Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition DLC Announced

By Adam Rosenberg

Late last year, a special coin-op edition of Super Street Fighter 4 landed in Japanese arcades with new characters, new costumes and overall tweaks to the game's balancing. We all knew that the console versions would be seeing that content in some form, and Capcom made it official last week at its annual Captivate preview event.

Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition will bring all four of the now-unlocked playable fighters from Japanese arcades -- Yun, Yang, Oni and Evil Ryu -- to home versions of the game as DLC, along with adding new costumes and balancing tweaks. There are also a number of cool console-specific features being added which look to improve on the community elements built into the game.

An enhanced Replay Channel is central to this, offering players new way to both discover and interact with content from across the Street Fighter community. First up is a newly added Elite Channel, which aims to make finding replays from top fighters easier; all content available on this channel is restricted to match replays with fighters who have 3,000 Player Points (PP) or more.

Complementing this Elite Channel is the newly added Replay Follower, which takes a cue from Twitter in allowing gamers to receive regular updates on newly available content for up to five other players. You search out their Gamertag/online handle and then simply follow them, just like the wildly popular micro-blogging portal.

All shared content and follow feeds are funneled into the newly updated My Channel Advanced. More than just a feed, you can actually share videos here -- either belonging to you or those that you've found elsewhere -- and there's enough space to save as many as 50. There are a few smaller tweaks as well, such as a newly updated HUD which shows each player's PP, BP and title throughout each fight.

We got to play a little bit of Arcade Edition at Captivate. From the perspective of a casual player of fighting games, this update definitely still feels like Street Fighter 4. The new characters add some additional wrinkles, but it's going to take the real pros sitting down with this before the true scope of these additions can be measured.

The pack is coming as an add-on to all platform versions of the game, including PC, in a simultaneous worldwide DLC launch for $14.99 (or the MS Points equivalent). A disc version will follow a few weeks later, starting in Europe on June 24. What's more, Capcom will also be releasing a free-to-download feature pack which will allow Street Fighter 4 owners who don't jump on the DLC to fight against Arcade Edition equipped players online.