Street Fighter HD Remix: Honda

E.Honda was one of the most controversial characters during development. In Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST), he has some really bad matches and is considered maybe the 9th or 10th best character in the game. Certainly not dominating, so he needs some boosts.

Fat Man Needs Help Against Fireballs

I considered my first pass on him to be pretty uncontroversial. He has a huge disadvantage against fireball characters, so I gave him some extra tools to deal with that, but nothing super strong. First, his jumping short can now hit sweeps. In more recent Street Fighter games, if you jump in and land on a sweep, you can still block it. That feature is called “trip guard” and it doesn’t appear in ST or HD Remix. If you jump in, the opponent can make you land on a sweep in the SF2 series. This is especially bad for Honda in that he gets knocked down, then pushed out by fireballs, and is then stuck in that same repeating pattern. He certainly can win, but it’s very hard. To see how hard, watch Japanese Honda champion Kusumondo attempt to get anywhere near Alex Valle's Ken at Evolution 2008.

A jumping short that hits sweeps is a way of giving trip guard to just Honda. At first this sounds powerful, but in practice it’s a little less powerful than you might think. Because of the way hitboxes are shaped on sweep attacks, they will still hit a jumping Honda if the sweep is done very far away right at the tip. So Ken and Ryu can still attempt that same old pattern, but it requires much more careful spacing on their part. Next, fireball characters can shift to other strategies to keep you out, such as relying on different anti-air attacks or jump attacks. Finally, it’s pretty important to realize that you can still keep Honda away in a similar way by just delaying your sweep and letting him land. This way, you won’t get hit by his jump short (he already landed) and you’ll force him to block a sweep, then block a fireball. This keeps Honda away, but is less damaging to him so he gets more chances to try to get in.

Next, in ST Honda has a move that people call the “floating fierce.” If you jump straight up and press fierce, you can then steer him left or right. This is helpful in avoiding fireballs. In HD Remix, the distance he moves left or right is greater, so it’s easier to avoid fireballs this way.

Then there’s the hundred hand slap, performed by mashing on punch buttons. As part of a global change to all mash moves, it’s now easier to get the Hundred Hands to come out.

And then there’s his super. It’s considered one of the very worst in the game in ST because the first hit doesn’t even knock down and there’s enough time between the first and second hit to Dragon Punch Honda out of it, even if he hits. It’s a generally sad super that has only one saving grace: it can be "stored." After doing the motion for the super (which ends with holding the joystick forward) you can keep holding it forward and then press punch whenever you want.

In HD Remix, I removed the storing property on the super, but greatly improved the super. It now knocks down on the first hit and juggles (with itself). That means if you hit with it from full screen, the first hit will knock down, the second hit will then juggle them, then they will be fully knocked down. Even though it doesn’t do much damage from that distance, it functions correctly and gives you a chance to pressure them as they get up, which is exactly what Honda wants to do. Remember that this move can destroy fireballs, too, just like it did in ST. Also, because of the new juggling property, if you hit with it at just the right range (pretty close, but not point-blank) you can get a three hit version that does about 50% damage, even as anti-air. In practice, I think it will be pretty rare to hit with it in that way because the opponent usually has to make some major mistakes to ever put himself into a situation where it could even happen. More likely, you’ll just get the 20% or so from the 2-hit version from far away.

Fat Man Still Loses to Fireballs, But Still (Too) Good Otherwise

At this point, tournament champion John Choi said that although Honda was better, he still lost those matches against fireball characters. Choi suggested making the jab version of the torpedo move destroy fireballs. I told Choi that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard and I moved on.

That was my complete list of changes for Honda in the first builds of the game. My goal was to give him a better chance in his bad matches, but not necessarily enough that he even had advantage in those matches, just so that he had a better chance. Some of the expert players involved in playtesting said that it made Honda way too good, but not for reasons you might think. They weren’t saying that he was too dominant against fireball characters, they were saying that all the old reasons why he won a lot of matches against non-fireball characters were still there. So, they said, he still dominates lots of characters (even their HD Remix versions) and he’s not as bad off against fireball characters either. He needs some weakness, they said.

How To Weaken?

Fair enough, but what to do? Suggestions included reducing damage on the hundred hands, reducing priority on hundred hands (that move really wrecks some characters), reducing dizzy power on the ochio throw, preventing the ochio throw from being repeated in the corner, and removing the stored property on the ochio throw. (Similar to the stored property on the super, that means he can do the motion, hold the final direction—down/back—then press punch much later to get the ochio throw to come out).

Other players scoffed at these ideas, saying that even one single nerf, much less a whole slew of them, was totally inappropriate for the 9th or 10th best character in the game. He needs whatever he can get, they said. The other players countered, saying that his middle-ranking is misleading. They pointed out that he is extremely dominant in many matches, but that he has big trouble in others. The reason for his low ranking is his problem matches, but when they aren’t so problematic anymore, he shoots up to near the top.

