Fancy a cheap Xbox? Microsoft is offering a console and Kinect for just $100 — but the catch is a two-year contract. Can this phone contract-style deal work for gamers?

The 4GB Xbox and Kinect costs about £60, with Xbox Live Gold membership costing just under £10 per month.

The deal is only available in the US, and only from a Microsoft Store — you know, an actual shop. You have to print a voucher and take it to one of the 17 Microsoft Stores in the US, so if you’re nowhere near those stores then you’re out of luck.

Is it worth it? Not really. By spreading the cost over two years you don’t have to pay out such a big lump sum at the start — but you have to be so bad at saving up that your money burns a hole in your pocket before you get anywhere near the full price of an Xbox for it to be remotely worthwhile.

The total cost over the two year contract is much greater than if you just bite the bullet and pay out for the Xbox — especially as you’re locked into a lengthy two-year contract, complete with cancellation fee if you decide to bail out early.

Buying a bargain-priced gadget subsidised by an extra amount on your ongoing bill is the accepted way of owning a phone in this country, but it’s less common in the US, or for gadgets other than phones. Generally you will pay more if you go for a contract than if you buy a phone full price and get a cheap deal separately, but the phone market is so competitive that there are bargains to be had even on contracts.

One question that springs immediately to mind though is whether you want a two-year contract when the next Xbox is around the corner. The hotly-tipped Xbox 720
hasn’t been officially confirmed, but is so close to arriving reports suggest it’s already in production. Microsoft’s plan is to shift the last stock of current Xboxes at cheap prices but still make money off the sale from the lengthy contracts — which tie you into the world of Xbox so you’ll have to buy a 720 when it comes out too.

Would you buy a cheap Xbox with a two-year contract? Are you happy with the cost of your phone, and does the phone contract model work with gaming? Tell me your thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page.

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New government proposals will introduce a new age 12 category into video games ratings. Retailers will face fines of up to £5,000 and a prison sentence of up to six months if they are caught selling a 12 or above rated game to a child under 12 years.

Games are currently classified by the Pan-European Games Information (PEGI) system as well as the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), depending on the content of the game. The new regulations will see the responsibility placed solely at the feet of the Video Standards Council (VSC). The VSC will carry on using the PEGI system though, so don’t expect to find odd new stickers on your games.

The VSC will also have the power to effectively ban games from sale in Britain by refusing to give them an age rating — games that do not get rated are not allowed to go on sale. Any retailer who attempts to sell imported games without a rating can face up to two years in prison — you’d better warn ‘Big Jimmy’ down the market.

The government hopes that the new regulations will make it easier for parents to understand the ratings system and be confident that their seven-year-old isn’t playing a game that involves them hacking someone’s face off with a crowbar — although I’m not sure exactly why the government feels the parent can’t make that decision themselves without a legally enforceable policy.

If you’re over 12 then it’s not likely you’re going to be affected much by the new changes. The only risk is that the VSC will attempt to ban games it deems ‘dangerous’, in line with the various ridiculous claims that games like Grand Theft Auto are causing our children to become violent prostitute-killing drug dealers.

There’s no firm date on exactly when the new regulations are due to come into effect, and it’s too soon to say what impact they’ll have on video game sales here in the UK.

What do you think to the new rules? Is too much of a fuss made over age restrictions on games and films, or do you think that violent games are the downfall of us all? Let me know in the comments below or over on our Facebook page.

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How a strange little slab of plastic and rubber earned itself a considerable slice of the nascent home computing market

Celebrated today in a pitch-perfect Google Doodle, the 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum will have many veteran gamers swooning into a reverie of eighties nostalgia.

Released on this day in 1982, the machine typified the British approach to industrial design – utilitarian but also idiosyncratic and characterful. It should have been buried by its more powerful contemporary, the Commodore 64, but somehow this strange little slab of plastic and rubber earned itself a considerable slice of the nascent home computing market, especially in Britain.

Partly its success was about price. Since the launch of the ZX80 computer two years earlier, restless British inventor Clive Sinclair had been interested in computing for the masses.

