Game Discussion of the Week: Street Fighter series

I've never played the arcade version, sadly, but back in the day I got to play the Mega Drive, Super Nintendo and PlayStation versions at friends and I had the PC version myself. All those versions were pretty good, with the PlayStation version being by far the best in every way as far as I recall.

We loved it mainly because of the humor, with big monsters fighting, lots of violence, blood and gore, exploding brains, fart attacks, eating eachothers human worshipers, it was all great fun and became quite a popular game among me and my friends during the mid to late 90s.

In modern time I've gotten to play the Game Boy version (as bad as you'd imagine with very limited controls and very ugly visuals), the Game Gear version (technically impressive for what it is and a much better suited platform for such a game than the Game Boy was) and the 32X version which is a pretty good version.

The PlayStation version is the best as far as I recall, the PC version was definitely good too and the 32X version is also fine, so I'd recommend either of those from personal experience, the Mega Drive and Super Nintendo versions are good too but not as good as the better ones, and even though I haven't played them I'm guessing the Saturn, 3DO and Jaguar 64 CD versions are probably on par with the better ones.

It had an insane anti piracy thing going on that makes the game somewhat broken if you attempt to emulate it, I think. No one has cracked it yet I don’t think. I remember reading about a Midway collection I for the PS2 or something that has the arcade version on it that’s messed up because of it. I think anyway.

I'm just going to assume we're talking about Street Fighter 1 because it's impossible for me to go into any kind of detail about every game in the series in a single post. It would also be a shame if we only ever got one game of the week thread for Street Fighter.

I managed to play SF1 on an emulator not that long ago and it's pretty much the piece of shit everyone says it is. Since Ken is a literal reskin in this game, you only play as one character, which some might consider excusable considering how the fighting game genre was in it's infancy. You're run through a gauntlet of uninspired fighters, with a few minigames spread out, until you face off against the main baddie (Sagat in this game), the formula isn't all that different from Street Fighter 2. What is different however, is how the SF1 plays.

The movement is wonky, the jump physics are so bad they're borderline unusable, the inputs for special moves seem inconsistent, normal attacks are unwieldy and sluggish, and scoring hits feels unresponsive. The animations don't blend into eachother at all, so the change between standing and crouching/jumping/attacking feels jarring given the relatively slow speed this game plays at.
Apparently the buttons on the original arcade were pressure-sensitive, so pressing them harder could change the properties of some attacks. Playing on an emulator, I didn't have this option (that I know of) but I highly doubt that feature would've helped this game much. Poor game design is one thing, but an arcade game that PLAYS like shit is the worst possible thing you can ask for. I wouldn't care if Street Fighter 1 came out in 1887 and invented computer code and the CRT TV along with fighting games, there's no excuse for an arcade game to play so bad that it can be accurately summed up with a bunch of videogame reviewer cliches, arcade games are supposed to be responsive. It's a miracle that some of the guys who worked on this game went on to work on their own highly successful games (Fatal Fury and Street Fighter II)

Don't worry, we can discuss the individual games in the series. I actually prefer those kinds of discussions over talking about series as a whole.

You should send a note to Balder requesting we talk about whatever SF game you want discussed.

Off topic, but Melee, I was reading this thread before I went to bed and your name came up in my dream. Weird!

Is this you?