My usual standard of proof is if people can beat me at the game. I said I would play any character in the game versus someone’s Honda, and invited people to make me afraid of Honda. Tournament player James Chen chose Cammy for me, versus his Honda. I said that with all of Cammy’s upgrades, I’d be fine. I have a pretty good record in these types of challenges, maybe only 5 times out of dozens did someone make their case. Chen definitely made his case. Even the improved Cammy with her safe cannon drills and easy hooligan throw had a monsterously difficult time against Honda. His hundred hands are practically impossible to hit, deal lots of blocked damage and tons of damage on hit. When cannon drills and hundred hands start flying, Honda easily gets ahead in damage, then just sits there and does nothing. He can of course do nothing from the start of the match too, and make up for blocking many cannon drills with just one well-placed hundred hand slap. And you can forget trying to hooligan throw if he’s on his toes. To top it all off, at close range Honda has the deadly ochio throw which he can even threaten to repeat in the corner.

I was willing to admit the problem was real. And yet, it felt very wrong to give any of these nerfs. Even if they are justified against Cammy, they certainly aren’t against Guile because that match is so difficult for Honda. When the players were discussing ochio throw nerfs, I once blurted out that Honda deserved to do 100% damage with that move if it hit Guile. (If you don’t believe that, try playing against John Choi’s Guile. Or Kurahashi’s or Muteki’s if you’re in Japan.)

So we have this problem where it’s still very hard to get in on some characters and when you do, you deserve huge damage and the unfairly good properties of the ochio throw. But you don’t really deserve those against characters who are trying to get in on you, like Cammy or Fei Long. What to do? I explained the problem to tournament player Julien Beasley and he gave a very unexpected answer. He said he thought Choi was right all along: make the jab torpedo destroy fireballs.

Jab Torpedo Destroys Fireballs??

Beasley said it solved the whole puzzle. If you make getting in on Guile a little less impossible, then you don’t need to deal 100% damage when you do. This was the same principle that was at work with rebalancing T.Hawk, by the way. T.Hawk’s new dive lets him get in more easily, so that’s why it’s ok to remove his 100% throw trap by giving him a throw whiff. For Honda, giving yet another option versus fireball characters makes those other nerfs ok. Beasley even asked me if, as a player, I would take a fireball-destroying jab torpedo in exchange for the whole list of nerfs other players proposed. I said probably yes. I said this left only one problem: the idea is stupid and makes no sense. But then we figured that some graphical effect on the move would explain it at least as well as why Zangief’s green hand destroys fireballs, so why not try it.

Here’s the actual list of changes in version 2 of Honda:

• Jab torpedo destroys fireballs and has subtle graphic effect
• Ochio throw does same dizzy as any throw, rather than double the dizzy
• Ochio throw bounces backwards afterwards, rather than forwards, to prevent the loop in the corner
• Hundred Hands deal less damage and have worse priority
• First hit of super travels slightly slower, but second hit travels faster

That new ochio bounce means that regardless of whether the opponent is midscreen or cornered, the ochio throw leads to a guessing game with nothing guaranteed. Afterwards Honda can do a torpedo, a flying butt, the hundred hands, a sweep, or wait a bit to bait a move, then one of those options. There is no guaranteed follow-up or real trap though.

Everyone seemed satisfied with this new direction in playtesting. The players found so many ways to beat the jab torpedo, that they weren’t worried about it being overpowering. (Though I'm still a bit worried...) Basically, you can bait it, then punish the recovery. Ken sweep it. Ryu can sweep it or red fireball it. Guile can backhand it. Sagat can juggle with 3-hits of tiger knees. The move is very powerful when it’s done from a distance close enough where it will destroy a fireball and hit the recovery of the fireball thrower, but it must be done a bit early to make that work. The startup cannot destroy fireballs, so you have to already be flying through the air or you’ll just get hit by the fireball.

Yomi Layer 3

From far way, it’s also all about predicting. If you are far, see the opponent’s fireball, then jab torpedo on reaction, the opponent can usually recover fast enough to hit you somehow. But if you guess and do your torpedo a bit early, you’ll be safe and you will have advanced, which is really good for you. Of course, your opponent could counter that by not throwing the fireball then walking toward you and sweeping you (the jab torpedo doesn’t go that far, remember). But then you can somewhat counter that by doing the fierce torpedo and make him walk right into it! But then, he could counter that by doing a fireball in the first place because the fierce torpedo doesn’t destroy fireballs. The point is that there’s a lot of gameplay going on here and people really liked it.

More testing did lead to some tweaks though. I had to keep reducing the damage and priority on the hundred hands quite a bit to get them bad enough where opponents could actually hit the move. I also had to make the jab torpedo travel a shorter distance just because of the match against Sagat (Sagat’s arms stick out pretty far and the torpedo was too good against him.)

Conclusion

The end result of all these changes is that there’s a lot more thinking going on in Honda matches. When he’s trying to get in, the old, fairly mindless patterns of keeping him out don’t work as well anymore. Instead, you each have several options that you need to consider. But once Honda gets in, his old, fairly mindless pattern of repeated ochio ohrows no longer works, so you both need to be on your toes there too. Honda’s less dominant in his good matches and less dominated in his bad ones, and more thoughtful all around.

--Sirlin

Street Fighter HD Remix: Guile

Guile is a solid mid-tier character in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST), but it takes quite a bit of player-skill for him to fulfill that potential. As a mid-tier character, he was eligible for a few upgrades, especially in his bad matchups. More than that, was eligible for some fun.

Crazy New Flash Kick

Guile’s roundhouse flash kick goes straight up very high in ST, and has no use I’m aware of. I’ve never seen a good US or Japanese Guile player use it in a real match, so was a ripe place for some new spice. Instead of traveling straight up, it now travels very far forward and diagonally up just a bit.