Using cheap components and a minimalistic approach to design, he was able to manufacture machines at a lower cost than rivals such as Acorn, Apple and Tandy. The computer’s rubber keys, for example, were created from a single sheet, with a metal overlay to separate them – much less expensive than producing a conventional keyboard.

So while the BBC Micro started at £235 for the Model A option and the C64 hit the shelves at around £350, the Spectrum launched at just £125 for the 16k version or £175 for the mighty 48k.

At a time of deep recession, with unemployment at 3 million in the UK, this was a vital factor – especially as a lot of the interest in home computers was coming, not from businessmen who wanted to do spreadsheets at home, but from kids, excited by the possibility of writing and playing cool arcade games in their own living rooms.

“The key thing was price for us,” says Ste Pickford, who together with his brother John, started out writing computer games in the earlier eighties.

“We spent a full year with this massive jar in the house labelled ‘Spectrum savings fund’. We put every spare bit of pocket money we had into it. £175 was way more than what mum and dad would have been able to afford on a Christmas present, but we wanted it all year.

“We must have saved up £80, and our parents were just about able to put the rest in. So the price was everything. It was the only way a family like ours could have owned a computer.”

There was also a fundamental difference in philosophy – while his competitors were still producing hardware with serious computing interests in mind, Sinclair was targeting the mass market; he saw the wider consumer appeal of computers, not just as serious workhorses for home accounting, but as gadgets that could be as ubiquitous and easy to use as the TV or pocket calculator.

“Computers were quite scary at the time,” remembers Philip Oliver, co-founder of Blitz Games Studios and one half of the Oliver twins, who created the legendary Dizzy series of games on the Spectrum.

“Some people were actually worried they were going to take over the world, thanks to movies like WarGames, other people worried that computers were going to steal their jobs. What the Spectrum did was gave a friendly, fairly simple image to computing. There was nothing frightening about the Spectrum!”

Ironically, there were strengths too in the technical limitations of the hardware. The Commodore 64 was more powerful and capable – its multi-chip architecture had been designed to move coloured sprites around the screen as quickly as possible – but it also did some of the work for the coders.

“When we started at the development studio Binary Designs we noticed that, actually, a lot of the C64 programmers weren’t that good,” says Pickford, now running digital publisher Zee-3, responsible for the Bafta award-nominated puzzler Magnetic Billiards.

“We realised that machines like the C64 had a lot of clever hardware; they did a lot of the hard things – like scrolling and sprites – for you. You could get most of the way to having a game running without knowing that much.

“The Spectrum had nothing. Architecturally, it was a really simple machine for a programmer – it was just a load of Ram and a processor; and the screen itself was just dealt with as part of the ram. You had to do everything the hard way, but it meant that if you managed to get a sprite moving around on the screen, you’d done a lot of really clever stuff.

“Years later, when that generation of coders grew up, Britain was really punching above its weight in the PlayStation era, when you had the start of games like Grand Theft Auto. The Spectrum bred a generation of really smart programmers.”

This blank slate design also meant that developers weren’t steered toward creating conversions of established arcade titles – they were free to improvise. Hence, the surreal Python-esque platform puzzlers Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, created by eccentric lone coder Matthew Smith; hence, the beautiful and challenging arcade adventure, Head over Heels, by Jon Ritman who introduced the concept of controlling two different characters.

There were also bizarre experiments like Mel Croucher’s Deus Ex Machina, an adventure about life emerging from a computer, which came with an audio tape featuring Ian Dury and Doctor Who star Jon Pertwee.

The ZX Spectrum held its own in the format wars until the late eighties, and developers were pushing the tech to the very end.

For example, the initial inability to properly colour sprites without bleeding out into surrounding space (thanks to the way the Spectrum handled colours as 8×8 pixel cells), was defeated in games like Trap Door and Dizzy through the use of thick character outlines and large sprites.

But the machine didn’t prosper outside of the UK, and with the arrival of 16bit behemoths like the Commodore Amiga, as well as specialist consoles like the Nintendo NES and Sega Master System, Sinclair found itself unable to compete.

But for those thrilling years between 1982 and 1988, against other machines designed to push objects around screens, the Spectrum symbolised and amplified a peculiarly British approach to technology; it was about lone mavericks, doing their own thing, figuring stuff out, inventing their own conventions.

