The 25th Anniversary Tournament Series has been the backbone of Capcom’s year-long celebration of Street Fighter, and this Saturday, December 8th, The Grand Finals are aimed to deliver one of most epic Ultra combos the fighting game scene has ever experienced. This isn’t just a tournament, this event is a pure bonanza of Street Fighter love: amazing competition, new announcements, killer artwork, tons of freebies, costumes, photos ops, signing sessions… we are even giving away a custom Street Fighter Scion FR-S Sports Coupe!

If you’re in the bay area, I highly recommend swinging by. The event (Facebook page here) is free to enter, but is sure to fill up, so get there early in the day if you can. The fun kicks off at 10:00am PST.

Hyatt Regency SFO
1333 Bayshore Highway
Burlingame, CA
94010

If you can’t make it in person, don’t worry — we will be live streaming the whole thing from our new Capcom Fighters channel. We also have a website with the brackets up, so you can follow along with the matches at home.

The Grand Finals features the best players who qualified across eight different regions throughout the world. This tournament pays out over $125,000 dollars in cash prizes — the largest prize pool in fighting game history — and with that type of money on the line, these players are out for blood. They will be competing across four classic Street Fighter games: Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, Street Fighter X Tekken, Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike – Online Edition, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (played as Super Turbo).

It has been a long and hard-fought journey, full of masterful victories, classy defeats, upsets, blow-ups, salty pop-offs… it’s been a whole lot of fun to watch. Our friends at shoryuken.com put together some great recap articles (here and here) that highlight some of the season’s best moments, so if you want a deeper dive you can check these out here:

But this event isn’t just a tournament, the day is jam packed with fun Street Fighter activities and giveaways. The first 1,000 people through the door will receive an exclusive goodie bag, including:

• SF25 Event T-shirt
• SF25 red Ryu headband
• Program book
• UDON SF comic books
• Other various goodies from all our vendors
• Some bags will have “Golden Tickets,” or special larger prizes hidden inside!

We also have scheduled four raffles throughout the course of the day, featuring some high-end collectibles from our sponsors, including SF25 Collector’s Sets, Oni Statues from SoTA toys, Musterbrand jackets, AverMedia capture cards, and a very high end painted sculpture from Protototype-Z.

If you can’t make it to the event in person, don’t fret! There is a ton of stuff to win online as well. Asus, Kineda, AverMedia, and Prototype-Z are all running twitter contests with large prizes. We’ll have all the full details up on www.Capcom-Unity.com, so check there and enter for your chance to win and help support our sponsors!

There is also going to be a live art show by Tsunami Syndicate, featuring new original artwork inspired by 25 years of Street Fighter. Legendary producers Yoshinori Ono and Tomoaki Ayano will be there in full force, and we’ll have plenty of posters available for their signing sessions. If you need a healthy dose of cute-factor, Hello Kitty Chun-Li will be busting cameos throughout the day, perfect for awesome photo opportunities. Cosplay is highly encouraged, and we will be featuring a cosplay contest where you can win some SF25 Collector’s Sets. Also, for those who want to not just watch the games, there will be a bunch of set ups there for you to test your skills at Street Fighter X Tekken (console and PS Vita), Darkstalkers Resurrection, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, Super Turbo, 3rd Strike Online Edition, and more. Rumor has it that we will be announcing something new for players to get their hands on, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out!

So, kick your holidays off with a Super combo of Street Fighter awesomeness! Get hype, and make your way to the venue (or stream monster it up online) — this is sure to be a truly historic event for the fighting game scene, and it may take another 25 years for us to be able to pull something off like this again. Thanks to everyone for their support and enjoy the festivities!

For those who don’t know, when the PlayStation Move controller became available, Capcom released a free update for Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition owners that implements new control options into the game which provide a more immersive and intuitive experience. Now you can use the PlayStation Move controller to aim with ease as you take down the hoards of Majini that have taken over Kijuju.

Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition is available in stores now and in addition to the entire Resident Evil 5 experience, the Gold Edition includes two new episodes, four new costumes, an online Versus Mode, and a newly reworked Mercenaries Reunion mode. The PlayStation Move motion controller works with all modes.

What is up! I’m Matt Dahlgren, one of the product managers here at Capcom who gets to work on the Resident Evil franchise.

Today I get to blog about the PSone Resident Evil: Director’s Cut, which will be available for download tomorrow on PSN for $9.99.

I don’t think I’ll ever get to make a statement like this in a blog ever again.

The original Resident Evil is a game that defined my personality as a gamer for years to come. (I’ve got two others on my list of influential games, FF7 and Tekken, each for their respective genre – but I’ll keep this RE centered.)

The early experiences that you have in gaming set you up for what to expect in the future. If you have a positive enough experience, you attempt to find it time and time again – but I don’t think a game will ever affect me in the same way that this one did.

Going back and tinkering around with this game after so many years off got me thinking about how different gaming was 10 years ago in comparison to today. Games back then were hard. I remember dying at the first zombie while trying to figure out a weird control scheme, yet being mesmerized with the fact that I could control the outcome in a 3D environment. It took me a while to get the grasp of everything, and I died a lot, but I was so entertained by the experience that I refused to go to bed. I stayed up all night at a friend’s house, figuring out this weird mansion filled with zombies.

