Street Fighter II

---

Hadoken! Street Fighing fun on the ST!
by Jess LaFleur

June 18, 2003

I own many different versions of Street Fighter II, The SNES version, Genesis version, full arcade cabinet.... What is generally common among the Genesis, the arcade machine and the ST is that they all use Motorola's 68k chip. Therefore if the machine was up to it, any 68k machine could use Street Fighter (The Jaguar would have made quite some money if they got the license for it, Even though Kasumi Ninja and Ultra Vortek are nice...)

But the Atari ST? Who thought that it should have it? Well obviously Capcom did and so an ST port was made, but how does it compare to the other ports, and what about the actual arcade version itself? Well, thanks to me, I can give you the lowdown! First, a bit about the game, for those who don't know.

The first Street Fighter was also on the ST, and it was more true to its name since its like a Double Dragon game, fighting random bad guys on the street. The games afterwards are now similar to Mortal Kombat, characters, fighting other characters. Street Fighter sparked many sequels (including many different slight differences to the second game itself!), it has made crossovers with other popular franchises (Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter anyone?) and even a semi popular movie. Each character has a story and since there is so much (even an anime cartoon furthering their stories) I wont mention any here.

Graphics:
Every one knows that Capcom knows how to make good sprites, of course these don't compare to the literally hundreds of sprites a character for some of the NEO GEO games but still. The arcade, the SNES, Genesis versions all have the correct sprites (although some of them don't have ALL of them) and are in a fabulous 256(?) colours. But, wait a moment you say, The earlier ST's cant display that many colours at once right? Right. Street Fighter for the ST only displays 16 colours so even though the sprites are correct, there just isn't enough colours to truly give you that Street Fighter "look." All the places are there and it does try its best but even the framerate suffers a little to those with only a bit of RAM on their ST.

Sound
The sound has sound bytes of the characters on the arcade and the ST does its best to keep it together, the music is still excellent and does not annoy you after playing for a while trying to win. The music is the same as the arcade and the rest of the ports which was expected since the ST has always been good with sound.

Control
After playing on a joypad and using actual arcade controls, the keyboard is a pain to use. Although, with practice of course you end up able to use it efficiently. With 6 buttons to use for punches and kicks (3 each) then having to pull of special moves, it gets tricky and the keyboard fails to make you a better player in the game if and when you play the arcade version. (or a proper arcade controller on a console...)

Gameplay
Street Fighter is one of those games you can get addicted to. the AI is challenging and its always a total blast to play with a friend picking and choosing your character, having to remember and figure out their special moves and seeing their end movies when you win the game (on a higher difficulty only of course) The ST version gives you that same amount of challenge and is just as good as its arcade counterpart in this division.

Overall
Street Fighter II is an excellent game. Although the ST version does suffer in a few areas it's a decent port. I do suggest you get it to at least see the efforts put into it but if I had to choose between this and another port (choosing the arcade isn't fair) I'd still pick a full colour port.