At the end of our talk, Goddard revealed that after the drain of putting together Shred Nebula, he'll be moving over to a "founder's" status at CrunchTime, and Winstead will be taking over operations. Citing a desire to move back to creative design, he's mentioned that he's going back into the industry with a different direction, and that he's hoping to convert Crunch Time into a student-driven facility for budding game designers to release content. That includes a gameplay update to Shred Nebula. He hasn't revealed where he's going, but hopefully, his experience will be harnessed for something interesting. However, until he's officially out of Crunch Time, he and Winstead plan to play lots and lots of Street Fighter IV, and perhaps well after his move back to the industry, over Xbox Live.

"I'm really excited about (Street Fighter IV)," says Winstead. "It seems that they've captured the awesome 2D element. I'm hoping that it's going to be the solution of capturing the tightness of 2D fighting games to the 3D genre, kind of like what the EX series tried to do a decade ago, but it always felt too floaty. This looks a lot more solid. Everyone seems to have some real weight to their hits. I'm hoping that it's going to be a game I'll play for a long, long time."

- James Goddard
If Dee Jay followed his inspiration...

After mentioning some mild concerns about speed, Goddard stopped himself from going too far off the technical deep end. "I'm super excited to get my hands on it and play the new characters. I'm just happy that it's going to bring me back to doing some skills with my controller and I hope that they did import some of that button-slappiness over from the Tekken series. I hope there's some hybrid characters that allow that, so I can have some of my Tekken friends play Street Fighter and uppercut their asses in the middle of their 'high/low' guessing game crap. Then again, I have some friends who won't touch SF4 because it's not Tekken. Hopefully, this can unify some stuff with the players. Like they keep saying, 'the original MMA game is back,' right?"



Special thanks to Dan Amrich, James Goddard, Dave Winstead, and my mother for putting up with all of those annoying "fake calls" to the XBAND modem. Check out Crunch Time's site for more insight on the team.