SFII is Arcade's fastest-seller

By Tom Bramwell Published 7 August, 2006

Capcom blows its trumpet.

Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting has become the fastest-selling Xbox Live Arcade title to date, Capcom announced on Friday.

The game achieved the feat over its first 24 hours on Xbox Live Arcade following release on August 2.

Capcom claims that "hundreds of matches" are taking place between online combatants every hour.

Information on sales of Xbox Live Arcade games is slightly inconsistent. At the turn of the year, Microsoft announced that Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved had been downloaded more than 200,000 times and bought more than 45,000 times.

In June, it subsequently revealed that UNO had the highest daily demo-to-sale conversion rate - between 40 and 45 percent - having eclipsed Geometry Wars' 39 percent rate.

It would easy to infer from the companies' careful use of unrelated stats that Street Fighter II's record is not as impressive as either of those two titles yet. However, it's safe to say that it marks SFII out as the most successful Xbox Live Arcade Wednesdays title to date.

Previous Wednesdays games were Frogger, Cloning Clyde and Galaga. Pac-Man is due to appear on Live Arcade this Wednesday at 8am GMT.

Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting costs 800 Microsoft points, or GBP 6.80, with a trial version also available.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (15) Latest comment 6 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • binky #1 6 years ago

    If only it wasn't so hard to use with a 360 pad, and was less laggy online!! :(

  • dbeamish #2 6 years ago

    jsut a shame that mostly due to the control pad I guess.. its soooo bloody hard!

  • Fatnick #3 6 years ago

    Use the analogue stick! it makes it much easier!

  • smoison #4 6 years ago

    Is the D-pad worse then the PSP's?

    Half circles on a shitty D-Pad is fustrating.

  • sharpfish #5 6 years ago

    The problem with the D-Pad (apart from it being a bit soft) is that you can't comfortably run your thumb around in a circle for special moves as it hits the edge of the next direction piece. I knew from day one that POS D-Pad would cause trouble but I don't really care as I doubt there will be many games using it and Analogue is great (though as I stopped playing the SF2 demo I don't know how great in relation to a 2D fighting game).

    Either way it's a lot better for fighting than my old bright green "bug" joystick was on my Amiga ;)

  • Pirotic #6 6 years ago

    the problem with the d-pad is that it's too low down, it isn't centre to the palm of your hand and so your thumb cannot make accurate directional presses without the occasional slip-up (normally pressing slightly too high and registering a jump when you only wanted to press back/foward).

  • smelly #7 6 years ago

    >less laggy online!!

    only way to do a 1-1 beat-em-up online is with lag. Other games get around it by cheating. I.e. On a fps, all thats reqd is the knowledge that someone else has killed you (it doesnt matter in reality that you're in a different room on his machine to the one you think you're in).

  • McBradders #8 6 years ago

    Not had any lag problems.

    However the controls, stick or pad, are lackluster at best, and the problem of cheesehounds using E. Honda or M. Bison and quitters are the most annoying things about it so far.

    Someone mentioned something about Microsoft doing a LIVE Arcade pad, I've googled and found nothing. Anybody got a link handy reporting this? It would give a few of the games I've downloaded a new lease of life for sure.
    Edited by 1 at 07/08/06 @ 12:04

  • king_ghidra #9 6 years ago

    I've had no lag problems either, though as the pp mentioned, i've had lots of e honda scrub problems. Still, i've had a ball with it so far.

  • McBradders #10 6 years ago

    Unless you're SNK.

    :)

  • dllord #11 6 years ago

    Use the stick you lamos!

  • thefilthandthefury #12 6 years ago

    ">less laggy online!!

    only way to do a 1-1 beat-em-up online is with lag. Other games get around it by cheating. I.e. On a fps, all thats reqd is the knowledge that someone else has killed you (it doesnt matter in reality that you're in a different room on his machine to the one you think you're in). "


    While I could be wrong, I fail to believe this even one little bit.

  • TheMoonRat #13 6 years ago

    An FPS uses a centralised server host that players send data to and from; the server decides what happens whereas the client often predicts what happens from the data it recieves from the server. - Remember, even with 2 players on a good 50ms ping, an event that happens on Players A screen takes 50ms to transmit to the server then 50ms to transmit from the server to Player B... so 100ms in total! Most of the time the prediciton and server agree, but you can see from laggers and how they move around how the prediction of what you should see then the server sending the reality makes the player jerk so much. You can also notice how even if you had 500ms ping on a server, if you press fire, your gun fires immediately; the old Quake never had this prediction, so on 500ms ping every action, movement, or fireing would take that 500ms ping to respond!

    A 1 on 1 game like this will be Peer to Peer: one player is the host and the other the client. When twitch split second reactions are needed P2P is clearly best; data goes from one player to the other without any middle man needed. However this makes poor internet connections more evident: there is no prediction, nothing to help. The host can easily make their connection laggy to high heaven by downloading files on a shared connection; being the host everything they do will happen instantly and they wont have a problem, but the client will have to wade through all that lag and have the delayed control problems etc.

  • smelly #14 6 years ago

    LMAO @ moonrat!

    Cheers mate, I was trying to keep explanation simple. You just saved me a lot of typing :-)

    Can I buy you a beer?

    But yeah. Most fps games use prediction (that's how they can cope with so many at once). But if you get shot on someone else's machine that info ALWAYS comes through. Brilliant thing is, hardly anyone ever notices, if yer in a deathmatch and all of a sudden you're shot and you die, you just presume someone shot you from behind, or snipped you.

    It wont even occur to you that the person who killed you may be seeing you even though you're not actually there any more.

    Same goes for racing games...

    Obviously cheating like that cant happen on a 1-1 beat em up, so it HAS to be peer-to-peer. Which means that each machine needs to wait for the info from the other one before continuing. Which on a 60fps game, that's 120 packets of data which need to be sent and synced each second.. Thus potential for lag (and potentailly lowering of framerate for online version - or at the very least lowering of how often each pad is polled.).

    Hope you learned something new today without me getting to techily boring.


    Edited by 1 at 08/08/06 @ 12:13

  • thefilthandthefury #15 6 years ago

    Yep, that did the trick :D