Okay I’m mighty late with wrapping this up, but it’s been a busy week and I’ve been mainly working on trying to my mailserver back to life since I returned from Sydney. During our visit to MSHQ on Friday we were treated to an exclusive preview of Street Fighter 2 and Cloning Clyde, and here’s some of my opinions and photos.

Street Fighter 2

Last time I played Street Fighter 2 was on the Super Nintendo, about 13 years ago I’d say. Picking up the controller to play this game was mainly a huge flashbang from the past: the game looks, feels and plays exactly the same as it did on the SNES, and that’s a great thing. Everything is in there, all the characters are playable, and it feels intuitive as ever. I even managed to remember some of the special moves before I found out the game helpfully explains them all in a sort of online help section. The game still needed some small final polishing, I couldn’t get Chun Li’s mad kicking move performed on a controller for example, but be sure to expect this available for download really soon.

Regrettably my photocamera proved better at taking beach pictures in blazing sunlight than photographing projector screens in dark conference rooms, but I did manage to get some shots in:

Cloning Clyde

Cloning Clyde is the next game from the wacko’s at NinjaBee, previously known for the fun strategy game Outpost Kaloki X. Cloning Clyde is an old-school pure platformer that takes wacko to a few new levels though. In short, the story revolves around Clyde who got offered a few bucks for having scientific experiments performed on him, and after he finds out they’re actually cloning him he needs to escape from the lab. Expect lots of wacko gameplay as Clyde clones himself into himself and himself and uhm stuff like sheep and whatever, and solve puzzles with a bunch of those clones having to do different things at different times. For myself a sure download.

Didn’t get any playtime on this myself regrettably (we were short on time a bit), but I did manage again to shoot some half-assed photos:

So when can we expect these games? To cite the MS guy who did the presentation: “these games will almost certainly be the next two games available for download.” Expect within a few weeks, both were in nearly finished state out there.