stick you were to throw into your stick case. Well, almost, because there is so much more to this stick that any other production model simply cannot do.
The kitchen sink has been thrown in
One of the things I heard a lot when I mentioned opticals to people on the Evo floor was that people weren’t interested for one reason alone: the lack of a gate, a perceived misconception that was left over from the P360 that carried over to the Sanwa Flash. When I transferred from a Seimitsu LS-32 to a Myoungshin Fanta in 2010, I found out first-hand how relatable that complaint was. Having played some Rufus in Street Fighter IV, the ability to find diagonals on a circular or gateless stick took a lot of practice — more than some people are willing to put in.
This concern was something rightfully observed by Armitage, as the Magenta comes with the standard square gate (octagon and circle gates will likely be released in the future). This makes the Magenta feel very similar to your current stick — albeit with the lack of clicky microswitches. But given that the biggest concern has always been finding the gate to find your diagonals, this should assuage some of the biggest detractors of optical sticks. It is also worth noting that the Magenta allows you to have microswitches on the casing as well, so that you can feel them click without actually doing anything — an aesthetic element of the stick that allows you to work with a feel you’re accustomed to before removing them if you ever decide to.
Screenshot of the Magenta’s highly customizable configuration. (photo courtesy of Bryan Armitage)
Because it doesn’t rely simply on basic infrared technology and can tell exactly where your shaft is at all time, the Magenta is more customizable than any stick you have ever owned. You can now adjust the sensitivity of the cardinal and diagonals on the stick, giving yourself more or less neutral zone. Not only can you do this in general, you can switch to an advanced mode to adjust each cardinal and diagonal independently. Say you miss certain inputs on left side more than right. You can now adjust your joystick to compensate for this by making the dead zone on the left side smaller than the right side.
You can also make cardinal directions have more area for actuation than diagonals, or vice versa. Given my Rufus in Street Fighter IV example, if you were to routinely miss divekicks, you could make up for this by making the activation space for diagonals bigger than cardinals, and you could even make that specific for diagonals that involve down inputs. On the other hand, if you were to play Chun-Li in any game and miss her head stomp combos frequently, you could make the activation space for down inputs wider than down-forward or down-back, thus assuring you’re going to get her headstomp every time you need it.
Another interesting customization that you can do is to rotate the exact direction of the cardinals and diagonals a few degrees. This allows you to compensate for mounting errors or if you tend to pivot the stick in your lap.
All of this is amplified by the fact that you can store four profiles on the stick with various configurations. The sky is the limit with this, and could be useful to literally anyone. If a character specialist has execution perfection one day and flaws the next, he could tailor a profile to fit his off days and have no issues with his execution no matter what. Another useful application is players who want their stick tailored to different characters or even games, so that their execution remains flawless in all games. All of this is facilitated by a button press on the stick itself. Players who use MadCatz TE2s or Razer Pantheras can simply pop open their case, press the button, and change their profile.
What about players that don’t have easy access to the insides of their stick? Paradise has thought of that too, and included a header to wire a button to, meaning you can wire the Magenta either to an existing button, or drill a hole somewhere on your stick to facilitate a new button for switching profiles.
The stress test
On paper, this sounds very good. What about in practice? I put it to the test at Evo, where Bryan sat me down with my game of choice — Super Street Fighter II Turbo. On Japanese sticks, I have often had issues with my main — O.Chun — in having conflicting inputs when attempting to do kara fireball (standing roundhouse closely followed by finishing her fireball motion) and have had issues of getting Spinning Bird Kick instead. I’ve also had issues of accidental air Spinning Bird Kicks, something that is useless with the character.
With the assistance of profiles to mitigate the odds of these accidental inputs happening, I can safely state that my inputs were the freshest I’ve ever had. I also used Deejay, and where I would often have inputs overlap between Sobat and Upkicks, I had none of that. But now for the ultimate test: motion characters.
I am a motion character scrub in ST. I always have been. I have a reasonably competent O.Ryu, but beyond that, you don’t want to see me manning a motion character. So I gave N.Ryu a shot. With the switch of a profile, I was getting what I wanted deliberately, including Super, which has long been the bane of my existence with the character.
I have often said that Korean sticks were the best for me getting the inputs I wanted. I still had issues with various inputs, even on the sticks I loved and swore were my weapon of choice. This stick has trumped all levers I have used and provided a precision to my inputs that — outside of a Hitbox — I thought were impossible. Whereas I would often drop many inputs over the course of a session, in the hour that I handled the Magenta, I experienced no drops.
This is far and away the best stick I’ve ever used, and I am already scheming to replace the LS-32s in my Madcatz SE sticks with the Magenta.
Cons—can there be cons?
Yes, I’ve spoke highly of this stick, but to be objective, there has to be something about this stick to talk about here.
Firstly, just like the Flash and the P360, this is a powered stick. This requires additional finagling to get to work on your joystick, as it will require a 5 volt power source. The positive nowadays is most circuit boards — particularly aftermarket ones like the Brook boards or Toodles’ Cthulhu and ChImp boards — have screw terminals that go to voltage, allowing you to merely run a wire from the Magenta to that screw terminal and be done with it. Another positive is that unlike the old era of consoles, all USB sticks run at 5 volts natively. If you are throwing this into a current generation stick, you will be able to use the Magenta no matter what. If you are trying to throw this into a PlayStation 2 stick, you’re going to need some technical prowess to make it happen.
Another thing to consider is the price point. The stick will release with a price of $100. Not everyone is going to want to pay that much for one lever when a JLF is $23 everywhere under the sun. However, given the amount of features available on the Magenta, as well as the level of customization available, I feel like this a fair market price for what you are getting.
The Magenta on display at Evo 2017. (photo courtesy of Bryan Armitage)
The release
If this information has whet your appetite, and you are like me and throwing your wallet at the screen right now, you have a little bit of time to wait. While there were 10 models of this stick available at Evo, they were all snatched up very quickly. These were completed with 3D printed casing, and the production models are being molded and made as we speak.
Bryan Armitage pointed to a September release, at the above cost of $100. You will get a selection of springs with the stick — so if you want the tension to mirror a JLF, that is possible. If you want it to mirror an LS-32, that is also possible. If you have brute force strength and want it to mirror a iL Competition, you can do that as well. The stick will come fully built, and all you will have to do is install it into your stick, and follow the directions given on how to use it. There will also be Link shafts available so that you can detach the top part of the shaft, much like what a lot of people currently do with their JLFs and LS-32s now.
These sticks will only be available at Paradise Arcade Shop, so be on the look out when this stick hits the market.
Some time back, we reported on the fact that known dataminer X-Kira had discovered evidence that a proper arcade mode was finally coming to Street Fighter V. Now, it seems that they may have found out when this mode will finally come to the game.
In a recent post on Facebook, X-Kira posted what seems to be evidence pointing to the arcade mode being released in January of next year. This comes from the naming of the folder for the mode, which is “201801”.
A true arcade mode is something that fans have been asking for since the game’s release. If this is real, then it looks like Capcom plans on rolling it out after the current Capcom Pro Tour season is over, likely alongside what other changes (such as a possible bonus stage) they have in store for Season 3.
