Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough! (Street Fighter II (PC))

Member Name: Del_Boy

Product:	Street Fighter II (PC)
Date:	15/01/02 (236 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Classic Fighting Action, Snes Conversion was unparalled, Sonically was great, gameplay however was the best of the best

Disadvantages: Cost a lot of money from a lot of people at the time, Snes version was expensive at around £60

'Hadoken', 'Sonic boom', 'Spinning bird kick'

No not the lyrics to yet another inane Vengaboys Ibiza fuelled exercise in banality, but the voices that could be heard emanating from each and every half decent arcade some years back. The reason being?

Street fighter 2 - The World Warriors

Take eight of the Worlds best fighters and pit them all against each other in a tournament. Yes, the plot was really that complex... Well ok there is some pretence at a plot, the crux of each being that they need to defeat the final boss to seek vengeance of some kind or to prove themselves. To be fair a game such as this needs little plot, what is present does its job well enough. This game is about out and out violence, to win the game you need to basically defeat 12 characters. 8 main characters, including bizarrely yourself, and then you need to defeat the 4 main bosses.

The characters ranged from standard martial artist fare, to a green monster of sorts. Whence putting your money into the machine and choosing your character you were whisked away to start fighting in one of 12 locations throughout the world. These locations didn't affect the game in any manner, just the scenery.

In order to succeed in this game, a whole plethora of moves were available for each character. These moves were in distinct sections, fierce, medium and strong. With these moves your character could perform many different moves, of which many were context sensitive. If your opponent were a certain distance away for example, a Strong kick would have perhaps resulted in your character performing a roundhouse kick. If however they were close, then a different style of kick would result, or if they were really close perhaps a throw would occur. The mastery of these basic moves were what separated the men from the boys in this game, or if you wish the casual gamer from the geek. By and large strong moves would be slow and s
trong, compared to fierce moves that were fast and weak. Combining these moves together would result in small combination attacks; the best of the type were unblockable attacks that would often weaken the opponent significantly.

Mastery of these basic moves was essential in order to prove your dominance however you also needed to master moves of a different ilk. These were known as 'specials'. To perform these moves a certain sequence of joystick movement and button presses were needed. These ranged from the very simple, tap one button fast, to the often infuriatingly difficult rotate stick 360 degrees then press a button kind of moves. It was considered a sign of your gaming prowess if you could master a technique called, 'a spinning pile driver' that was employed by a character of immense strength and tortoise like speed called 'Zangief'. If you managed to pull that move off against a tough opponent with a crowd of people gathered to watch, instant kudos would often be gained.

Speaking of the special moves, this would be something out of the ordinary in many cases. For example the most famous was the 'Ha-do-ken' employed by two of the main characters Ken and Ryu this was a ball of pure white energy that would be fired at your enemy.

The graphics used to wow the captivated audiences that would often assemble around the machine to watch a participant try to complete the game. Sometimes one of these spectators would challenge the person playing the game to a 2-player game, winner stays on games would often ensue. These machines must have guzzled up a fair amount of money when the Street fighting game addiction was in its prime.

All in all a wonderful game and one that I still have many fond memories of. There are ways of playing the actual arcade version(s) of this game on a PC through something called MAME. Download the game and the emulator from http://www.mame.dk I would recommend you
to do this ? a control pad or joystick however is essential in order to play SF2 though I reckon.

This game was converted to the Super Nintendo and became one of the best selling games on that particular platform. It was considered to be virtually arcade perfect, and as such helped to take away people from the Arcades and get them sitting in front of their Console and TV Screen instead.

Apart from the saving of money (eventually) by not playing this game on the Arcades all the time, gaming tournaments between friends became par for the course amongst fans of this game. Indeed my friends and I used to enjoy playing this game, and having a lot of friendly competition between us.

Many of the other games in the Street Fighter Series were also ported to the Super Nintendo and were also virtually arcade perfect ? a perfect showcase of the machines power.

This is one of the reasons why I have such fond memories of Street Fighter 2, and is one of the reasons I couldn't recommend it more. So if you ever wander into an Arcade and see this game, put 10/20p in it (which is what it should cost nowadays) and see what all the fuss was about.

You can also get this game working on the PC in many different forms via a few small downloads, if you are interested in knowing how, send an email to: kevinliversage@btinternet.com

Kev

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