Too Much Hyper, Not Enough Fighting

Jason Booth takes a look at the recently released Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, on Xbox Live. A highly anticipated title, Mr. Booth lays out why Capcom has fallen short of the high expectations gamers had for the title. From the article: "Now, where the game really falls down is online. It's bad enough playing SF2 on the 360 controller, but with lag it's nearly impossible. The funny thing is, the lag really isn't that bad from a technical standpoint. Most matches feel as if I'm getting a reasonable ping time and response. But SF2 turbo is a fast game, and at that speed, you just can't play, and can't compensate enough for the lag. If you press an attack button while leaving the ground on a jump, it'll probably go off as its landing."

street fighter 2 many

[paradigmdream]

why do they keep making street fighter 2 games? shouldn't the number go up once in a while?

Re:street fighter 2 many

[rabbot]

I'm sure it's because this isn't a new game. just a port of sf 2 hyper fighting. No need to give it a new name.

Re:There in lies the problem

[Quarem]

Actually a peer-to-peer model is better than a centralized network for fighting games where frames need to be synced between two client boxes. If they added a centralized host information would just have to travel and be processed at another node, which would actually increase the latency of the packets traveling between the two Xbox 360's.

A centralized server does make a lot of sense when the game has more than two players though, since all the server processing can be down by the server box which leaves the client machines free to process more game data, and typically centralized server's can be put on low-latency high-bandwidth connections which are still lacking in consumer broadband. Somebody has to pay for the centralized servers and the game-traffic though. Maybe they can use in-game advertising for that, but I would rather ISPs just continue to upgrade their networks.