Certainly, the Commodore 64 produced plenty of genius coders, artists and game musicians, but the Spectrum arguably fostered something else – something that the Raspberry Pi initiative is now attempting to re-capture – an approach to computer hardware that is more about exploiting the machine, testing the architecture, probing at the metal and silicon innards, rather than trusting to high-level languages and application-programmer interfaces.

Writing for the ZX Spectrum was more about invention than design. It was a blank slate on to which a large section of the British game development industry drew itself.

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The 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum will have many veteran gamers swooning into a reverie of eighties nostalgia – here are five of the best Spectrum games

It is, of course, an impossible task to root through the many hundreds of ZX Spectrum titles to deliver a definitive Top Five. But we’ve had a bash anyway. I’ve concentrated on titles that appeared originally on Spectrum, so no arcade conversions (goodbye R-Type) and no translations from Apple II, BBC or Vic-20 titles (so long Elite). For some reason, I also neglected Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. And Chuckie Egg. And Chaos.

For a more comprehensive round-up, you should head immediately to the Your Sinclair Official Top 100 Spectrum Games of All Time, which was persuasively and entertainingly written by Stuart Campbell. He put the motorbike-riding-through-forest thriller Deathchase at number one.

Jet Set Willy (1984)

This early flip-screen platforming adventure featured surreal locations and bizarre enemies, burning itself onto the minds of impressionable gamers who had, until this point, possibly only controlled spaceships and racing cars. Creator Matthew Smith became a bedroom coding enigma when he disappeared in the mid-eighties, spending several years in a Dutch commune before returning to the UK.

Lords of Midnight (1984)

This prototype role-playing game allowed players to explore a vast kingdom as they gathered armies to fight the evil witchking, Doomdark. Designer Mike Singleton managed to provide the look and feel of a 3D world by creating thousands of still images, which could be viewed from multiple perspectives.

Knight Lore (1984)

Created by prolific UK developer Ultimate: Play The Game, this was the first title to use the studio’s filmation engine, resulting in lush isometric visuals. It was created by Tim and Chris Stamper, who would go on to found Rare – still one of the biggest development studios in the world, and most recently responsible for Kinect Sports.

Tau Ceti (1985)

Pete Cooke’s revolutionary 3D space adventure pitted the player against a malfunctioning mainframe computer and its robot killers on the abandoned colony world of Tau Ceti III. Respected for its deep varied gameplay as well as visual innovations such as a functioning day/night cycle.

Skool Daze (1985)

One of the first games to actually attempt a replication of real-life experience, Skool Daze had players rampaging around a school building, scrawling on blackboards and trying to locate the combination for the headmaster’s safe. Later spawning a superior sequel, Back to Skool, it was like an interactive Grange Hill – with the added bonus of letting you change all the teacher and pupil names. Rude word hilarity ensued.

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Draw Something, the smash hit game for smart phone scribbling, has been updated. You can now undo your last squiggle and share your touchscreen tour de force on Facebook and Twitter — and now you can even unleash your touchscreen Turner or multi-touch Monet on the CNET team.

To play against me and the rest of the CNET UK gang, just look for the username ‘cnetuk’ and challenge us to a game. Be warned: we did a couple of modules of finger-painting in primary school, so as the picture above shows, we’re pretty quick on the draw.

The game, developed by OMGPop, sees you take turns with friends to guess a word from their phone-based doodling. Once you’ve guessed the word, choose your own easy, medium or difficult word and doodle your picture. Then send it to your friend for them to guess the word.

It’s a simple pleasure — falling squarely into the it’s-so-simple-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that-dammit-I-could-be-a-millionaire-by-now category — but it’s the little details that make it so addictive.

For example, in between turns your drawing process is played back so you can watch your opponent trying to guess what it is, allowing you to see at which point they grasped the full breadth of your artistic vision — or you can watch them floundering in confusion at your bizarre and puzzling pictograms.

Today’s update allows you to undo your last step, saving you from having to employ the eraser or scrap your whole drawing. And when you’ve created a masterpiece, you can share it to Facebook and Twitter or save it for posterity.

