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In preparation for the upcoming Street Fighter 5, Capcom and Sony have seen fit to bring the latest, 'ultra' iteration of its predecessor onto PlayStation 4. It seems like a guaranteed win, with a high-quality PC port already available and well-suited for conversion onto the Sony console. Additionally, with the Evo 2015 tournament just around the corner, this was a golden opportunity to push players onto the PlayStation 4 platform in preparation for the new game. Instead, the whole endevour has come off the rails. Spearheaded by SCEA's Third Party Production group, the PS4 iteration marks the first time a Western team has worked on Street Fighter 4. SF5 is under development using Unreal Engine 4, but the existing game is built around custom tech produced in-house by original developer Dimps and Capcom in Japan. Rather than recruit the likes of proven conversionsmiths Bluepoint Games, or another high profile studio, this port was handed off to Other Ocean Interactive - a company with a rather poor reputation when it comes to its porting work. Unlike every other version to date, Capcom's involvement seems to be somewhat limited, with the company having already issued a statement basically offloading complaints to SCEA.
Problems with the PS4 game are evident right off the bat; the game's menu system has been reduced to a choppy, unresponsive mess that makes navigation a chore. It's not just a matter of lowering the frame-rate - every frame is displayed at half-rate resulting in a slower overall navigation experience. Graphics slowly lurch and stutter across the screen, feeling more like an unrefined webpage than a proper port of the original game. Stranger still, while all versions re-use the original 720p 2D art assets, the icons in this version are often scaled using a mix of what looks like bilinear filtering and point-sampling, leading to a particularly inconsistent layout at times.
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