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Street Fighting, Capcom Style
4
Rating: 4,
Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 21, 2007
Author: Amazon User
First a bit of background and a small rant about Capcom's classic emulated arcade releases...
Capcom has released a series of perservations of their arcade classics (and also some of their lesser known games) on the PC. Unfortunately for PC gamers, their best game collections have been console exclusives. And due to the hardware limitations of some of these consoles, even those sets have been of varying quality (with poor framerates, choppiness or missing features on certain platforms).
What you do get in these rare, bargain priced sets on the PC are a "bare bones" presentation of 2 games for Windows and one of them for PDAs (I don't own one so I can't comment on their quality).
Street Fighter II Champion Edition is as good (or bad) as you remember it. A great, colorful and addictive arcade fighting game with two players (or one player and a computer opponent) duking it out in a grudge match, winner take all. The cartoony, animated characters of course were designed in a very different way than the starkly realistic digitized fighters with the blood and gore effects of the Mortal Kombat series, and the gameplay features six buttons and the ability to do special moves that do damage even when blocked, using various button combinations of half and quarter circle motions on the joystick plus a button press, or rapid taping of certain buttons to pull off other special moves to sucker your opponent if you're lucky. It had surprisingly deep gameplay for a street fighting arcade title and is my personal favorite of the series... being a minor upgrade of the previous "Street Fighter II: The World Warrior" with the ability to play as (slightly more balanced versions of) the four boss characters.
The original Street Fighter is also included. This game was released in 1987, the same year as the classic Double Dragon arcade game (which, surprisingly has yet to be released in a pure emulation on the PC, which is a major oversight), but did not attain the long term popularity as that game. SF1 shows us just how far Capcom took the concept to improve it in the years to come, to make the run-away hit that SF2:WW was that dominated, revolutionized (and perhaps drew in far too many lackluster imitations) the arcade game industry. SF2:WW singlehandedly perhaps gave the Super Nintendo the edge it needed to surpass the Sega Genesis in sales, with its decent port of the game.
SF1 however saw a very poor port to the PC and a somewhat better one for the TurboGrafx CD and was quickly forgotten. It remains as more of a historical artifact than anything, to show where the series came from.
Street Fighter's controls are much less tight than SF2:CE's. The special movies are the same for its two playable characters, Ken and Ryu (who are absolutely identical). Combos are kept to an absolute minimum, and strategy consists mostly of trying to pull off the incredibly difficult to perform special moves (fireballs, dragon punches, hurricane kicks) to destroy your opponent in a few shots. Unlike SF2:CE, you can only choose two characters and your computer opponents are fairly generic. There are some interesting bonus rounds, featuring board breaking and other challenges (much more appropriate than the Final Fight style "smash the car/barrels/oil drums" of SF2:CE).
In contrast to the highly addictive and memorable SF2:CE, Street Fighter is a frustrating and mediocre relic of the past. If you wanted to see where the series came from, check it out, but this is one case where the sequels are superior in almost every way to the original.
The set is minimal, featuring save states and a little bit of history info and some small cabinet pictures. The emulation of the games is perfect as far as I can tell, if you have a decent machine.
It's a shame that Capcom doesn't release a large "Collection" on the PC, with many more games and extras, like it has done on the Xbox and other consoles.
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