Guile players salivate at this newfound range, but it comes with a price. Great flash kicks come with great recovery. If blocked, it’s the most vulnerable move in the game. A fierce Dragon Punch is pretty vulnerable if you block it too, but Guile’s roundhouse flash kick leaves him pushed right up against you so that it’s very easy to time a combo as he recovers.

The new flash kick means you can’t jump straight up and down at mid-range versus him anymore. He can use it as an escape if you try to cross him up. He can use it to trade or even clean hit Dhalsim’s yoga fire at mid-range. He can use it easily hit Vega’s slide, while his old flash kicks often missed in that situation.

Over the course of testing, I had to tone down this move twice, each time removing more of the bottom part of the hitbox (for the roundhouse version only). Guile’s flash kick actually has three different hitboxes over the course of the move. The first two I didn’t change at all, and the Guile’s new forward movement is why these first two hitboxes are better able to hit Vega’s slide now. The third hitbox is the one that’s out during the big flash of the flash kick. In development versions of the game, this hitbox could hit a crouching opponent from about half screen away, and could even punish whiffed sweeps from that far. A lot of the new uses of this move were fine, but hitting crouching opponents wasn’t. In the final version of HD Remix, this move will only hit standing opponents from that far away--still substantially better than hitting nothing at all in ST.

Upside-Down Kick

The upside down kick (hold toward or away + roundhouse while close) always looked like an overhead attack…and now it finally is. The opponent now must block this move high. In addition, you can now also activate it from any range by holding toward + roundhouse (it still has really long range). This kick had 15 frames of startup in ST, which would make it the fastest (and longest range) overhead in the game. I slowed it down to 20 frame startup which puts 2 frames faster than the slowest overhead in the game (Fei Long’s).

Guile is such a defensive character that it’s a breath of fresh air to have a new offensive option. The opponent really should be able to block this overhead most of the time, but Guile can tack it on after making the opponent block a Sonic Boom almost any time he wants, as long as he’s willing to lose his charge. (You have to be pretty close to get the overhead to come out when you’re holding back, remember.)

I also had to monkey with the hitboxes for this move. After the first pass, we realized that he could cleanly upside down kick over Sagat’s low fireballs every single time on reaction. It was too crazy for me, so now those low fireballs will hit Guile in this situation.

Then toward the end of development, playtesters started using this move as a long-range poke and discovered that it was extremely high priority. Even when you knew it was coming, it was very hard for most characters to hit with anything. I think giving Guile some fun offense is in order, but not unstoppable-poke offense. In response to this, I had to lower the priority of the move all around. This has virtually no effect when you use the upside down kick as I intended (sneaking in an overhead here and there, after a Sonic Boom or a knock down), but it put an end to the uber-pokes.

Finally, note that even though Guile appears to be off the ground during the upside-downkick, he can still be thrown. I didn’t change that; it was true in ST also.

Super

Guile’s super move fails to connect correctly all the time in ST. It took about four tries to fix this, but it finally works as it seems like it always should have. The super move consists of two consecutive flash kicks, and the second one has a bit more range now. All the hits also knock down and juggle now, and I even had to do some subtlety about changing how fast the enemy falls when he’s hit by this move. You won’t notice that, but without it, the super would miss air juggle hits on certain characters only. Vega was one of those characters, but now Vega gets juggled like everyone else.

In equally big news, there’s now an optional new motion to perform the super. You can still do the old motion, but the new one is hell of a lot more practical: charge down/back, then down, down/forward, forward, up/forward. In other words, charge down/back, then do the old Tiger Knee motion + kick. Ironically, I removed all other Tiger Knee motions, but it seemed appropriate here considering how complicated the old motion was. (The old motion could be performed charge db, df, ub OR charge db, df, db, any up.)

You might ask, “Won’t I get the super to come out accidentally?” I have never had this happen even once, so I don’t think so. You might also worry that Guile can now easily combo into this super. For the most part, comboing normal moves into supers is not practical in ST (yes, I know you can do it). We could have made it very easy for everyone to combo normals into supers, but the lack of this feature is, in my opinion, one of the nice and defining qualities of the SF2 series. It’s not about poking with safe attacks and comboing into a super. Supers are, for the most part, an additional move in your arsenal rather than a combo ender.

So doesn’t Guile break this rule by easily comboing low strong into super with his new motion? You’d think so, but some deep mysterious property of ST’s engine saves us. I cannot figure why this is true, but you cannot combo normal attacks into Guile’s super using this new motion. If you try, you will always get a flash kick instead. Even more deeply mysterious is that if you try to combo a normal move into super using the old, difficult motion, you CAN. This really shouldn’t be true, but somehow it is. So combing into super is no easier or more difficult than it ever was for Guile. We may never know why.

Yet another strange thing is that you can’t use the button-up technique to do Guile’s super, making it the only special or super move in the game with that property. This is a bug, but I was pretty sure that if a programmer fixed this, he would also have made it so comboing into the super was easy, so I never reported this bug.

