Street Fighter II: The World Warrior

8.5

I was just old enough to catch the Street Fighter II buzz, and especially aware and participated in the Mortal Kombat craze. I saw that movie like 20 times. My older brothers were more into the game itself, but I loved the little action figures and Ken was my most played with little toy ever. I’m face the whole lineup were treasures to me… Ok I digress… needless to say I got most of my playing in when I was a little older, which is more impressive because the game absolutely held up even after so many copycats. The fighting felt good, the variety of moves and the balance is immaculate. There’s a reason it’s held in such high esteem, and if it wasn’t for nostalgia and general aesthetic appeal, it’s hard to argue a better fighter ever came out.

Year: 1991
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Console Played: PC

Okay, so to start off there are more different versions of this game than perhaps any other, but the one I have played and am most familiar with is the ORIGINAL ARCADE PORT on the PC with a joystick. I'm going to try and avoid talking about all the different console ports and spin offs and focus my review completely on this version of the game, which I'm sure most of you will be familiar with anyway.

So Street Fighter II is basically the mother of all fighting games. I mean sure there were beat em ups before this, but none of them really made a real impact or helped form the genre until this baby came along (although Mortal Kombat and Virtua Fighter were right on the horizon, but that's another story). Even the original Street Fighter wasn't significant enough to go into the beat em up history books, I mean who here has even played it?! SFII deserves some mad props already just for how groundbreaking it was, and if anyone tries to deny its influence then they deserve a swift Hadouken to the face! SFII set the bar that all fighting games after it would be compared to. To this day it is still reknown for its great controls and fluid character movement, awesome animated locations and characters, incredibly retro music score and a near perfect difficulty curve which makes fools of the button bashers, but masters of the disciplined. Street Fighter II was so easy to pick up, yet so difficult to master. Reaching the battle with Sagat and M Bison was difficult enough, but beating their asses took hours, perhaps weeks of frustrating fury. It's a game that is addictive as hell and hugely memorable to play. Which is obviously why the franchise has been whored out more than a Vietnamese prostitute over the years.

But enough of the history lesson, what does FRENCHIE really think of it? Well I will admit that the SF series doesn't hold a candle to Tekken, Mortal Kombat or even some of the Virtua Fighter games in my heart. But perhaps this is because SFII wasn't my introduction to the fighting genre. Playing it out of context of its original release makes it look a little primitive, but it is definitely still a timeless game. SFII is still full of win, even if the series and characters aren't my favourites. I just prefer the button combos on Tekken, the bloodfest and extremity of MK and the arcade feel of VF. SFII wins on perhaps the three most important fronts; it's great to play (and I can play it for hours), it's great to look at, and it's great to listen to. And yeah out of all my favourite beat em ups, this was the first one to meet all these requirements, so what is there not to love. I hugely recommend tracking down the very original arcade port of SFII, I think it is the most essential version of the game that SFII fans and all gamers alike NEED to play. Fuck all this Alpha, Remix, Hyper, Super, Turbo bullshit, none of it can top the REAL Street Fighter II. If you own the version with just 8 characters to pick, a tiny little aeroplane over a map screen, fighting taunts over the loading screens, a two player mode and bonus stages where you beat up cars and barrells, then you probably own the definitive Street Fighter II, and long may it reign in the hearts of gamers. Every beat em up made after owes its life to this motherfucker!