It seems that no matter how much people spend in the Xbox Live Arcade store Microsoft still feels the need to cap developers at a limit of 150MB per game. You would be surprised at how few games actually struggle with getting their content under that limit, but the ones that you do hear about are big named games that most of us would part with our HD space to play them. Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is a high definition version of the same game that you can currently purchase on XBLA, but the differences between the two are so vast that fitting under that 150MB limit has become a rather large issue.
Capcom decided to go all out for this project, landing popular Street Fighter manga artist studio Udon to redo a lot of the art and fighting game guru David Sirlin to re-balance the game mechanics. While most people will simply find this addition to XBLA just a prettier version of a game they probably own in too many formats, the release of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix many prove to be an excellent example of why the 150MB limit should be raised yet again.
When Sirlin had a chance to comment on the file size limitations he said that a limit of 150MB causes issues when you’re trying to pack the game full of 1080p graphics, original game music, remixed game music, and the original game features. While to the general audience, this doesn’t look like a situation that has any chance of having a good ending, Sirlin and his team have stayed optimistic stating that his team is doing everything they can to work within the imposed limit.
So a limit why 150MB Microsoft? Originally you started it out with a 50MB limit and saw how difficult it would be for anyone to produce a new game or remake an older title within that size. Paired up against the Playstation Network, offering plenty of games in luscious 1080p HD, how does Microsoft expect to entice people to purchase XBLA games? To purchase content from XBLA you need to have a PAID Gold subscription which means you have already forked over a games worth in hard earned cash to be able to purchase content and play games online.
While it is unfortunately true that people actually own a Xbox 360 without hard drives, I feel that it would be a safe bet to say the audience who will be buying Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is not the same as those without hard drives. Granted, I have my hard drive fairly filled up due to all the junk I have on there ranging from the Cartel music videos to all the Rockband songs I’ve downloaded, but even with the original hard drive I still have plenty of room to spare. Let’s hope that this rendition of Street Fighter doesn’t just take our money, but convinces Microsoft to take another look at their unnecessary file size limitation.
