I’m not sure if it’s the attrocious live-action movie, or the usually attrocious fan made costumes, or the fact that in the current world of talking about your emotions and violence = mental illness that the whole street fighter concept seems a bit absurd, but everytime someone tries to do live action Street Fighter I can’t help but cringe a little.

… actually no I’m pretty sure it was the horrible, horrible movie. “Who want’s to goh hom, and who wants to goh wid ME!’ What the hell were you thinking Van Damme?

Street Fighter 4 has just come out and for the launch (wait fighting games have their own launches now..?) the marketing team decided it would be a good idea to enlist Dylan Resnekov and Joanna MacEachern to uh… dress up and pose in Chinatown, Sydney. To their credit they are both actual martial artists and both currently hold the WPKA Lightweight World Championship titles. Not that I know what WPKA is, but it most likely stands for ‘Would Probably Kick my Arse’.

Their costumes don’t look half bad either, sure Ryu doesn’t have the ‘omg my muscles are so big i’m BURSTING out of my karate suit’ look and ChunLi has some hair dye problems and light brown eyebrows… but believe me, it could have been much, much worse.

I don’t live in Sydney so I can only presume Chinatown there is in the CBD like it is here in Melbourne. From the pictures it either looks like they cordoned off a section or chose a deserted part of chinatown to take photos in. I only hope any asians walking around didn’t think it was a ‘ha ha lol at your culture’ celebration or something.

Here are some photos from Charlie Brewer.

Ryu doesn’t have any muscles and looks a bit unsure of himself and Chun Li is looking about as asian as Home Brand Dim Sims.

Not sure what’s with Ryu’s Kmart gloves, they kind of look a few sizes too big. I think I can see a bit of Chun-li’s undies on the left there.

Australia says no to violence against women! …but kneeing a guy in the shoulder is okay, he probably deserved it.

These are the two best photos in my opinion. Some nice photoshop action on the left (where’s Ryu’s fireball!), and the right takes me back to the good old Mortal Kombat days, before the stupid ‘haha you can’t watch people playing’ curtain arcade machines.

Chun-Li presents the AMAZING Ryu kneeing the air gravity defying aerial super attack! On the right Chun-LI and Ryu trying to look as co-ordinated as you can striking a random jump-in-the-air pose. Yeah, they might have been running out of ideas for photos at this stage…

This last photo kinda turns me on…  it definately brings back some pre-puberty chun-li boy crush memories. I think a spent a whole evening once trying to screen capture Chun-Li doing her rapid kick just to catch a glimpse of her undies when Streetfighter II first came out on PC.

Compared to some of the cosplay freaks you see running around the anime conventions these were done pretty well. Kudos to Capcom and thier marketing team for bringing some dignity back to live action Streetfighter.

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