Streets of rage 4

[endo]

I've played it and it's pretty good and looks better in real life.

[112]

I used to always go the faster, quick on their feet characters, but in recent years found that playing the weaker / faster characters would drag the game out too much as it would take longer to defeat enemies. So I always play as Adam in SOR1, and Axel in SOR2 and 3. Overly big cumbersome characters just don’t feel right, when I play them.

But I agree with those Adam fans out there, he is my choice of character too. However, I can understand why they got rid of him in the second game, as adam and axel are similar characters...

112

[Asura]

SoR4 is an analogy for Brexit.

Do we remain in the 16-bit era that we know and love, or leave for possibly greener pastures with higher pixel counts but less perceived depth?

Oh man, FOUR PAGES DISCUSSING THE VERACITY OF THIS METAPHOR

[vanpeebles]

Look, if I want clip art I'll play Publisher 97!

->Open Spoiler<-

[hudson]

I didn't like SSFIITHDR for the same reason...

[vanpeebles]

That does look nasty.

[Asura]

That does look nasty.

Weirdly... I think SSFIITHDR looks bad in small screenshots, but I actually like it when playing the game live on a big TV. I hated it before I got to finally play it. Then again I love UDON comic's interpretation of the characters, which they're based upon.

[Dogg Thang]

For me, the big problem with that HD SF2 is that the animation is not good. The sprites are seemingly drawn over individually so are approached as drawings, not part of a sequence of animation. And some of the interpretation of those drawings is janky. From what I have seen of Streets Of Rage 4, the animation quality looks much better.

[randombs]

Yeah, they had to use the existing animation frames to keep the hot boxes and doohickeys accurate.

It’s weird how someone’s standing animation looks fine to me in SSF2T, but the exact same animation looks choppy in SSF2THD. And that’s not my nostalgia specs.

[monel]

Ha I remember buying SSF2THD when it came out... then playing it for 5 minutes tops. I don't mind the art style but it conveys no sense of motion and those shots make it look like cardboard cutouts, or something, can't quite put my finger on it. Mega disappointing in the end.

[Nu-Eclipse]

Yeah, they had to use the existing animation frames to keep the hot boxes and doohickeys accurate.

Something they really didn't do a good job of because the hitboxes are considerably off in HDR, meaning that a lot of the combos don't register properly.

[fuse]

I think a lot of the graphical complaints with the Super Turbo remake are down to, on one hand, asking Udon to go to town on their lavish style as seen in the cartoons, while on the other hand, demanding that anatomically they neatly overlay and conform to the proportions and quirks of some 25 year old sprites, to ensure the game doesn't look totally broken when the hit & hurt boxes are miles away from where the game's code says they are. If you freeze frame the original I'm sure you can nit pick the proportions (and the way they change between different animations) very easily, and while you might not notice it in sprite form, it's got every opportunity to be a lot more obvious when you move to another style of art. Nor do you really have much opportunity to alter the animation to better convey movement because again, it's all just overlaying the old sprite work. There's such a limited to scope to actually make things better, but plenty of room to totally mangle it - it's always seemed like a bit of a Frankenstein undertaking to me, but I also think it could've ended up a hell of a lot worse.

When you're talking about a new game designed from the ground up though, the fundamentals are all new and shiny and mapped to what your artists are doing without the baggage of trying to retain 1:1 mapping to something that wasn't your design decision in the first place. If anyone's citing Super Turbo as a reason to be worried for SoR 4, I'd argue that they're two very different beasts.

[randombs]

DT was talking about the animation in SSF2THD being off.

[Dogg Thang]

Yep. And yes they are very different things and the animation in SoR4 looks far superior. It’s easy to see what happened to the SF2 remake and it would have been possible to translate the sprites the way they did while making the animation better. Not easy - it requires good animators obviously - but certainly possible. Focus needed to go on movement within the constraints of the pixel versions, which as pointed out are far from perfect (and also very limited in terms of numbers of frames) and yet still can provide a good base to work from. A lot of it is down to the continuity of movement and secondary action. The small details like dodgy toes or whatever would fall away in terms of importance had the movement been better.

Anyway, it is what it is. I guess the point is that the SF2 HD remake doesn’t show whether it can or can’t be done well. All it shows is how it worked out for that game. The animation quality in SoR4 looks much better regardless of what you feel about the drawing style.

[Cassius_Smoke]

I watched a cool video about how fighting games are animated. I can't find it now, but it was about how different games use a different number of frames before and after the hit. Most games use 11 frames before and after and 2 standing frames to make 24 frames per second. Others will simply speed up the animation which looks clunky.
My point is, I think making a game like SoR4 is more technical than it makes out. Perhaps the graphical design has been chosen to allow for the best animation and hit boxes.