The damage on this super also took some tweaking. For most of development, it did substantially more damage against jumping opponents than it did in ST (because it actually juggles correctly). Because Guile gains super meter so quickly, and because the motion for the super is very easy now, players were just getting too much damage of this move too often. I reduced the damage quite a bit. Even with this reduction, in the final version the super still does a little more versus jumping opponents than ST, but not a huge amount. The ground version actually does quite a bit less damage than in ST, but the easy motion, knockdown property, and slight extra range on the second part of the super means that it’s much, much more practical to use in real gameplay, so in the end, this is a buff rather than a nerf.

Things That Didn’t Change

One of the most common requests from players was to change around the commands of Guile’s standing kicks. In ST (and HD Remix), the kicks are:

• Back + short = knee (advances Guile while charging)
• Back + medium kick = backward sobat (Guile jumps slightly off the ground and moves back while kicking)
• Back + roundhouse = lunging kick (Guiles moves forward a bit while charging and kicks)

The common request is to find some way to make back + short into Old Guile’s rapid fire kicks. This would allow Guile to rapidly standing short to stop incoming slides while keeping his charge. I admit, this would be useful against Blanka, and Blanka is a bad match for Guile, but we can’t fix everything. The new roundhouse flash kick hits the other slides anyway.

More to the point though, no one could ever agree on which move Guile should lose of the above three. The knee is incredibly useful and basic to his gameplay, so that needs to stay for sure. The back sobat is not used much by most players, but the experts find it indispensable because of a few important, specific things it counters (Dhalsim’s drill at a certain range is one, and there are others). And Guile players were not willing to lose the back + roundhouse lunge kick either. Rather than assign the knee to back + jab + short (strange for a normal move), I just left all those kicks as-is.

I hope Guile players won’t complain about that, because with a huge new flash kick, a long range overhead kick, and an easier, better super, Guile players should thank their lucky stars.

Bad Matchups Mostly Gone

Vega was a very bad match for Guile before, and a lot of it had to do with how hard it is to counter Vega’s slide. It’s good news that he now has a better answer. Sagat was a very tough mach as well, though not so much anymore due to Sagat’s slightly worse fireball recovery. Guile’s worst match was probably versus Dhalsim, so his ability to do *something* at mid-range now combined with Dhalsim’s inability to low punch cleanly under Sonic Booms brings this match from near-hopeless to near-fair. Blanka is still a tough match for Guile, and it's unfortunate that this bad matchup isn't any better for Guile in HD Remix. That said, Guile players should be very happy that three out of his four bad matchups have been addressed. Practice that Blanka match and you'll be very hard to counter indeed.

–Sirlin

Street Fighter HD Remix: Ken

Ken was around the middle of the pack in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST). Rather than give him any single big boost like Ryu’s fake fireball, I decided to juice up several small things about him.

Jab Dragon Punch

During a lot of development, I gave Ken’s jab dragon punch total invulnerability, just like Old Ken had in ST. (In ST, each character has an “old” version with slightly different properties.) I figured that a lot of people wanted that change and it wasn’t overpowered for Old Ken to have it, so why not. After playing with it that way for a long time though, especially in our online beta test, I decided that it was just too mindless. The jab dragon punch is safe on block, so making it totally invulnerable means it's almost always the right thing to do, regardless of what the opponent is doing.

For the final version of HD Remix, Ken’s jab dragon punch is exactly like it was in ST: invulnerable on the way up, but his head is vulnerable at the height of the move. This makes it possible for other characters to hit the dragon punch if they cleverly time their own dragon punch-like moves a few frames after yours. I think the ST designers had this one right to begin with.

Strong Dragon Punch

The strong (medium) dragon punch is another story. I was always frustrated with this type of move in ST. It’s one of several 2-hit moves that don’t knock down on the first hit, but do knock down on the second hit. The intent was that you’d always get that second hit and knock the opponent down, but in practice, it often fails. It especially fails if you dragon punch the opponent’s limb from far away because you’re usually too far to get the second hit. In this case, the opponent can easily hit you back, even though you guessed right. I consider this a bug and these types of moves don’t appear to be working as intended.

My first fix was to make the move a 2-hit attack that juggled, so either hit would knock down. During development we had a bug with juggling system that allowed a few moves (such as Ken’s dragon punches) to go beyond the usual 3-hit juggle limit. As everyone saw in the online beta test, this allowed Ken to do two medium dragon punches to get a total of 4 hits, and usually a dizzy, too. We fixed the bug, limiting this to 3 hits (and no dizzy), but even then the ability to get 3 hits so often from this move was very strong.

I went a different direction, and made the medium dragon punch a one hit attack that always knocks down and is totally invulnerable on the way up. It’s exactly like Old Ken’s medium dragon punch. This works out really well because if you want the most invulnerability in a dragon punch, you can use the medium version (not the jab version!), but it also means your committing to a bigger move and that the opponent will probably be able to hit you back if you guess wrong. Incidentally, this system of a safer, mostly invulnerable jab dragon punch and a totally invulnerable medium dragon punch is exactly like Street Fighter Alpha 2. It worked out well in that game, so I went with that for SF HD Remix.

Fierce Dragon Punch

I gave the fierce dragon punch much more horizontal arc, similar to the huge arc Ken had in SF2: Champion Edition. Unlike Champion Edition though, the fierce dragon punch is not actually invulnerable.