You can now also chat to your opponents in between rounds, to award kudos for their artistic endeavours or mock them mercilessly for their ham-fisted doodlings.

Draw Something is available now for the iPhone, iPad, and Android phones and tablets.

Would you like to join the CNET team in a round of drawing things on Draw Something? Just sign up for a game against the username ‘cnetuk’ — happy sketching! We’ll share the best pictures — and the worst — on our Facebook page.

Download Draw Something for Android or iPhone

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That rumour we brought you about Apple’s CEO Tim Cook paying a visit to gaming behemoth Valve? Well it turns out not to be true, Kotaku reports.

At least, that’s what Valve head honcho Gabe Newell told Seven Day Cooldown. Asked about Tim Cook, Newell responded: “We actually, we all sent mail to each other, going, ‘Who’s Tim Cook meeting with? Is he meeting with you? I’m not meeting with Tim Cook.’ So we’re… it’s one of those rumours that was stated so factually that we were actually confused.”

Just in case anyone was in any doubt, Newell went on to add: “No one here was meeting with Tim Cook or with anybody at Apple that day. I wish we were! We have a long list of things we’d love to see Apple do to support games and gaming better. But no, we didn’t meet with Tim Cook. He seems like a smart guy, but I’ve never actually met him.”

Or is that what he’d like us to think? And look at the wording. He said no one from Valve met with anybody at Apple “that day”. No, I know, I’m just wishing it was true. I just can’t let go. Of course we all knew it was wishful thinking, but the prospect of an Apple and Valve hook-up was pretty exciting. A rival to Google’s Project Glass augmented reality specs? Or a whole console to go with the much mooted Apple TV set? Both of these were rumoured following the supposed Tim Cook spotting, but they’ll have to stay pie in the sky, for the time being at least.

Still, Valve is working on wearable computing, though it won’t involve hardware, possibly ever. But still, I can but dream…

What do you think Valve’s wearable computing will involve? And is it more exciting than Project Glass? Let me know in the comments, or on our Facebook page.

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Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki discusses the extra content in the forthcoming PC version, plus the likelihood of a console update, whether there will be modding support and more

On August 24, PC gamers will get to experience one of last year’s finest – and toughest – console releases: From Software’s unrelenting RPG adventure, Dark Souls. As announced on Friday, the new Prepare To Die edition of the Xbox 360 and PS3 hit will feature a whole new chapter, Artorias of the Abyss, and a refined PVP mode which will make it easier for players to arrange competitive battles against their friends online. Plus, of course, the frame rate and texture detail will be given a lift.

That’s all we knew when we went into a group interview with Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki at Namco’s Global Gamer Day event in Las Vegas. And that’s pretty much all will still know – although Miyazaki did clarify some key points.

The main question everyone has had since the announcement is whether console owners will get the extra content created for the PC release – perhaps as DLC. Namco’s response to this has been, let’s say, ambiguous. For Miyazaki’s part, he said From Software had nothing to say at this point. “It’s completely understandable that people who bought the console version have those questions. However, as the director of Dark Souls I cannot answer your question right now. I want to apologise to console owners that I don’t have any news at this point.”

It would, however, be difficult to imagine Namco not bringing Artorias of the Abyss over to console. Indeed, there were rumours circulating the Gamers Day event that the company may even be considering a full retail release for a Dark Souls: Prepare To Die edition on console. It’s likely we’ll get more information at E3.

Another element Miyazaki wouldn’t be drawn on is the apparent decision by Namco to use Games for Windows Live for the PC game’s online content. At the Namco Gamers Day event, box art of the title showed a GFWL logo, prompting a disappointed response from some gamers who view the service as inferior to other contenders such as Steam. However, while Miyazaki wouldn’t comment, Namco’s publishing producer for the game, Daisuke Uchiyama, told reporters that the final decision had yet to be made and that partnership negotiations were ongoing.

Miyazaki did provide a few small details about the additional chapter. Apparently, it will feature “three to four” new boss characters and the same number of areas, as well as a fresh storyline. “There will also be more NPCs and more enemies,” he said. “And the equipment of these characters will be available for the player to wear.” He also mentioned that the area will fit into the game at some point after the middle of the game, and certainly later than Sen’s Fortress.

