Ok, there ARE A-ranked and B-ranked people in SSF4. This just isn’t particularly transparent because you are ranked both on your general play, and your character play, and the two values are not called something entirely intuitive.
“Player Points” does make sense. “Battle Points” are per character, so why not call them “Character Points”? Is this just me? I am aware that while I am a player of the game, I am a fairly casual one and not steeped in the culture as such, so maybe this was totally obvious to the hardcore people and everyone who actually plays it online is already hardcore except for me. Then again, as I’ve linked before, 60% of the players of Fable 2 understood less than 50% of Fable 2’s features and this phenom can’t be entirely focused on the RPG genre.
Overall on-line has been improved a lot for this game, though as opposed to SF4 vanilla. Invisible character selection is nice, in general I have an easier time finding an appropriate match, and not everyone is playing Ken. There are a few characters that, after about 50 total matches, I have yet to face at all, of course. With my small sample, people are trending toward Juri a lot.
Yesterday while I was still in an SSF4 mood I stumbled across this blog on Capcom Unity: How to Design a Street Fighter Character. I linked to part 27 of the blog, but you can read the whole thing here. BigMex obviously has some biases as to what he thinks is good character design, but I like to read articles by biased people; it makes you think. In the linked post he talks in particular about what design elements he thinks resonate the most in characters, talking about why some characters have caught on more than others. He also talks occasionally about the new characters designed by Arika for the Street Fighter EX series, and I admit I do have a bit of a soft spot for some of those otherwise forgotten misfits (like Pullum Purna).
I definitely agree with his discussion on which Street Fighter “bosses” are awesome (Dictator, Sagat, you are awesome) and which are the worst (Gill, it’s you, you are the worst). And color me disappointed that we never got King Cobra in the game – what the heck, Capcom, that dude is awesome.
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