The fierce dragon punch in ST also suffered from that same bug where you hit the enemy but don’t knock them down, and it was even worse than the problem with the medium dragon punch. The fierce version is 3 hits and only the 3rd knocks down so it was very common to hit the enemy, not knock them down, and then get hit back. To fix this, I made all three hits knock down and juggle. This means that if the opponent jumps in, you can now use a deep dragon punch to juggle for three hits (in ST, this would only get you one hit) and it does quite a bit of damage. A deep jab dragon punch does a lot of damage too though, so whatever.

I also kept the fierce dragon punch’s property to hit on the first frame. Hardly any moves in the entire game are able to actually hit on the very first frame they activate, but Ken’s fierce dragon punch and Blanka’s horizontal and vertical rolls can. This property means they can beat safe jumps (see my advanced tutorial about ST to learn what that means.)

Even though some players pressured me to tone down the arc on Ken’s fierce dragon punch, I stuck with it and claimed that it wasn’t overpowered. And when problems arose (see below) with one of Ken’s combos, I wouldn’t back down on keeping the fierce dragon punch a first-frame hitting move. So it took a kind of iron will to keep Ken in the state that you see him in the final version.

In summary, each dragon punch has its own use now:

jab - safest on block
strong - most invulnerable
fierce - biggest arc, juggles, hits on first frame, but least invulnerable and most unsafe

Roundhouse Hurricane Kick

In ST, Ken’s roundhouse hurricane kick had almost no use. In HD Remix, I made it travel much farther and move much faster. This was a somewhat controversial change amongst playtesters because it seemed powerful, but in practice, it wasn’t all that powerful. It let Ken punish a few things he couldn’t before, but it really wasn’t that big of a deal.

What was a big deal was that Ken could reliably hit people with the hurricane kick after his knee bash mixup. That mixup allows Ken to switch sides (or not!) with the opponent, and go for a low attack, which he can then combo into a hurricane kick. Two things you should know here: first, Ken’s hurricane kick (unlike Ryu’s) has a first hit that works against ducking opponents and second, in the Street Fighter 2 series, getting hit by a special move while you’re ducking causes you to stand up. That means that Ken’s knee bash mixup can very easily lead to him hitting you with an entire roundhouse hurricane kick. With the increased speed and range in HD Remix, it was even more likely to get all the hits and dizzy you. To prevent this, I had to reduce the dizzy power of the move by half.

I really wish we could have ended it there and shipped the move in that form, but another problem arose. It was possible to combo a fierce dragon punch after hitting with a roundhouse hurricane kick. Ken could do this in ST as well, but only on certain characters and the conditions to set it up were impractical. The range and speed of the new hurricane kick made this very possible, but difficult. I think it required a 1 frame window of timing, and that sometimes it was literally impossible because that 1 frame is dropped because of the way the game handles game speed. Even still, experts were pulling this off way too frequently and it was devastating in real matches. I had to fix this somehow.

It’s really too much detail to go into why it was hard to fix this, but it was really very hard. The variable dealing with how fast the hurricane kick lands was tied to how fast it rises in the first place, so messing with it would change the height of the move. Adding some recovery after it touched down was technically very difficult because so many parts of the code activated the moment it touched down. Making the fierce dragon punch not hit on the first frame was another solution, but I wouldn’t allow it on principle. With limited programming time allotted for gameplay changes, I was left with no choice but to slow down the new roundhouse hurricane, just to prevent this devastating combo. The final version does travel farther and faster than before, so it does have at least some use in getting across the screen faster and punishing some moves you couldn’t punish before.

Forward (Medium) Hurricane Kick

The medium hurricane kick also travels slightly farther, but it’s hardly even noticeable. This was just to make the jump between short, forward, and roundhouse versions a little smoother.

Short Hurricane Kick

The short version of the hurricane kick now has a shorter duration. This makes it more useful in going over Sagat’s low fireballs or in general anytime you want to go over a sweep and land quickly to dragon punch. I always thought the short version stayed in the air just a little too long in ST.

“Crazy Kicks”

In ST, Ken has three different so-called Crazy Kicks, each with a different joystick motion. These three motions made the kicks generally confusing and they would come out when you didn’t want them. In HD Remix, I changed the commands for these kicks to be similar to the commands in Capcom vs. SNK2. Quarter circle forward + either short, forward, or roundhouse gives you each of the three different kicks, and holding the kick button down makes any of the Crazy Kicks cancel into an overhead. The actual properties of the kicks (speed, hitboxes, damage, etc) are exactly the same as in ST.

They’re just a little easier to keep straight in your head now. Note that, like before, you can easily combo a normal attack into the qcf+medium kick version and with good timing you can combo a sweep after the qcf+short version.

Knee Bash

Ken’s knee bash hold is very powerful. Afterwards, he can walk under most characters and end up on the other side. This means that he might do a low attack from one side or the other side, and then either try for another knee bash or maybe a jab dragon punch. Or, against many characters, he can jump jab right after the knee bash and the spacing is just right for him to “safe jump” (again, see the tutorials on Capcom Classics Collection 2), which lets him go for another knee bash.

The knee bash is, in my opinion, the third most deadly repeated throw trap in ST. This is a close call, but I left it in. Ken is not considered a top tier character, and we’re trying not to nerf the power level of anything unless it’s absolutely necessary. Also, Ken gets so much gameplay out of this mixup that he’d lose a lot of fun-factor if this were removed.

As a bit of a compromise, I reduced the damage on the first hit of the knee bash. I don’t mind the fun gameplay resulting from his mixups, but his ability to get as much as 25% damage off each one was just too much.