Apart from this addition, PC owners can pretty much expect a straight port of the console version. “There were many things that I didn’t like or would have changed in the console versions,” Miyazaki admitted. “But if you change every single element, it won’t be Dark Souls anymore. We might tune it a little bit but we’re not going to make any drastic changes.”

I also asked whether the area in the chapter was something originally cut from the console version, but apparently it’s brand new. “The new areas were designed after the console release,” he said. “However, we did have the idea when we were developing the game, but none of the team members took it seriously at the time. It’s 99% new content.”

Moving on, it seems Dark Souls on PC will not support any sort of user modification or editing – unlike, say, Skyrim with its creation kit. “Personally, I am interested in the concept of Mods,” said Miyazaki. “However, due to our lack of experience with the PC we need more time to adapt to what PC gamers want from mods. So this time we’re not doing it.”

The game will also only offer limited support for mouse and keyboard control. “Since it’s a straight port of the console version, we recommend that players use a joypad. We will support the keyboard, but it will be minimal.”

Finally, we asked Miyazaki about the mysterious pendant that players of the console version can select as a gift at the start of the game, but which seemingly has little use in the subsequent adventure. Is there more to this controversial trinket? “Oh, the pendant?” he laughed. “I am aware that many people are wondering about the meaning of it … but let’s keep it as a secret. I can’t answer the question now. I won’t answer it for the rest of my life.”

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The next Xbox will have a Blu-ray drive, and will be on sale in time for Christmas next year, VG247 reports.

Citing multiple unnamed sources, the site reckons Microsoft’s upcoming console will use the high-definition disc format that currently works with the PlayStation 3, and will also require a permanent Internet connection.

In terms of hardware, the so-called Xbox 720 will sport two graphics processors, with one source reportedly stating the next-gen console will be “like two PCs taped together”. Which sounds, er, great. Those two graphics chips are thought to work independently of each other to draw different objects at the same time.

You didn’t need a rumour to tell you that the next Xbox will be able to chuck polygons around at a violent rate, though. A more intriguing tidbit is that the next generation of Kinect will reportedly be built directly into the console, which I guess would mean the console would need to have a decent view of your living room.

Constant connection?

Supposedly codenamed ‘Durango’, Microsoft’s follow-up to the Xbox 360 is also rumoured to require an ‘always-on’ Internet connection, which is a controversial feature already present in some PC games and set to appear in upcoming titles like Diablo 3.

Forcing players to maintain an Internet connection helps fight piracy, but with the consequence that those with a non-existent or sketchy connection can have their game ruined.

The PlayStation 4, meanwhile, is rumoured to be packing some similar anti-piracy tech that would require discs you buy to be authenticated using Sony’s online system before you could play. Games these days sure are fun!

Microsoft’s previously said we won’t see the next Xbox shown off at E3 this year, and it’s not likely to go on sale this year either. That could leave Nintendo’s Wii U with a free run at your Christmas cash this year.

Which upcoming console will you be buying? Let me know in the comments or on our Facebook wall.

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The place to talk about games, even if you’re not at work and you’ve eaten your own body weight in creme eggs

It’s Easter Monday, but on the off-chance there are still a few Gamesblog regulars loafing about hoping to discuss games, the Chatterbox is open!

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The Street Fighter producer, now recovering from a recent illness, tells us about his aims and ambitions for the legendary series, and reveals his favourite Tekken character

If you’re a fighting game fan, you’ll have seen the videos. Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono and his Tekken equivalent, Katsuhiro Harada, at the San Diego Comic Con, battling it out over a series of ridiculous competitive tasks. In the run up to the release of Street Fighter v Tekken, the good-natured rivalry between these two games industry veterans became a priceless marketing tool. They didn’t just make the game, they symbolised it.

In late March, Ono became ill during a promotional tour of Asia. He was taken to hospital but later released and although he has temporarily stepped down from his position as Street Fighter series producer, he is staying in touch with the game.

