Ahh, Street Fighter - many a memory does it bring back. The first Street Fighter was actually one of the first games I ever owned, back on the Atari ST.
Shit it was, let's be honest.
The world at large really considers Street Fighter II the true beginning of the series though, as that was as close to a perfect piece of video gaming as you could ever find. As cool as the arcade game was though, I think the Super NES version was the
true classic. Up until that point home systems had always paled in comparison to arcade games you see. I mean we had fun on our home systems, sure, but it was nothing compared to the magic of being in an arcade and playing the
real games.
So when Capcom released a pixel perfect port of Street Fighter II on the SNES, it completely revolutionised home gaming in that regard - suddenly we could get that same arcade thrill in the comfort of our own home. Ever since then the home systems have slowly and steadily rose up to rival, and indeed overtake arcade games in general.
It's on buying the SNES version that I got addicted to my first game in fact. I'm talking full blown highs and cravings. I think the longest I played was seven hours in one sitting - one of the many "Winner Stays On" marathons me and my mates used to put on. I was all about Ryu myself - the dragon punch being the secret weapon to winning every match - yet it was so tricky to pull off, only revealing itself at the final, most desperate moments.
Naturally I went on to gobble up all the various cash-in re-releases and upgrades that followed, my fave being Street Fighter II Turbo.
Street Fighter II Turbo Ninja Rock Hard Bastard Supreme Ultra Mega Edition
But enough reminiscing, let's move onto the new bumper pack anniversary collection we're here to chat about today. Basically it's a kind of "greatest hits" compilation. You get every single rendition of Street Fighter II bundled together for the first time, namely Turbo, Champion Edition, and of course standard vanilla Street Fighter II, totalling a whopping great 17 characters in all. More importantly, this includes all the various different incarnations of each individual character from over the years as well.
Rounding off the pack is Street Fighter III: Third Strike, a game I must admit I never got into when it first came out, as I was in a minor gaming slump at the time (something of a Bermuda triangle point of my life).
Unsurprisingly, the very first Street Fighter is no where to be seen among all these. Although as a game it was about as fun as sandpapering your foreskin off, it would have been nice for archival purposes if they'd thrown it in here too.
Although this collection has already been released on PS2, the new Xbox version which I've been enjoying this week adds an extra online component via Xbox Live - rather a pivotal feature that'll improve its shelf life no end. After all, Street Fighter has always been about battling a friend hasn't it, and now all the mateless agoraphobics can enjoy such pleasures without the need to give up precious sofa space.
Street Fighter II is still the benchmark for all beat 'em ups if you ask me. It's so easy to pick up and play, yet stupidly tough to truly master, just as it should be. The characters handle so responsively they become almost an extension of you, and perhaps most importantly of all, it enforces the use of blocking in order to stay alive. There's subsequently just that element of raw skill involved, where you have to be spot on at all times if you plan on taking down the better players. You end up with the craziest high speed back and forth duels usually only seen in kung fu flicks.
It just feels like in the more recent 3D fighting arena we've lost all that in favour of slower paced button bash fests.
I'll Take Your Brain to Another Dimension
Let me go into mini rant mode for a second. My theory on beat 'em ups is that they rapidly declined over the years, once they made that jump into 3D. I believe Virtua Fighter was one of the first to try this, if not
the first, and I must say that despite being wowed by the pretty (yet lifeless) polygonal graphics at the time, it just never played anywhere near as good as Street Fighter II. And that trend continued for years after, each one feeling just as sluggish, lacking in skill, and delving more and more into button bashing territory.
As a result, I went from loving this genre with such a genuine passion, to eventually chucking it in completely. The recent Soul Calibur II is perhaps the only 3D fighter to start matching up to the brilliance of SFII in my book, but it took a long fucking while to get there.
Ha-Do-Ken!
SFII's legacy can still be felt throughout the genre never the less. In fact it can be crowned as the game to single-handedly invent the whole concept of both special moves and combos. If the tales are true, combos were apparently nothing more than an unplanned exploit in the first game, an art that all the best players used to get their toons pummelling twice as fast as they should have been. Playing some of the latter reincarnations of SFII in this collection it makes me smile to see how the combo system went on to become such a pivotal part of the entire series. That kind of thing's magic, and you can't really plan for it.
Okay, so as with most repackaged older titled such as this, the graphics in SFII don't exactly shine in comparison to more recent offerings, but Street Fighter III still comes off okay. It must also be said that the sound fares much better, in both games actually, with that vintage video game cheese still sounding as good as it ever has.
All in all this pack is a welcome trip back in time, and the inclusion of the previously unplayed Street Fighter III gives it a nice sense of the unknown for me. A vital question though, is whether this outing as a whole is different enough to the last Street Fighter compilation we had on Xbox, which while not as definitive as this one, wasn't hugely different in terms of just how it played.
Die hard fans will no doubt think so, but for the more softcore gamers out there, you might want to give this one a miss if you already own Capcom Vs SNK 2 EO.
This review/report was created by the great team at TPSreport.co.uk:
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