I also reduced the range of the knee bash, but by an extremely tiny amount. Because the knee bash has so many advantages over his normal throw, this gives you at least some reason to choose his other throws over the knee bash when you’re walking in from far away.

Super

In ST, there is a bug that prevents Ken from doing a reversal super. That means if he’s knocked down and the enemy makes him get up into a sweep (or any move), he can’t do a super on the first frame he stands up. This bug is fixed in HD Remix, but it remains unfixed in HD Classic Arcade. There’s also a dipswitch setting that lets you play with this bug fixed or unfixed in either mode, if you like.

Conclusion

Ken was a viable, middle-tier character before and now he’s a bit better all around (except for the lower damage knee bash). His strong dragon punch has great invulnerability. The big range on his fierce dragon punch also has several uses, such as stopping a pesky off-the-wall Vega even moreso than before. And his 3-hit anti-air fierce dragon punch, his simpler crazy kicks, and his longer-range roundhouse hurricane kick give him some fun new toys.

Street Fighter HD Remix: Ryu

Ryu is the central character in Street Fighter, both in the story and in the game mechanics of fireball/dragon punch. In Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST), he’s not especially powerful (no one ranks him as top tier), and yet in the hands of an expert, he’s able to win tournaments. He’s a well-balanced character already.

I asked tournament player John Choi to give me a complete list of Ryu changes that he wanted for SF HD Remix. Choi is, I think, the #1 Ryu player in the US (check out his crushing victory at Evolution West 2007, among others). Choi contemplated this for weeks and finally came up with his complete list:

1) add a fake fireball
2) no other changes.

This was not what I expected, but I immediately liked it. Ryu already has the tools he needs to win, so he doesn’t really need much of a change. Choi’s original reasoning for the fake fireball was to give him an answer to Dhalsim’s drills. Dhalsim can drill Ryu on reaction when he sees a fireball, but a fake would trick Dhalsim into committing, then Ryu would recover from the fake and be able to Dragon Punch.

Why a Fake Fireball?

Although that was Choi’s original reason for suggesting the fake fireball, it was not the reason I put it in the game. As soon as I heard the idea, I realized that it solved a problem we were about to have, before we even had it. The problem has to do with how powerful projectiles are in general in Street Fighter.

In ST, projectiles like fireballs are extremely powerful, and that’s part of what makes positioning and spacing so important. Strong projectiles add depth to the game. The problem is that in ST, fireballs are just a little too strong. One of my goals with SF HD Remix is to reduce the number of really bad matchups--matches where one character dominates the other--and that list from ST is full of matches where a projectile character dominates a non-projectile character. The non-fireball characters need a few more ways to deal with fireballs, but it’s a delicate thing. If we have a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the effectiveness of fireballs in Super Turbo and 1 is the effectiveness in SF3: 3rd Strike, I was shooting for an 8 in SF HD Remix.

But what about Ryu, the star character? His main tool is his fireball and I was worried about him slipping even lower in the overall rankings if other characters had more answers to fireball traps. The fake fireball is a brilliant answer because it lets him keep his fireball traps, even though other characters can get around them more easily now.

You might wonder what the difference is, if Ryu can fireball trap his opponents in both ST and HD Remix. Why is the fake fireball trap preferable to the previous game’s real fireball trap? The answer is that the fake fireball trap requires more mind-games on both sides of the fight. Ryu still has the tools to trap Bison, Fei Long, Honda, etc, but he must now risk throwing fake fireballs to keep it going. His opponent has a chance to escape if he predicts which fireball is fake, but the opponent will be even worse off if he predicts wrong. Meanwhile, Ryu will be even worse off than in ST if he throws fake fireballs at bad times--after all, the move cannot hit at all! But in the hands of an expert, the fake fireball trap is strong. It’s now a very skill-testing interaction with lots of decisions on both sides, rather than an optimization game where Ryu tries to achieve a nearly unbeatable pattern against some characters.

Before implementing this, I also talked to Nekohashi, one of the best Ryu players in Japan. I asked him for his list of Ryu changes for a new version of Street Fighter and his response was something close to “No changes needed, Ryu’s design is already perfect.” I said ok, but how about this idea of adding just one thing: a fake fireball? Nekohashi said, “Yes! That is a masterpiece. Give him that move and nothing else.” I think Nekohashi probably had similar reasoning to mine above, because I had already explained to him a few ways that various weaker characters would have to avoid fireballs. So with Nekohashi’s blessing, I added the fake fireball to the game very early in development.

Other Use: Rushdown

The fake fireball is classified as a special move, so you can cancel normal moves into it. You can actually recover a little faster than usual from a fierce or roundhouse (f you hit the opponent) by canceling into a fake fireball. This creates new rushdown opportunities for Ryu when he’s up close. Even canceling a ducking short or medium kick into fake fireball often makes the opponent reflexively block (they expect a fireball!), and gives Ryu a chance to throw. So the new move helps him control space from a distance, and it also increases the pressure he can put on from close.

Input Command

The command for the fake fireball is qcf + short. Ryu players tend to fake with short anyway, so this was a natural place for it. Also, putting it only on short kick ensures that you will never ever accidentally get the move when (on button up) you try to do low medium kick or low roundhouse into a real fireball.

