The Japanese Super Street Fighter 4 developers have posted a new entry discussing several of the character balance changes they're looking at with the upgraded title.

The team specifically mentions nerfing/tweaking Sagat, Zangief's Double Lariat and Ryu's Hard Punch Shoryuken. Again, a huge shout out goes to Azrael for translating this post.

Here's the whole shebang.

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A new image showing a few of the additional alternative costumes in Super Street Street Fighter 4 has surfaced courtesy of the site game.watch.impress.co.jp.

Also, we get another look at the infamous character select screen for the game.

Click images for larger versions

According to a translation of this Chinese website by Neo2046, the remaining four characters in Super Street Fighter 4 will be revealed either this week or next week in the Japanese magazine Famitsu.

Just to temper expectations, remember that sometimes these things are not translated correctly and apparently a Capcom employee later jumped on the thread and said that a leaked version of upcoming Famitsu cover had no mention of the new characters — and if the announcement was in the magazine — it would likely be mentioned on the front cover.

Capcom V.P., Christian Svensson, was asked about when the new characters would be revealed and he stated that the game is in the home stretch and we'll just have to be patient.

Note that the rumor list has been very accurate up to this point and previous comments from the Nakky blog have all but confirmed Ibuki is in the game. While making things official will be nice, the collective opinion is that Dudley, Makoto, Ibuki and Hakan are the final four characters that will be in Super Street Fighter 4.

Maj at SonicHurricane.com challenged readers to combo two of Ryu's Crouching Hard Kick (sweep) attacks without dizzying your enemy in between in any Street Fighter 2 game.

Here were the solutions players came up with.

Shadosw4 compiled this clip showing the evolution of the Raging Demon in various Street Fighter games. Nothing earth shaking here, but it's cool to look back at some of the older more cheesy entries that had the Street Fighter license.

While most of the people reading this have probably already picked up this game, if you know someone who's been on a fence, now is a good time to tell them that Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is 33% off on XBox Live all this week.

Normally the game is 1200 MS points ($15) and it's reduced to 800 ($10).

Also, if you retweet this Capcom-Unity story on Twitter, you'll be entered to win a rare Marvel vs. Capcom 2 vinyl of the soundtrack.

Microsoft is going to kill online play for original Xbox games on April 15, 2010. This will include such titles as Street Fighter Anniversary Collection, which has Street Fighter 3 Third Strike and Hyper Street Fighter 2.

Online play will no longer function even if you own an Xbox 360, as this will remove the ability to play these titles online even if they're backwards-compatible discs.

Many players have already moved on to other places for these games like GGPO and Supercade (formally 2DF), which offer a better online experience, but this move should migrate the rest of the fans who were still hanging on.

Microsoft stated that this move will provide a great benefit to the Xbox Live community going forward, although they didn't say exactly what this will be.

Justin Wong and Daigo Umehara's First to 10 Street Fighter IV set at Seasons Beatings 4 wasn't streamed and video of it hadn't surfaced until recently.

Rodney pointed out this clip which has a solid portion of the matches from a shaky camera setup.

Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars had a strong showing in America during its opening week, according to VGChartz.com. Capcom's latest vs. game secured the 6th overall sales spot in the U.S.A.

Also, we know from an earlier story that TvC was the 6th best selling Wii title in the United Kingdom.

Unfortunately, the game didn't reach the top 10 for Japan and Worldwide audiences, but it moved a collective 103,670 units around the globe.

All things considered, it sounds like TvC had a solid opening week. To give you an idea of how it stacked up with the other games, here are the top 10 video game sales in the U.S.A. through January 30th.

Melty Blood won the Players Choice poll for the Evo 2010 tournament, and BlazBlue was dropped from the lineup in favor of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 on the PlayStation 3.

While Street Fighter 3 Third Strike had some very vocal and passionate fan support, it failed to garner enough votes to be a tournament game this year.

Source: Shoryuken.com

Nyoronoru noted that Smurvis discovered a dash glitch bug in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars that lets you extend your dash to huge lengths, i.e. perform a wave dash, this video doesn't have any sound.

According to the new research group, Forecasting and Analyzing Digital Entertainment, the re-release of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 grossed $4.2 million on XBox Live Arcade.

This is a pretty nice number considering it's not factoring in the game's simultaneous release on the PlayStation 3 and that it was a rehashed title which didn't require a full development cycle.

Capcom has said a few times that MvC2 had an impressive performance as far as sales went, and these numbers certainly back that up.

With these kinds of figures, you can bet we'll be seeing more re-releases in the future. Here's how the top 10 played out for 2009.

Solid_Toki emailed me pointing out a Famitsu blog which has several screen shots of Hori's new line of arcade sticks for the PlayStation 3 and XBox 360.

Hardware isn't region locked, so if these products tickle your fancy, you can always grab them through an importer like Play-Asia. Here are select images and a bit of information from Famitsu.

Real Arcade Pro Premium VLX
30,000 Yen — about $334 USD, March 28, 2010 release

Hori's wireless arcade stick
PS3 7800 Yen, XBox 360 9800 Yen. About $87 and $109 USD respectively, March 4, 2010 release date

So PlayStation 3 owners aren't left out in the cold, GameStop is offering the Mad Catz Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 Tournament Edition FightSticks for $99, but the catch is this offer isn't available online, so you'll have to stop by your local store to see if these are available there.

Thanks to Dskuma for the heads up.

Azrael translated the Feb. 4th Japanese Super Street Fighter 4 blog entry.

Inside you'll find more details on the collector's edition, SSIV will come in four different flavors with various goodies thrown in — at least for the Japanese release. To see the whole post, just click the link below.

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