VIDEO GAME CRITIC WAGER 2023

Odd kind of roped me into trying out the SF6 BETA this weekend. It's up until the 22nd to try out. You have to signup for a capcom account to try, it's very easy to do. Also the offline demo with Luke and Ryu with extreme battle/custom character is also still available. I've never been a huge of SF4's 3D stuff, there's something about how the 3D models move in that space that has always felt off to me? but the modern controls they added in this iterations seemed to have fixed these problems for me, maybe. (they also have classic controls still available for those who still want it)

instead of having 3 punches and 3 kicks.

For the kick buttons, they give you a weak, medium, and fierce (you can still do tradition move inputs on these)
For the punch buttons, they give you a throw button, Drive Impact and Drive Parry, and they also give you a special move button.

Drive Impact and Drive Parry is kind of like Focus Attack but it's broken down into two parts and they give you a meter for it, which is kind of cool. I haven't used it enough to get a feel for it yet tho.

The Special Move Button is great and I feel like it's going to be the big thing that's going to rope in a lot of newcomers. The way they set it up is a lot like smash? But you still have the limitations of the moveset, but they're a lot easier to pull off.

Like Gulie's Sonic Boom special, instead of holding back for 3 seconds and then pressing forward, back, forward + punch.
it's hold back 3 seconds then press special move button and fierce.

Alot of the super moves are easily done now, by pressing the special move and fierce button with a direction.

I would not prefer this, if it was a traditional 2D fighting game, because often the challenge and thrill in a 2D fighting game is figuring what sort of move inputs can you squeeze between large frames of animation in order to pull off more combos.

I feel like this new modern control set, lends itself better to a 3D fighting game? because this is how you'd perform combos in Tekken and Soul Calibur. like instead of doing quarter-circles and pushing buttons at the end of these moves, you're pressing diagonals and combining them to get the most out of that 3D space - it just feels a lot more intuitive. Honestly, it feels great and I'm surprised how well they pulled this off and I'm wondering everyone else is gonna feel about this change.
I don't think SF6 is going to be for me, but I hope this does well, (for obvious reasons

)
I don't know if it's going to be as good as RE4 remake was though,
that was pretty great. that was an outliner, that was like Christmas in 2023.

Also the online retro arcade they included in the lobby - they have final fight playing currently - is also pretty cool, like, you're not just playing these games, you can actually go back and look at the history and see where these ideas of inspiration, like cody's "juke" in his move "final destruction" came from. This is stuff I really wish I had as a kid

EDIT: Also, Luke is a really good character, he plays a bit like sean and ryu. Ken and Ryu are a lot more slow and methodical now. So it'd be interesting to see what the future of the series will look like, if they can actually make Luke a series staple.

They tried to replace Ryu before with Alex, in street fighter 3, I think they might be able to do it now with Luke.

EDIT2: Kimberly is also a really neat surprise.