Street Fighter II, a few Decades Later

One of the three games included with my $20 Super Nintendo, and the one I naturally gravitated towards, was Street Fighter II.

Ah SFII, you spawned a million clones, you kept Capcom alive, you profited from the Cold War, you brought nationalism to kids everywhere. So the real question became how good is this game? not how good was it at its peak but rather by todays standards. And though I realize that its unfair to subject a game to such standards I cant help but do it, specially since, well, I have nothing else to write about.

My first memories of Street Fighter center around the massive hype it generated in my elementary school. Yes, this was the game you had to play. So the first time I did it was at a local shady establishment of fun called "mundo divertido". They had about ten machines and there was a line to play SF. I eventually got to it, picked Dhalsim and got my ass promptly handed to me. But that didnt matter, what mattered is that I had played it, I had a story now see.

As I said there was a lot of hype, there was a lot of SF merchandise, official and clandestine, sold at the entrance to school, merchandise which I now wish I'd kept for ebay. But thats beyond the scope of this thing, the point is I had played it and I wanted more. So we scoured the local rental store until we finally got the opportunity to take it home for a few days. We played it like madmen for that one day. We might have beaten it a couple of times but it was only after struggling with those four bosses for hours on end. It was great.

And what is there not to like? you can pick one of EIGHT characters to play as, each with unique characteristics, moves, stages. Then there were the four final characters who you really did hate at the time because they were so cheap (except for Balrog, he was easy) but that made it that much better when you actually did beat it. The coolest character was Ken. Zangief was useless, Chun-Li we did not use for a while. Eight characters! so much variety!

The one thing that struck me as odd when I played it yesterday was how slow the game was. Obviously we did not feel that at the time, but now its kind of hard to get over. The fighting engine is great, it was great, but there are many flaws: aerial kicks and throws do an inordinate amount of damage, any fireball leaves the character throwing it motionless and vulnerable for a few seconds after throwing it.

The graphics are, of course, outdated but no less brilliant because of it. Theres so much pixelated goodness, even though the characters are smaller than I remember they still fill in enough of the screen and that which is not filled in is covered in the now iconic, glorious backgrounds. Sure I can bitch about the graphics twenty years later but we were lucky, at least we didnt have to deal with the Atari or Commodore graphics. So thats why Nintendo eventually won out. That second one looks like an error screen.

Now that I have the system, now that I also have an Xbox 360 with Street Fighter IV, will I keep playing the original? yes! its still remarkably playable. You go through it once or twice and you realize why exactly this series is so iconic, so memorable: it obviously came out at a time with a great deal of limitations but it was great nonetheless. It evolved through time too, they have a winning formula (which was widely copied as I said earlier) but they kept updating it with the times and in remains at the forefront of fighting games, and even though Capcom is shamelessly trying to cash in on our nostalgia at least they're doing it with quality products and with a respect towards what the game represents for losers like myself.