Frame Stats

The fake fireball's total duration is 22 frames. Ryu's real fireballs have 12 frames of startup followed by either 41, 42, or 43 frames of recovery, depending on whether you do the jab, strong, or fierce version. In other words, the fake fireball recovers very quickly--Ryu is stuck in the hadoken less than half as long as he is when doing a real fireball.

I originally tried making the fake fireball even faster, taking about the same time it takes to do a standing short kick. A lot of players already faked fireballs with standing short, so I thought that might work. At that speed, it looked like a graphical glitch though, so we tried this 22 frame version next and never looked back. It's really fast, but it needs to be to be good.

Conclusion

Even though Ryu received only one change in SF HD Remix, it’s quite a change and its power ripples through a lot of matches.

--Sirlin

Balancing Puzzle Fighter

It was a great honor to have the opportunity to design the balance changes and help oversee the new art for the High Definition version of Capcom’s Puzzle Fighter. Game developers do not often talk about why specific changes were made, so I thought the fans (and other game developers) might be interested in the reasoning behind these balance changes.

My high level goal was to change as little as possible because the original game is very well-designed and fun. I would even go as far as saying it’s the single best competitive puzzle game. That said, it does have a problem: only 2 of the 11 characters are playable in a serious match. I did not want to get into any deep changes with the underlying formulas or rules because—character balance aside—the game is very good already. So, I restricted myself to changing only three variables: 1) drop patterns, 2) damage scaling per character, and 3) the “diamond trick.”

Drop Patterns from the original Puzzle Fighter
		Akuma (deals 70%)
Ryu	Chun Li	Dan	Sakura	Ken
Morrigan	Hsien-Ko	Devilot (deals 70%)	Donovan	Felicia

New, Rebalanced Puzzle Fighter Drop Patterns
		Akuma (deals 100% takes 120%)
Ryu	Chun Li (deals 120%)	Dan	Sakura	Ken
Morrigan	Hsien-Ko	Devilot (deals 85%)	Donovan	Felicia

Drop Patterns

An early drop pattern.

A drop pattern is the pattern of gems you send to the opponent's side after you break gems on your side. Drop patterns help differentiate the characters, but they also serve a useful overall purpose: they allow for defense. Because you know the pattern of colors that the opponent is capable of dropping on your side, it’s possible to build your side so that enemy attacks sometimes help you. If all characters sent random patterns of blocks, it would be very difficult to build up large Power Gems on your side without having them covered up all the time. So we want the drop patterns to be predictable and not too mixed-up.

In the original game, Ken and Donovan were the best because they had the “least bad” drop patterns. Actually, Akuma and Devilot had the best drop patterns, but they also only dealt 70% of normal damage, a handicap that made them the worst characters. Because I knew the game was already fun when playing Ken vs. Donovan (that’s all anyone ever played), I thought it would be good to balance the game around their power-level. For this reason, Ken and Donovan are exactly the same in the rebalanced version.

	► ►
Old Ken		New Ken (Unchanged)
	► ►
Old Donovan		New Donovan (Unchanged)

I also wanted to keep Dan unchanged. He’s a joke character who can only send red gems, so he’s supposed to be the worst. I liked the idea that Akuma and Devilot have the best drop patterns in the game but with a drawback. It’s just that the drawback of dealing only 70% damage was too severe. The new Devilot deals 85% damage (better than 70%!) while the new Akuma’s damage went all the way up to 100% (normal damage). I thought that it would be a more fitting drawback (based on his Street Fighter appearances) if he takes 20% more damage than the other characters.

	► ►
Old Dan		New Dan (Unchanged)
	► ►
Old Akuma (Deals 70%)		New Akuma (Unchanged Pattern Deals 100%, Takes 120%)
	► ►
Old Devilot (Deals 70%)		New Devilot (Unchanged Pattern, Deals 85%)

I didn’t want to tinker with damage scaling numbers for very many characters, so there is only one character besides Akuma and Devilot with a damage adjustment: Chun Li. I thought it would be interesting to make one character that’s the reverse of Akuma: instead of having the best pattern and taking more damage, Chun Li has the worst pattern but deals 20% extra damage. I hope this makes Chun Li a tempting character to play because she has the ability to do so much damage, but her terrible pattern can really backfire against you sometimes.

	► ►
Old Chun Li		New Chun Li (Unchanged Pattern, deals 120%)

Felicia gave me some trouble.So far, that’s 6 of the 11 characters, and I haven’t changed a single drop pattern yet! The remaining 5 characters needed new drop patterns, though. Even though these 5 drop patterns needed updates, I wanted to keep the general feel of each one for nostalgia’s sake. Sakura and Felicia had similar patterns, and both suffered from only being able to drop green in column 1 and yellow in column 6. This is a huge disadvantage for both of them, so I mixed up the greens and yellows in each of their column 1 and 6. I mixed up Felicia’s the most (alternating green and yellow each row) because her red/blue middle pattern (power gems!) is worse than Sakura’s red/blue middle pattern (horizontal rows, which we know from Ken are powerful).

After playtesting a while, I decided that even the improved Felicia was too weak. Sending power gems to the opponent was just too much of a handicap, so I changed the red and blue part to a Tetris configuration with interlocking “L” pieces. There were a few possible ways to arrange the Tetris pieces, and I chose the most powerful one, such that it’s kind of hard to build against it without filling up your own column 4. (And remember kids, don’t ever fill up your column 4 because that’s the only column that can make you lose the game.)

