But marketing's a bitch of a tightrope to walk - and it's even worse when the marketing material is VERY LIKE the game it's promoting. Take this recent example (video embedded below) Street Fighter 4. Now we've all played version after version of this famous side-scrolling beat-em-up. The promo, however, TOTALLY REIMAGINES the jaded and crusty old Street Fighter grand vision. It's an amazing tour de force that might just revolutionise the fighting game genre completely.
It's classy, stylish, brutal and as next-gen as you can hope a 3D title to become. But no, the game's producers forgot to commission this amazing pre-prototype visualisation before letting the coding team go about their latest version update. I say, let the ARTISTS design games and show the gaming world how it should be done. Forget mediocrity in mass-market entertainment. Artists should dictate to the world how it should be. Oh, wasn't Adolf Hitler an artist...
The point is, though the side-scrolling fighter genre might appear to be broken by this wild and wacky artistic presentation, it can be done. If we show the game from the 'winning' player's graphical perspective, the side-scrolling aspect ISN'T broken. We can then have 'control of one's action' as a part of the actual gameplay. It would be sweeeeet. Lack of corporate foresight all over again while the artists can only dream up the ignored future? Same old story, I'm afraid.
