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Despite discounting games as part of its ongoing holiday sale event, Valve has seen fit to offer even more games at reduced prices, this time flipping the switch on massive discounts for triple-A titles like Street Fighter IV, which can be yours for $10, and Crysis Maximum Edition -- a bundle of Crysis and Crysis Warhead -- for under $14.

That's not all, as your hard-earned greenbacks can also net you cheap digital copies of Medieval II: Total War, Half-Life: Source and Shattered Horizon -- though we'd be remiss if we didn't point out the very tempting combo of Darwinia and Multiwinia, both of which can be yours for $3.

Click to vote Haggar ... and enter the galleryCapcom has revealed even more Final Fight fanservice in Super Street Fighter IV, in the form of a new Metro City stage. Yes, that's Street Fighter III's Hugo in the background. Yes, that's a giant statue of Mayor Mike Haggar holding the city's name aloft. Yes, that is awesome.

Other new stages introduced include a busy Korean street, a neighborhood in Dhalsim's native India, a wrecked Shadaloo headquarters, and a watering hole somewhere in Africa occupied by terrifyingly enormous hippos. One thing the stages have in common: a million things going on in the background, while you try to get the joystick motion right for Zangief's spinning piledriver.

Click to "super" sizeCody isn't the brightest of the Street Fighter bunch, is it? The Final Fight star made his first appearance in the series in Street Fighter Alpha 3, having just escaped from prison. Apparently, he hasn't figured out how to remove his manacles (nor has he changed out of his incriminating garb) in the several years between the events of Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Street Fighter II, nor in the time between Street Fighter II and Super Street Fighter IV, which is where these new screens originate.

Sure, the other characters are all wearing the same outfits from years ago (except for Chun Li), but those can all be reasonably believed to be choices. Maybe Dan wears other stuff when he's off the job, and changes into his pink gi. But it's extremely hard to believe that Cody would voluntarily don his prison uniform and shackles again, which suggests that he can't remove them. This is also the guy who picks up a rock and throws it as one of his special moves.

The latest trailer for Super Street Fighter IV reveals the newly-announced characters in motion for the first time, leading to some surprising discoveries. For example, Adon sounds like Starscream. That actually kind of makes sense if you imagine Sagat as Megatron and Adon as his annoying sidekick.

In addition to the three new new guys, all the other new Super Street Fighter IV characters are featured as well, so you can hear all the terrible new voice acting so far! And you can also see that, at least upon cursory inspection, everyone plays like they used to. Cody still throws knives, T. Hawk still throws people, and Dee Jay is still annoying.

[Thanks, Kenoji!]

We thought the Haggar billboard and Metro City license plate in the new car-smashing bonus stage would be the only Final Fight nods in Super Street Fighter IV. Scans from Famitsu show that Final Fight's two shirt-wearing protagonists, Cody and Guy, will appear as playable fighters in the game. The appearance of Adon, along with Cody's striped prison getup, means that the fighters are appearing in their Street Fighter Alpha incarnations. Well, those clues and the heading on the article saying that the three characters are from that series.

A sidebar in Famitsu shows Guy parrying a kunai, suggesting that Street Fighter III favorite Ibuki might be joining the fight as well. You remember Street Fighter III, right?

[Thanks, Richard 2.6!]

Capcom recently fired off a fact sheet in our direction for Super Street Fighter IV and while most of it talks about the stuff we already knew -- additional fighters, online lobbies, car punching -- it did inform us of two new online modes for the expansion to this year's excellent brawler and hook us up with some screens of the updated lobby system.

Teams of two, three and four will be able to see who's the best Hadoukener around in the new Team Battles mode, which is a "round-robin elimination" mode where "one man stays until beaten, next team member rotates in," Capcom's Chris Kramer told Joystiq. So players will be able to either control a team themselves or assign slots to other players in the room. Just don't go expecting any tagging in and out -- that only happens in other Capcom games.

The other new mode is Endless mode, a one-on-one elimination mode where two players duke it out and the winner stays in the hot seat and fights the next individual queued up. If you've had any experience with DOA 4, then Endless mode is kinda like that game ... sans the ability to be a chicken in a sombrero running around a martial arts dojo.

Capcom was also kind enough to include some new videos, strictly for training purposes. You can check out newcomer Juri fight T. Hawk above and, if you want some MAXIMUM gameplay footage, head past the break to see her fight Deejay.

Look, if people are going to eschew their work day in favor of having a gaming tournament, we're the first to sympathize. In the case of those in the business of protecting our lives from murderers and financial institutions though, we find it hard to offer much solace. So when eleven officials from several Florida agencies were caught on videotape playing games a couple months back and the story caught on internationally, we were hopeful that those found guilty would maybe, you know, actually receive some form of punishment.

Instead, the Lakeland Ledger reports that the offending officers will suffer such retribution as ... a few hours of retraining? The names of the officers are even being withheld due to their "undercover" status at the time. Lakeland sheriff chief of staff Gary Hester goes as far as to say, "We are learning from our mistakes ... I think we handled [the investigation] properly." He then hurriedly rushed back to a game of Street Fighter IV in progress against a competing police department.

... Okay, we made up that last part.

