* Juri, part 2 (looks and personality)

Tsukamoto here.
Today, we'll continue our chat about Juri from last week! Well, I won't be doing the talking, but I've invited Design Director Kamei, and the Scenario Designer to give us some interesting insights.

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Host: CAPCOM1

(And right top corner, TEAM BATTLE / Lobby)

Translation of the blog entry

• Much anticipated Team Battle gets implemented. You can choose the rule set, 2vs2, 3vs3 or 4vs4.

• When you select Team Battle in Request Mode and start playing Arcade mode, you don't have to wait in the Lobby for your partners to come. You can keep playing until they show up.

• You can find a random partner, but also invite a friend for a team.

• In Lobbies, you can gather people to watch fights together, night after night.

• In Street Fighter 4 you had to click on each replay you wanted to watch individually, now you can watch a bunch of them back to back without having to select them one at a time. This is done using the categories feature.

• There might be no limit on replay saves (those that you watch on the Channel at least). Whether you can save all fights you want is still unanswered.

• Testing Team is busy day and night.

• Work in development, so everything can still get changed!

Capcom is there any chance to see games like Vampire Savior, Vampire Hunter 2, Red Earth, SF3 3rd strike, and Fighting Evolution on Virtual Console or WiiWare? — DARKINF3RN0

Sven: Wiiware I'd think isn't likely at the moment. Virtual Console and specifically Virtual Arcade, maybe. Those projects live with our online team in Tokyo and I think they're still mulling over options. I've got no news on anything moving forward right now though.

A 'round 2' Tournament Edition stick for Street Fighter 4 was released a while ago. Will you guys be selling this at the Capcom Store? — Jake

Seth: We are planning to sell them through the Capcom store, yes. It's been a little slower this time around, but more news soon I hope...

Does Capcom do reprints for their older games? There are some great games that are pretty hard to find. — FeatherFang

Sven: There are significant minimum manufacture numbers that would then need to find homes at retail. In general, because retail isn't ordering more of these goods, we aren't able to produce them.

Some day, digital distribution will make this all an issue of the past.

• A team battle mode that is a 2 vs 2 set, but it can scale up to 4 vs 4.

• A Replay Channel where you can play replays of matches while voice chatting with other players.

• An Endless Battle mode with up to 8 players and voice chat, which sounds a lot like the quarter matches in SSF2T HD Remix.

• Apparently a 'tournament mode' will be delivered as DLC (downloadable content).

• Sagat and Seth were specifically mentioned in the article as being nerfed (not being as effective).
• The rest of the cast is being rebalanced by altering the power of some of their moves along with changing up the frame data.
• There will be new opening and ending sequences done by a 'great Japanese animation studio.'
• Assumption from author: The user-interface will be receiving an overhaul.
• Assumption from author: Bonus stages have been confirmed.

Because it's difficult to create an apples to apples comparison for how strong each of the fighter's Special/EX Moves are when compared with the rest of the cast — these attacks were NOT factored in. When Specials/EX moves were in the charts, the numbers for projectile throwers and other low damage attacks skewed the results quite a bit.

Instead universal moves that all characters have like Hard attacks, Supers, Ultras, Throws and Focus Attacks were used to tabulate the data.

So while this will give you a general idea of how strong each of the characters are, it doesn't factor in things like recovery time, speed and the overall efficiency of a move. Some attacks may have really high damage, but are very difficult to land in an actual match.

Even if a character's overall strength rating here is low, it doesn't necessarily mean their damage capabilities are. Things like combos and how easy it is to connect with your attacks also play a very key role.

Is it possible we'll see a re-release of Capcom vs. SNK 2 any time soon?

Seth: I too would love to turn on my consoles and have my choice to play any of my past favorites, but a few things to keep in mind for CVS2, or really any Capcom fighter not currently available on next-gen systems:

"Just release it on PSN (or XBL, etc.)" is much harder than it sounds. As you can see from MVC2 and SF HD Remix, we aim high in terms of overall standards even for digital-only releases, and getting online right, much less the port itself, can be a very painstaking process. Having been a part of both of these from the inside, the amount of work that goes into the games, even when they are just ports+online (like MVC2) would likely shock you. It takes a lot of time and effort, all of which costs money.

