Among the legions of useless gimmick websites set up to market a product, this “put your face in Street Fighter 4” one has got to be one of the best in recent memory.
Advertising used to be a simple game. Come up with a catchy slogan, slap it next to a picture of your product and some happy looking people and profit. Nowadays, with all the technology and internet and what not floating around, you’ve got people pulling stunts like releasing hordes of black cats in London and designing gimmicky websites that exist to do little than provide a little distraction while hammering your synapses with logos. This site, recently set up by Capcom to promote Street Fighter 4, might be another piece of transparent not-so-viral marketing, but it’s still a whole lot of fun.
What it does is magically transpose your (or someone else’s) face onto the heads of the characters in SF4. You choose a video of a match – Sagat vs. Rufus, Ryu vs. Akuma, other variations so you can have mixed gender fights – and then upload the pictures onto the site. Make sure the photos are portrait-sized, have your mouth closed and your hair back, or else it won’t work so well. After that, click a few buttons and you’ve got your own customized SF4 match.
It’s really pretty impressive technology: the way it knows how to map the faces on is a lot better than I thought it’d be. In the end it roughly looks kinda like the faces you’d see in old 3D games like WCW/NWO Revenge or something – definitely stretched and ugly but undeniably recognizable. It even animates the mouths to make it look like they’re talking.
Lacking any good pictures of myself, I decided to upload some photos of other people. Rummaging around my hard drive, I found a picture of Gears of War auteur Clifford “CliffyB” Bleszinksi. And thus, CliffyB vs Akuma was born. The only real catch here is that the site only maps the photos for the little preludes to the fights where the combatants are doing their trash talk spiel. During the fights themselves, you can’t really see their faces. But, if you choose to slap your face on Ryu, at one point he’ll do his Ultra move, which is a giant fireball. The camera zooms in on him when it happens, giving you a good clear view of his face as he charges up the fireball. Go, Cliffy, go!
[Via Kotaku]
