Something different ....

@~James actually sent in this review, and the associated hints,
@~after LAST Christmas! By the time they'd 'fallen out' of 2
@~issues, the Xmas theme didn't really fit so J said, "why not
@~hang onto them for Xmas '94?". Good idea!

        Streetfighter 2 - US Gold/Capcom RRP œ27.99-œ29.99
                  Available on PC, Amiga and ST
                Reviewed by James Judge on an STe

Well, this just proves that after enough letters to Santa,
pleading for a certain present, he will finally twig and give it
to you. In other words this was a Chrissie present.

I was quite surprised that this was converted to the ST as I
thought it would be slow, jerky and with terrible graphics. This
may sound a bit defeatist, but when you saw the quality of, say,
the SNES version, you couldn't imagine that quality being
transferred to the ST. Well, US Gold have done us proud, producing
a great conversion with superb BIG graphics with great animation
and sound - faithful to the console versions.

Streetfighter (the original) was released on the Spectrum and
other 8-bits way back in '86 or there abouts. I can remember
getting a demo of it off of a Speccy mag and playing it for quite
a while - with its mono graphics, terrible animation, few moves
and blippy sound. The story was that you wanted to become the best
fighter in the world and, to do that, you had to do a bit of
travelling and fight certain individuals.

You only had a limited number of moves and could only choose from
one character.

Now the game has progressed to a game with great graphics, music
and animation, a selection of eight players (plus an extra 4 boss
characters), three bonus stages and, what sold the game, a great
two player option.  You start the game off by choosing your
preferred control method - either keyboard, joystick or a mixture
of both. It is best to choose joystick only as the manual does not
cover keyboard at all.  You then choose whether you want a 99
second time limit on each bout and the difficulty level - there
are eight, from child's play to AAAAAAAAAARGH!

After that you choose from eight different characters. They have
their own strength and weaknesses, moves and special moves. The
programmers did cheat, though, by including two characters that
are exactly the same, but with different graphics.

Each character is different to control, from the oh so easy
Dahlsim to the difficult Ken and Ryu (see my help file for a few
tips about each character's moves and how to play and defeat them)
and so you will have a continuous challenge to see whether you can
control them perfectly.

One you have chosen your character the game loads up your
character and then chooses another character, from the remaining
seven, for you to fight with. You are then placed onto an area in
which to fight and you see all the action from a side view that is
common to all beat-'em-ups.

The game then progresses with you and your opponent taking each
other on, trying to reduce the other's health bar to zero. The
person who wins two out of three bouts is declared the winner of
that bout. If you lose you have got three credits with which to
try again. If you win you go onto a different character to fight,
still being the character you chose in the first place.

After three fights you then have a bonus stage which could, if you
smash the car up enough, earn you a bonus 20,000 points - all
important if you want to get into the high score table.  You then
continue fighting the standard opponents, another three or four
fights will get you to the next bonus stage. This is where barrels
roll, from a platform, towards you from either direction.  You
must try and smash them. If you can smash all of them you get a
bonus score, but this is something I have never been able to
manage (hehe).

After fighting the seven standard characters you move onto the
four boss characters. If you are doing badly you will move
straight to the end boss, but if you are doing well, you must slog
through three other characters. Each of these three extras is
more intelligent, quicker and stronger than the other characters
you have come across, so you have to keep your wits around.
Finally you come to either another bonus stage which is destroying
three oil barrels, gouting flame, or Bison, the big bad baddy.

He is really difficult, being the quickest and hardest character
in the whole game with some devastating combinations of moves
that the computer can pull off in quick succession.

If you manage to defeat Bison you will, depending on the
difficulty level, be treated to a little end of game sequence,
showing the fate of the character that you chose to play. On the
whole they are sickly and a waste of time and disk space.

Once you have mastered all the characters you can then invite a
friend, tell him to choose a character at random for you and a
character for him and thrash him into the ground because he hasn't
had any practice while you've been waggling your joystick for
hours on end.  The two player option makes a good game a great
game, especially if you know someone of your ability. You both
choose a character from the eight available (you can't play the
boss characters) and then fight it out. You can chop and change
characters and the computer keeps a tally of all the bouts that
you won, lost and drew for each character, so you can have a
proper league, if you want.

Now to the bad points. Firstly there is a bug on the ST version
that doesn't allow you to use the game if your mouse is plugged
in, causing undue wear and tear on the ports. Another mistake is
the Thai flag appears in Australia and the mid-Pacific Ocean,
oops!  The biggest gripe about the game is the manual - it is
complete rubbish from not including keyboard controls to making
the special move controls seem highly complex. That is definitely
the worst aspect of the game.  Finally names and other writing
that are present at the top of the screen tend to get lost in the
background during frenzied fighting, but the health bars are
always recognisable, being a bold red.

This is, by far, the best game of this genre that has appeared on
the ST since the year dot. If you like a break from adventuring,
or you just want to settle an argument this will be great for you.
If you don't, well, that's your tough luck, you are missing out on
a brilliant game and now that it has become a budget game - how
can you afford not to get it?













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