That leads us to consideration #2: return on investment (aka "yes, this is a business that has to make money to keep the lights on"). CVS2 has a very dedicated following, and had a long tournament life, but wasn't one of Capcom's most generally popular fighters. In order to make these proposals "pencil" (as in, predict reasonable sales that at least cover our development costs), we need to be able to offer games that appeal to a larger base than just existing CVS2 fans. This is a hard market to expand, however, because CVS2 is *extremely* complicated for new users. It has C, A, P, S, N, and K "grooves," a large cast, multiple team members, not to mention roll canceling (the first hurdle you must jump if you want to play "seriously"), which puts the difficulty bar at a ridiculously high place for anyone trying the game for the first time.

Finally, even if we can generate enough sales to cover costs, there are at least two other issues to consider: First is opportunity cost. That's basically the cost of having our staff work on this instead of something else. The people we have working on CVS2 online aren't working on SSFIV, or some other game that might produce a better return. We're all about the fan service (trust me when you see a few of the things we have in store!), but when fan service becomes a black hole for time and money, that party gets ended pretty quick.

The second issue has already been mentioned here, and that's flooding the market. I am insane about fighters, as are a few of you, but for most of the game-buying public, they only have room for a fighting game or two per year. If Capcom decides to release a bunch all at once (and let's not forget, we've already gone from approximately zero per year to MANY just since I've started), we risk burning out even the hardcore. Being "hardcore" about any game means devoting a lot of time to it, so having a lot out at once can get in the way of having enough time to really spend with any of them. Fighters are special -- they aren't like your Assassin's Creed, where you play it, hopefully enjoy it, get to the end, and then stick it on the shelf with your collection, probably never to play it again. You can play a good fighter every day for well over a decade without getting bored, and even without mastering it. Having TOO many such creations around can be taxing on everyone's time.

Wow, long answer to a simple question, but hopefully that gives you a little extra perspective from our side...

UNIVERSAL/SYSTEM CHANGES
+ Throws are more useful (tick throws exist. You can throw someone while they are attacking, can throw after blockstun, etc.)
- Characters fall faster now.
- Megacrash pushes up and away. Can still combo after a megacrash.
- Baroque is not as potent.
+ Giant characters cannot be so easily comboed/infinited.
+ Characters gain a bit more meter while being hit.
- Cannot force the opponent into a corner after a juggle via the air combo trick.
* Stage-specific music.
* New character select screen (with gear-like selection reels that leave the number of new characters to be included ambiguous).
- Damage scaling on DHCs (Delayed Hyper Combos) is more severe, devaluing hyper combinations somewhat.
+ Characters now have more proration as their health bars get lower (guts).

• He confirmed characters will have two Ultra moves.

• Some of the new commands to execute an Ultra are very unique.

• There were 8 selectable character spots on the select screen with only Juri, T. Hawk and Dee Jay selectable.

• The character select screen is completely different than it was in Street Fighter 4.

• Yoshinori Ono is still pushing hard to get an arcade version made.

• He was asked if the big announcement next week will relate to characters or new online modes, Ono said it was the latter.

• Dee Jay's Machine Gun Punch is now a mash punch command. It's no longer done by charging down and then pressing up + punch.

• T. Hawk's Condor Spire (horizontal Hawk Dive) is a reverse Dragon Punch command.

• You can follow an EX-Tomahawk Buster with an EX-Condor Dive. This takes two EX meters.

• Yoshinori feels that a Darkstalkers revival is possible.

• Throws are too easy to land in Capcom's eyes and they plan to tweak some things to fix this. Ono wants jumps to have fewer startup frames.

• Capcom wants to give the rest of the cast more tools for countering Dragon Punch/Tiger Uppercut attacks.