Controls then were not nearly as important as they are now. People were so mesmerized with the fact that they were experiencing something new, it didn’t matter that the graphics weren’t perfectly realistic and the acting was bad. It was a completely new experience, and better yet it could scare you. (ex. Dog + Window = Jump)

But what made this game cool is the fact that deep underneath the struggles you had to go through to progress, there was this gigantic intricate puzzle to figure out. How do you get to the next area with only 15 bullets? Which path is going to punish you, and which is going to let you survive? A lot of the time, if you chose the wrong path, you were just screwed, and you started over. If you didn’t have an ink ribbon on hand, or didn’t save recently, this could mean you have to re-do the last hour of gameplay. But it didn’t matter as much, because you learned from your mistakes and you could do things better the second time.

In addition, the environments were just sweet. I don’t think any game has re-created something as creepy as that first mansion. To me it is the ultimate classic scenario. So many questions to be had, and you fill them in piece by piece as you progress. Not everything may have made perfect sense, but either way, it was completely intriguing.

Playing as Chris Redfield and getting your shotgun is a great example. At this point, you have been playing for a while now, trying to survive with just a handgun. You go into a room, and see a shotgun on the wall. Sweet! Then you pick it up, and the ceiling comes down on you and makes a Chris pancake. (owned) Better hope you saved recently.

Getting that shotgun was a big time struggle. You had to find the broken shotgun, manage your inventory so you can actually hold it, figure out how to dodge or kill a ton of zombies through a long stretch of the mansion, so you can replace it on the wall and not die when trying to get a new weapon.

But when you get it…that shotgun is a score! You can now blow off zombie heads in a single shot, you just need to aim up. That weapon completely changes the gameplay experience from then on out. What makes that cool is once you finally figure out how to get the shotgun, there is such a strong sense of accomplishment. You earned your reward, it wasn’t just handed to you.

Nowadays if a key drops and someone has to spend 5 mins trying to find out where it goes, they just get pissed and stop playing. (Obviously over-exaggerated, but you can see the point I was making)

And the camera angles – sometimes you can’t even see down a hallway. That’s like putting you at a bigger disadvantage than being there in real life. Haha. I kept remembering that I wanted to kick a zombie in the chest because they were so slow. (If you played Outbreak, there’s one guy that could kick zombies in the chest. I always picked that guy. Heh) Not only was it difficult to see, even when I knew where the zombies were, they would get me ALL the time. It was difficult to move precisely. Very different experience than seeing a single enemy, lining up a headshot – done, progress. You were watching that zombie, trying to predict how he would move, how you could lure him to the side so you could sneak by. And you would still get caught.

But, if you played the original game, you have to admit that the control elements and camera angles helped heighten the experience. Resident Evil is all about putting you in situations that are hard to predict the outcome. It is a game that keeps you on your toes. Granted you may be frustrated that you can’t see the zombie, or even worse one of the “chop your head off in one swipe” hunters that is 5 feet in front you because the camera won’t let you, but those moments are pretty intense experiences because you don’t know what is going on.

(OMG – if you can aim up, shoot blind and hit a jumping hunter based on his sound alone, talk about satisfying. Haha)

Many people now would probably find this annoying. Games are so real, that if you can’t do anything you want, there’s something else out there that will let you. But for me playing this game as a kid, it defined me as a gamer. I wanted a challenge, because I felt I could do it, and other people couldn’t. Maybe that’s a bit arrogant, but isn’t that what getting ridiculous amounts of trophies or high scores is all about anyways? If anything didn’t give me that challenge – I was disappointed.

I think that sums up what Resident Evil is all about: Reward through harsh struggles. There’s a great sense of accomplishment when you can make it through the worst. I think Resident Evil does this to a “T”, and has continued to do so over the years.

(I also think they re-created a “this is completely new to me” experience when they did RE4, part of the reason I respect the franchise so much.)

I think there are a lot of gamers out there like me – many of them probably who hated on RE4/RE5 because it was different than the “old school” games. I disagree that the survival/horror element from Resident Evil is gone – it’s definitely still in there, it’s just evolved. And that doesn’t mean that the traditional survival horror of the early games is gone, it just means that the franchise has branched out to provide new experiences.

So, if you haven’t played this game, or want to go back and re-live a classic game you played as a kid like me, I highly recommend this game. If you are a current fan of Resident Evil, you can see many of the gameplay traits that evolved from this game. (You may not like the fact you can’t move and shoot simultaneously in RE5, but those controls are there for a reason, and help the game stay true to some of the classic elements of the franchise which are very evident in the early games.)

Also, if you were introduced to the series through Resident Evil 4 or 5, this game is a great opportunity to go back and experience the roots of the franchise. Both Chris and Jill, who appear in RE5, make their franchise debut in this game.

For those who don’t know what the Director’s Cut version is, this is the updated version of the original game which was released 18 months after the original. It features an “Arranged Mode” which essentially mixes up the item placement, camera angles, and enemy placement, to give people a different path through the game than found in the original 1996 version.

I think that is about enough for my “tribute” post. I can’t recommend this game highly enough – and that’s the gamer in me, not the marketing dude. Hope you enjoy.