There was one point where Capcom had the whole gaming world eating out of its hand. The Mega Man games were guaranteed to move units. They’d trip over a brand new beat-‘em-up that would net millions almost by accident. And they had the indispensable game at every home, arcade, pizza joint, or what have you: Street Fighter 2. Or, of course, Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition. Or maybe Street Fighter 2 Turbo… oh, you get the idea. Capcom had improved the game play of the seminal, yet clunky, Street Fighter by light years, and they were on top of the world.
Now, years later, Capcom would like to remind you of when they were the undisputed king of the arcades with Street Fighter Anniversary Collection, which celebrates Street Fighter’s recent anniversary. You’d be forgiven if you don’t remember what precise anniversary; most companies don’t celebrate when a franchise turns seventeen years old (the original Street Fighter came out in 1987). Or, if you want to look at when the series broke huge, the thirteenth anniversary (the first Street Fighter 2 rolled out in 1991). Or possibly the seventh anniversary of when Capcom finally learned how to count to three (yep, Street Fighter 3 came out in 1997). Okay, so unless corporations have learned to stop worshipping numbers evenly divisible by five, we have a blatant money grab. But is it any good?
First stop in the package is Hyper Street Fighter 2. That’s right, ladies and gents. Capcom has made yet another brand new version of Street Fighter 2 for this game. This time, though, I’ll give it credit: it basically mashes the five most popular versions of Street Fighter 2 into one package: the original, Championship Edition, Turbo, Super, and Super Turbo. Before continuing to read this review, may I recommend that you spend a minute or two laughing your head off at how very silly that is? Now that you have that out of your system, this is actually probably the best way to please every Street Fighter fanatic. Capcom constantly tweaked the characters, adding new moves and adjusting old ones during their run of Street Fighter 2 games. It was like one long and public beta test. And now, you can actually compare the different versions between the games. It’s interesting to compare the evolution of Ryu, for example.
In terms of versus play, this might be the best iteration of Street Fighter 2 for fans. You can play it straight up like an individual Street Fighter 2 [add your favorite adjective here], or you can mix and match as appropriate. Want to prove that Guile was much better before they changed voice actors for him in Super Street Fighter 2? Prove it. Think that Balrog was much more fun before they sped him up and weakened his punches? You can, now. You can even go out and measure, once and for all, whether the Super SF2 version of T. Hawk is the worst fighting game character of all time, or whether the Super SF2 Turbo version of T. Hawk is. Though that one is, admittedly, a tough call.
The game’s single-player mode, though, is incredibly flawed. First off, the computer always uses the Super Turbo versions of each character, so you’ll never get different looks from the computer. Secondly, the computer’s difficulty level is ramped up to obscene levels. I mean, I know that I’m not the greatest fighting gamer ever, on Netjak, or even in my immediate circle of friends (that would be my friend Christopher in Pittsburgh, but saying I’m worse than him is like saying I’m dumber than Einstein). But I’m not so lousy that I need to continue nine times just to beat the first opponent on the default difficulty level. Well, not usually, anyhow, but Hyper Street Fighter 2 is a special exception. I could only advance by using one of the cheesiest setups I knew from the game. But even that couldn’t prepare me for the third and final flaw the game has. Namely, the computer cheats to a level that I’ve never seen. I don’t just mean the standard “the computer instantly can do a dragon punch whenever it wants” level of cheating – after seeing my friend Christopher in action, I realize a really talented human could do that too. No, I’m talking about how the computer plays with completely different rules about recovery time and attack priority. I know it’s not possible for Ryu or Ken to launch two fireballs and then do a dragon punch while both fireballs are on screen. There’s supposed to be too much lag time to pull that off. Except that the computer can do that in this game. I generally don’t buy into theories of games cheating, even when I play Pokémon and watch the computer score on three “10% chance” moments consecutively. But this game literally plays with different rules for its human and computer players.
The graphics for Hyper Street Fighter 2 are quite solid, and are basically just a clean and smooth version of the graphics found in the original arcade version. Even the backgrounds are the same, although with a bit of a color touch-up to reflect the superior graphical capabilities. What sets this apart from the earlier versions, though, is that this game has absolutely no issues with frame skipping or flicker. Unlike some other re-releases Capcom has made for the current consoles, they cleaned up the programming to ensure that the graphics always load smoothly and promptly in this version. Graphically, this is what Street Fighter 2 was always meant to be.
The music is exactly the same as it was before, for better or for worse. The music never was there to be catchy, to be honest, just to give a backdrop. The game’s sound effects, as well, haven’t changed, and these are what add to the game. The smacks and thuds sound quaint and a bit too tinny now, but it’s not hard to remember when the sound effects were amazing. The digitized voices are also notable, as this was when this was uncommon at best. It’s also interesting to note how they changed over time – Guile and Dhalsim are the two most obvious examples, but you can even catch it in Ken and Ryu.
Perhaps the best nod to fans of the old games is that there’s a gallery of all the endings that you’ve earned as well as clips of the openings for the original arcade versions of the Street Fighter 2 games. It was neat to remember that Street Fighter 2 actually had a subtitle: The World Warriors. It also reminded me of the subtle racism video gaming bled back then, as the game starts off with a pretty Aryan-looking guy knocking out a black man. It serves to not only bring you back to your youth, but also to remind you how far we’ve come as video gamers.
