Clap your hands

Street Fighter can be a bit daunting. It’s easy to have fun mashing buttons and throwing fireballs, but once you delve a little deeper into the series, the discussion centres on frame counting and character balance. As such, we’re not entirely convinced everyone’s going to be able to appreciate Ultra Street Fighter IV’s new ‘Edition Select’ feature, but we daresay that a small group of aficionados will be losing their minds right now.

Essentially, the addition will allow you to toggle between the various versions of the game's characters, allowing you to, for example, pit the original iteration of Sagat against the rebalanced brawlers from the new title. As publisher Capcom has been tweaking the release for the past four or so years now, this should serve as a nice reference piece for all of the tweaks that have taken place over time. It will also allow you to discover the game's strongest ever combatant.

“In all of the years that I've been playing through the Street Fighter IV series, I can't count how many times discussions on 'who the strongest character has been thus far' have come up among players both old and new,” explained Capcom’s Peter Rosas. “Seeing as how there was no actual way to measure whether vanilla Sagat was stronger than Arcade Edition Yun, players would engage in long theoretical discussions with no way to figure out who was right. Well, it’s time to change that.”

In addition to the abovementioned feature, Ultra Street Fighter IV will include five new fighters, a handful of additional stages, and a bunch of improvements based on player feedback. You’ll be able to purchase it as a downloadable upgrade to Super Street Fighter IV or Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition in early June, or as part a new physical package later in the year. There’s no word on a PlayStation 4 release just yet, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it got ported eventually.

[source capcom-unity.com, via siliconera.com]