Indeed, in a lot of ways, he is the game. Ono has come to embody the spirit of the new Street Fighter – steeped in tradition, but not afraid to laugh at itself. Famously, he carries a little toy of electrified Street Fighter character Blanka with him on every press tour. Although only a series producer for the last couple of iterations, he’s been involved with Street Fighter for years, originally on the audio side. He was sound supervisor on Street Fighter III: Third Strike, the era of the brand that he felt scared away a lot of potential players with its complexity.

When I got to question him a couple of weeks before his illness, I started out by asking about the game’s origins back in the late-eighties; about Capcom’s decision to enter the burgeoning fighting game genre. “At the time, Takashi Nishiyama, who was my senior at the company and now the President of Dimps worked on a number of games, including Spartan X before coming to Capcom,” he explains. “As a game designer, Nishiyama-san always had wanted to create that type of fighting genre. Street Fighter 1 could be considered the first modern day fighting game.”

But was Nishiyama inspired by the likes of Karate Champ or Yie Ar Kung Fu? “It was more influenced by popular Japanese manga,” says Ono. “From what I heard, it was never Nishiyama’s intention to go out and make a better game than what was already out there, but rather to make his own ideal game as a designer. But anyway, those special moves were really hard to do in the original Street Fighter, so they didn’t come out very often. I remember Nishiyama-san told me he once got upset at the development team and shouted, ‘If these are really special moves they gotta come out when you need them!’ ”

Ono is amiable, funny, a natural clown, but he’s also very serious about what Capcom needs to do to survive in the current industry. Last year, he gave an interview to Japanese games magazine Famitsu in which he stated his intent to spearhead a social and mobile gaming revolution at the publisher, making social connectivity a key element of all its titles. The future is probably Street Fighter v Facebook.

For now though, the important thing is the current game, a breathless showdown between two very different fighting brands. Street Fighter is the exacting 2D classic, the hardcore bruiser; Tekken is the glitzy 3D showman that symbolised the dawn of the PlayStation era.

The prospect of a co-production first came up a couple of years ago. It was Ono who had the idea – he’d heard that Tekken producer Harada was a big fan of Street Fighter (“it might be the case that he is better at Street Fighter than he is at Tekken,” says Ono), so he put forward the concept of Street Fighter v Tekken. Perhaps he was inspired by the Dreamcast-era cross-over project Capcom vs SNK; it certainly wasn’t because Ono was secretly obsessed with Harada’s series.

“I was never very good at Tekken,” he admits. “Before we started making this game, I had never dreamed that we could make this project a reality, so I didn’t play Tekken very seriously back then. Once the project was given the go ahead however, I put my full attention into learning the game, the characters, the battle mechanics, and the match-ups. I didn’t get any better at the game though…”

I ask who his Tekken character of choice is – it’s Nina Williams, apparently. Or at least it was. Sometime during the development of SF x T, he saw everyone else in his office opting for Xiaoyu, so immediately swapped allegiances to this ultra-athletic school girl.

Surely at some point early in production, it must have seemed like madness, mixing these very different combat systems. Street Fighter uses a system of light, medium and heavy attacks usually based around a six-button layout and a combo mechanic that employs circular and semi-circular joystick moves; Tekken has four buttons, one for each limb, and combos mostly based on sequential button presses and directional jabs. They don’t fit.

Ono laughs. “We get this question quite often and it was definitely a main concern of ours. Street Fighter and Tekken are very different, even though they’re under the same umbrella of ‘fighting games’. We couldn’t just take Tekken characters and put them into a Street Fighter game, so we decided to take the key elements from both franchises and make something completely new. Although Tekken is a 3D fighting game, it still contains many 2D elements within its core gameplay, and that made the transition process much smoother.”

So now the fighting system cleverly combines both. Street Fighter characters get the six-button array, while Tekken veterans can access many of the four-button moves they’re used to as well as discovering new heavy punch and kick attacks and a range of specials and supers. Introducing a rich selection of new moves designed to aid newcomers will indulging experts it’s a surprisingly robust amalgamation, a triumph of sheer will over contrasting engines.