The other huge part of the package is the inclusion of Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, the third and (supposedly, if Capcom’s official announcements are to be believed) final edition of the third part of the series. This game tries its damnedest to be a departure from the handful of Street Fighter games that preceded it, managing to only bring back four characters that appeared in previous SF games. This is just like the version you’ll find in the arcade, with the large roster and the complete list of moves that defined Street Fighter 3. It does not bother with smashing Street Fighter 3: A New Generation, SF3 Double Impact, and SF3 Third Strike simply because the characters from the earlier SF3 games don’t change at all. In this case, the tweaking came just in the addition of new characters.
Well, new might need to be put in quotation marks, because playing Street Fighter 3 gives this odd sense of rehash. I don’t just mean in the standard way fighting games do. I mean that I feel like I’ve played several of these characters before in Capcom’s games. Isn’t Necro much like Dhalsim, with a little bit of Blanka thrown in? If you beefed up Dan Hibiki, he’d play much like Sean would. If you want to widen your net, you could note that Twelve (fortunately, not our own Twelve) plays much like Omega Red did in the Versus games, and Hugo is every single bulky powerhouse Capcom ever created. Heck, even though they play different, try telling me that Remy and Gambit are all that different graphically. There are only two characters that felt noticeably different to me: Q and Oro. And the former only feels different because I refuse to believe they were deliberately shooting for a character that felt like one of the nameless drones from Karate Champ, back in the 80’s. It’s not so much the feeling that you’ve played the game before but the feeling that Capcom has made this game several times already.
However, unlike its partner on the disc, this game is much more playable. Even having put in no time at the arcade, I was able to punch through a couple levels before needing to continue, which is about what I expect with a fighter I haven’t picked up before. I’d say that this game is set to a much more rational default difficulty level, and I never got the feeling that the computer was doing something patently unfair (compared to what I was capable of doing). If anything, I thought the computer was actually a bit stupid, falling for the same moves every time (like Necro’s roundhouse sweep or Ibiki’s garrote maneuver). People who want to try the single-player mode will want to stick purely with the SF3 part of the package.
It also helps that Street Fighter 3 is easily one of the more beautifully animated pixelated games I’ve ever seen. The animations are almost frighteningly fluid, and the characters move with a preternatural grace across the game. Granted, in the case of 12, it literally flows and moves with an unnatural grace, but even lumbering hulks like Alex and Hugo have an agility that is almost mesmerizing. Unlike, say, Guilty Gear, where the details are more important and the flashy animation is saved for the big supers, Street Fighter 3’s movements happen constantly, and are almost show stopping.
Of course, the music is pretty blasé, although a technical improvement over the score of Hyper Street Fighter 2. Much like its forerunner, Street Fighter 3 decided to have pedestrian music that wouldn’t distract you from the fight. At the same time, though, it doesn’t pull you into the game either. Nothing sticks with you as either incredible or terrible, and all you’ll remember of the game’s sound are the effects, which are similarly touched up (and thus pretty solid).
However, I do have to belittle SF3 for the entire stupidity surrounding the final boss. First off, he’s named Gill. Gill isn’t a final boss name; he sounds more like an actuary who lives in Hoboken. I’m going to guess that he’s the final boss because Herb and Frankie were too busy planning a Texas Hold-‘Em poker night for everyone else at his insurance company’s unit. Moreover, he reveals that he holds a fighting tournament to help join his shadowy organization… the Illuminati. Yes, that Illuminati. It’s quite possibly the worst use of the Illuminati as a plot device ever. And yes, I mean ever. I think it’s in there simply because of the sinister undertones the word carries, as not a whit of Illuminati imagery appears beyond a simplistic version of the Eye in the Pyramid. If I were an Illuminatus, I’d be pretty angry about how a video game weakly attached my organization’s name to a boss named for a business school graduate. At least I don’t have to wonder why Street Fighter 3 never did as well in the arcades.
Now, I’m sure that you’re thinking that the package has to have something else present. After all, I haven’t talked about the original Street Fighter, the naked baby photos of the fighting genre. No appearance of Street Fighter EX, the admittedly lame attempt to turn the series 3D (although it did have one saving grace – Skullomania!). I haven’t discussed any Street Fighter Alpha game, the last of which is probably among the best of the genre. And I haven’t even brought up a single one of the Versus games, which brought new life to the franchise (albeit much more cartoon-like). And I didn’t bring up any of these logical inclusions in this package because they aren’t in here. No, instead, Capcom decided to “treat” fans by including “Street Fighter 2: The Animated Movie.” Gee, really? Oh, can I? Nothing says “great pack-in” like a third-rate licensed movie that officially didn’t happen in the Street Fighter world, according to Capcom’s official word. Well, the bright side of this is that at least it isn’t the shonen-ai-fest that was Street Fighter II V. The bad part is that it’s still a lousy anime with only one good scene (the fight between Chun-Li and Vega). A lousy, non-canon anime instead of more Street Fighter? Not exactly the best decision in the world.
And really, that phrase sums up everything about this package. It reeks of desperation and greed, as if Capcom just threw this together to make as much money as possible. They include the most obscenely difficult and unworkable version of Street Fighter 2 for one part of the package, throw in the forgotten spawn of the series for another, and top it off by including a lousy licensed anime movie instead of any other Street Fighter game. If you should be one of the people who really like Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, then you’ll love picking this up and getting a couple extras with the game. If, for some reason, you absolutely need a new version of Street Fighter 2 simply when you have people over, then this might be a reasonable purchase. But otherwise, I suggest everyone just go and pick up Street Fighter Alpha 3 for the Playstation and run through that. It gives you more playability with less bullhonky to get in the way. It just goes to show – when a franchise dies, it doesn’t die pretty.
