ARCADE WATCH
Keeping an eye on the coin-op gaming scene
Street Fighter belongs in arcades. It’s where it all began, of course: those of you of a certain age will remember just what it was like to walk into an arcade in the early ‘90s and be immediately assaulted by those loud, booming special-move vocal samples. Capcom’s decision to restrict Street Fighter V to home consoles was puzzling to start with, and if we’re honest we’ve never quite seen the logic in it. A wellplaced fighting-game-community source once opined to us that Capcom was doing it to try and make the Street Fighter competitive scene a bit more interesting. Until Street Fighter V came along, Asian players were dominant, thanks in part to their thriving arcade scenes; when you knocked off work for the day you could head down to your local game centre and spend the evening sparring with a dozen of the best players in the world.
Whether by accident or design, the international playing field has since levelled out in the SFV era. US players are now every bit the equal of those from Japan and Korea, and this year a Brit won Evo for the first time ever.
Almost three years after launch, the latest revision of Street Fighter
V will no longer be misleadingly subtitled Arcade Edition, with release confirmed for next year and a series of location tests in Japan scheduled for October. Details are scant, but all characters will be available, and in a nod to the game’s initial shift in focus, cabinets will feature USB ports for those who’d rather bring along a console controller. Whether it will have much impact on the tourney circuit remains to be seen, but Japan’s arcade scene will be all the richer for having Street Fighter back in its spiritual home again.