One key addition I want to ask Ono about is the controversial Gem system which allows players to augment certain favourite moves. It seems like something out of the RPG genre, but also something very modern – a nod toward the customization fervour of the social gaming age. “With the gem system, we wanted to add a layer of personalisation that had never been seen before in fighting games,” says Ono. “No longer should customisation be purely cosmetic; it should be about fusing your own play style into characters, and that’s what we’ve managed to do with the gem system.

“No gem is more powerful than another, and it is all about finding out what works for you as a player and you personally. New players to the genre can utilise Assist gems in order to cover their weaknesses, while more experienced players can utilise Boost gems to increase the parameters of their characters. Either way, the gem system has something to offer everyone out there, and I am very excited to see what combinations players come up with!”

Another key element of the new game is the choice of characters. There’s a roster of 50, with 25 from each title (though PlayStation versions offer five extra guest characters). “We wanted to create a festival that everyone could join,” says Ono. “So we put in all the most popular characters from each franchise. We wanted new and old players to enjoy the variety of characters, so there is something for everyone in the roster.

“Even similar types of characters play differently. Take Zangief and Marduk, for example; they are both ‘power’ characters, but they do not play the same way, and I believe players will enjoy these kinds of matches as well.”

He admits, though, that it’s getting harder and harder to select balanced rosters in Street Fighter games. As the menagerie grows and the hardware gets more powerful, the temptation must be there to just chuck everyone in – or at least make great armies of extra fighters available as DLC.

“The most important thing is to build a roster that contains varied play styles and varied personalities,” says Ono. “As we always say, fighting games are not just mere entertainment that you watch, they are tools for the players. This is also true when we create new characters; we want to keep things as diverse and interesting as possible. I’m sure you can see this with recent Street Fighter games, as they end up having huge rosters – the balancing act has become quite a difficult task for us!”

But what is it that has allowed Street Fighter protagonists to remain popular, to remain balanced? “I believe it’s because every character can be seen as a ‘main character’ in one way or another,” he says. “In other older games, you basically controlled one or two fighters, and every other character was an enemy, or had a minor role. Street Fighter was always about the player making their own gameplay experiences, just like in chess or poker. Whichever character you choose, that becomes the main character in your eyes. That is why players have loved the characters over all these years.”

The interesting element of this whole cross-over enterprise is that Street Fighter x Tekken was developed entirely by Capcom, with no input from Namco. At all. “They gave us complete creative freedom with the collaboration project,” says Ono. “They never tried to steer the direction of things, and just gave us helpful advice. It really made the development process a lot easier than we had initially imagined.”

Now, it’s up to Namco. Harada and his team will have already begun work on their response, Tekken x Street Fighter. Can we expect a whole new roster? How will the button layout change? Surely accommodating the Tekken system within a Street Fighter structure was the easier task? But then successfully translating the fireballs and extending limbs of the SF heroes into the fully 3D Tekken universe?

“Honestly, I haven’t seen a single thing about it!” laughs Ono. “Harada is notoriously slow at making games, so it might be 2018 before that comes out!”

Fighting games in 2018? That will be a rather frightening 35 years after the first formative titles in the genre emerged. How does Ono see the whole concept evolving in the near future? “I believe the analog and digital environments need to be blended together more seamlessly,” he says. “Right now, we are very happy that there are Street Fighter tournaments going on all around the world, both online and offline. Live stream technology has allowed for viewers to watch them like never before.

“But we want more and more people to become interested in fighting games so that we can grow the genre. It would be nice if we could create a means of giving new players an easy way to get acquainted with the existing fighting game community. If we can include more social features in the future titles that could help grow the communities. That would be ideal.”

Ono is on the road almost constantly, publicising Street Fighter all over the world. I figure it’s either the only game he plays or that he plays nothing. Turns out I’m wrong. When I ask about what he manages to play in-between promo appearances, he has a list ready. “I often play 3DS: Mario Kart online in the hotel,” he says. “And when I can’t sleep, I play Resident Evil Revelations – it makes me so excited and tired that it helps me sleep. And I love playing Ace Combat on the airplane.”

“Oh, and I always play Pro Evolution Soccer and FIFA on my PSP when I go to Europe, just as a communication tool. I make sure to practice on either game before I get into a European country.

“What a great time we live in!”

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Keith Stuart

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