	► ►
Old Sakura		New Sakura
	► ►
Old Felicia		New Felicia

The red Power Gem in the middle of Morrigan’s pattern was very bad for her, so I replaced it with a slightly better set of interlocking “L” pieces. This change makes the bottom two rows of her drop pattern at least close to the power level of Donovan’s bottom two rows, while the upper part of her pattern is certainly better than Donovan’s.

	► ►
Old Morrigan		New Morrigan

Ryu’s pattern was the hardest to decide on. It has a nice flavor in that the all-vertical pattern is simple and opposite of Ken’s all-horizontal pattern. Unfortunately, having an all-vertical pattern is extremely bad in Puzzle Fighter. One good quality Ryu had is that his vertical pattern would not create any Power Gems for you, but it’s very easy to build, say, red in column 2 and let Ryu fill in the red in column 1 for you. Far worse, his inability to drop anything other than yellow in column 4 means that you can place a single yellow crash gem in column 4 (or at the bottom of 3 or 5) and clear out your entire column 4 against Ryu. I stress again that in Puzzle Fighter, column 4 is the only one that matters: when you fill up column 4, you lose.

Although many patterns were tried for Ryu, I ultimately decided to keep his vertical theme, but replace the third row with a jumble of colors. You now at least need one or more green crash gems to clear out your column 4 against him, and the other junk in row 3 somewhat limits the size of the Power Gems his pattern helps you build. When the jumbled row was row 4, Ryu turned out too weak (and identical to his original bad form whenever you sent 18 or fewer gems). When his jumbled row was row 2, he was a bit too strong because his bottom 2 rows were more jumbled than even Akuma and Devilot’s bottom 2 rows. The jumbled 3rd row was about right.

	► ►
Old Ryu		New Ryu

This leaves only Hsien-Ko, whose drop pattern in the original game was even worse than it looked at first glance. Although her diagonal-themed pattern sounded good in theory, it was too easy to chain together very tall blue and green power gems against her in practice. Other than Dan, no other character in the rebalanced mode ended up with any columns that only sent a single color (they were eliminated from Ryu, Sakura, and Felicia). Hsien-Ko’s new pattern explores the trade-off of having solid colors in columns 1 and 6 (known to be very bad from the original Sakrua and Felicia), but with columns 2, 3, 4, and 5 that rival Akuma and Devilot’s powerful patterns. Furthermore, I kept the diagonal theme Hsien-Ko originally had, and I also kept the “build blue on left, green on right” counter-measure against her. Her new pattern at least makes it difficult to chain together your huge blue and green towers, and the middle portion is actually very powerful.

	► ►
Old Hsien-Ko		New Hsien-Ko

The Diamond

This van was hit by the original game's "diamond trick."

That covers all 11 drop patterns, but there is still one last detail: the diamond. In the original game, the diamond was intended to deal only 50% of the damage you’d do by breaking the same pieces without the diamond. However, there was a glitch that allowed you to bypass this and deal 100% of the damage. In order to perform this “diamond trick,” you must first find a place on your playfield where you can rotate your diamond-piece 180 degrees with just one button press (rather than the usual two presses). For example, if you have a lot of blocks in columns 2 and 4, you could put the diamond-piece in the well in column 3, so that it has no room to rotate horizontally. At this point, hold down on the d-pad, then when the piece touches down (with diamond on top), press rotate at the last moment. The diamond will rotate to the bottom position, and it will appear to break blocks as it always does, but it will do enormous damage because this technique avoids the 50% penalty.

The diamond trick is well-known by Puzzle Fighter tournament players and is considered by many to be a part of the game. Puzzle Fighter has a delicate balance where large attacks that almost kill are the most fun because they give the opponent enough ammunition to fire back a large attack of his own. Small attacks, such as the original diamond with its 50% penalty, aren’t as fun because they don’t nudge the game into that state where you are simultaneously almost winning and almost losing. This is why so many people consider the powerful diamond trick more fun than the original weaker diamond.

That said, it’s pretty convoluted to have to explain this technique to new players. I thought it should just become the default behavior of the diamond all the time, for simplicity’s sake. When this change was made, it ended up making the diamond even more powerful than the diamond trick in the original game. By removing the “trick” aspect, it was much easier to use it on exactly the color you wanted all the time, because no setup was needed (you didn’t have to create that narrow well between pieces to set it up).

Another somewhat related factor was the new “fast drop” feature bound to “up” on the d-pad. The arcade, Saturn, and PlayStation versions did not have this feature (it was new to the limited-release Dreamcast version). The ability to fast-drop pieces actually exacerbated the power of the diamond, because it further increased the reward for playing fast. I felt the game was moving too far towards “play fast at all costs, regardless of how many mistakes you make, just so you can get the diamond.” Playing fast is still necessary to win, but all things pointed to a slightly weaker diamond than the always-100%-diamond-trick version. We toned it down to always doing 80% damage (still quite a step up from the original 50%) damage, and I think it turned out well.

I hope that gives some insight into what I changed and why. The new game’s gameplay remains very similar to the original game’s, but hopefully there’s a wider range of reasonable characters to play, and a slightly improved mechanism behind the diamond.

--Sirlin