Plastic peripheral powerhouse Mad Catz has unleashed its fiscal 2010 Q2 earnings results (that's the three months ending September 30, 2009 for us normal folk) and, while the company is still making plenty of cash ($21.6 million this quarter, to be exact) it saw losses of 16 percent when compared to the same period last year, where Mad Catz' net sales earned it $25.8 million. Its biggest market, North America, also saw a dip in sales this year to the tune of 18 percent; US sales have fallen nearly 20 percent this quarter, while Canadian sales rose 55 percent.

When comparing its gross sales by platform, Mad Catz only managed to lose a small fraction of its PC platform business, while simultaneously building its PS3 and Xbox 360 revenue streams by ten and four percent, respectively, and growing its specialty controller business nearly 20 percent. The company did take a considerable hit in its Wii business -- sales dropped eight percent -- as well as in other platform markets, however.

Citing what its key products were during its fiscal Q2 2010, Mad Catz obviously had a lot of love for Capcom, as several of the fight sticks it offered for 2D fighters were top earners. Aside from that, it pointed to its new line of Rock Band accessories and some Wii items such as its Remote and z-Chuk as other successful ventures.

While this quarter may not have been the best for the company, all signs point to it being a successful fiscal Q3 2010 for Mad Catz. With its collaboration with the biggest game in the universe and its venture with Capcom to offer new fighting game stuff -- the company also confirmed that Marvel vs Capcom 2 stick is legit -- we have a feeling our next post on its earnings will probably have an image of Scrooge McDuck in it.

Much to the chagrin of many Street Fighter fans trying to get their online multiplayer on, matchmaking issues and lack of a multiplayer lobby system really stood out as glaring missteps in Street Fighter IV. Thankfully, it appears that Capcom has taken the hint and will be including an eight-person multiplayer lobby for groups to observe other matches and virtually "quarter up," as it were.

SSFIV's Masahiro Taguchi let the cat out of the bag on the official Japanese blog for the game (translated by Andriasang), saying that the regular ol' Street Fighter IV did not properly convey "the feeling of players gathering together for fights." He says that the ability to create multiplayer lobbies was on the table before creating SFIV, but was scrapped in favor of the one-on-one model currently in place. As frame rate can be a particularly important issue with fighting games relative to other genres, Taguchi makes a point to dispel any worries of online stuttering while observers look on to games in progress, though admitting that the process of making this lag free was a bit of a "technical feat." We're looking forward to putting Taguchi's claims to the test in 2010 when Super Street Fighter IV lands on our consoles.

[Via Andriasang]

This latest trailer for Super Street Fighter IV shows off the new online modes, including the "Endless Battle" mode that allows up to eight players to play multiple matches, with the loser of each match going to the end of the virtual line; the "Replay Channel," which allows players to record and view replays together with voice chat; and a bunch of new tournament options.

It's all great stuff, but we know what you came here to see: If you skip to about the 2:30 mark, you can watch Ryu car bashing and barrel bashing! Check out how excited the kilted barrel-dropping machine operator is -- he loves watching his barrels get smashed!

[Thanks, Vince]

After scans from Famitsu all but confirmed it, Capcom today revealed that the crescendo of humanity vs. his own creations – car bashing – will return in Super Street Fighter IV. Though the image of Juri above is all we're offered by Capcom-Unity for now, various Capcom staff Twitter accounts lead us to believe we'll be hearing more about this bonus stage next week. In the meantime, we've dropped an excellent video of John Cleese beating up a car with a stick for you just after the break. You're welcome.

While Street Fighter may be the perfect symbol of man's inhumanity to man, we always considered SFII's bonus stage (which used the punching of a car as a John Henry-esque metaphor for the struggle to maintain humanity in the face of an industrial age) as the more poignant symbolism. Capcom appears to agree, as some new Famitsu scans seem to indicate that the car-punching bonus stage will return in Super Street Fighter IV.

Also depicted is the barrel smashing mini-game, though that doesn't represent anything ... except that it's fun to smash barrels.

So what if you weren't able to make it out to Capcom's second annual NYC Fight Club last night? Don't worry, we went -- and got trounced by the competition -- in your stead. Though Super Street Fighter IV was only there for Capcom to demo (and give a small handful of community members time with), we snapped pictures of everything. We also played a mess of Tatsunoko vs Capcom in a next to final build (yes, we put the two recently revealed characters through their paces), and even shot some video of legendary Street Fighter player turned Capcom employee Seth Killian demoing new SSFIV characters in front of a roaring crowd (550 or so people over the course of the night, a rep approximated for us -- more than double last year's attendance numbers).

As we weren't able to get our hands on the three new fighters being showcased (Juri, Deejay, and T. Hawk), we talked to Jamal Brewster, a gentleman who exchanged kindness for some time with Deejay during one of the night's four live demos. "He doesn't feel cheap or overpowered .. he does feel good though, like he belongs in the game -- a lot of his moves have been retained from previous games," Brewster told us, echoing sentiments from Seth Killian earlier in the night. But how did you get chosen to play the game, you lucky dog? "One of the representatives here, she was almost passing out in the corner over there, and a friend of mine and I noticed this, so we did our best to try to help her out. We sat her down, gave her some water, and the people here were so grateful that they offered me a chance to play Super Street Fighter IV and they gave me an autographed hoodie of Tatsunoko vs Capcom."

In case it wasn't already clear: Yes, Capcom Fight Club is most certainly for the fans. Hit the break for a video of the new characters in action (sorry about the quality -- it was really dark) and be sure to peep the gallery below -- it's just like you were there! We'll have a hands-on of Tatsunoko vs Capcom's final two characters later on. Promise.