In the west computer arcades were not expensive and they existed for decades by the time they first appeared here. Only after the collapse of the tankie union in the mid-90s our region first got them. Before that it was all electromechanical classics, not that different from the western ones, from a generation or two before the computer arcades appeared there. Not only the form-factor got here too late, arcades were also expensive as all hell. I remember in the earliest 00s one play costing 50₽, while bubble gum was still at 0.2₽, before pukin’s economic policies made it 2₽. 50₽ is an insane amount of money to pay for playing for 10 seconds. And that’s why general public never heard about Street Fighter or its sequel. It was the age of 3D graphics, no one played the arcades, and it was not released for the famiclones. DOS and non-IBM PCs were cornered mostly by the (more) local devs, since no one would import diskettes from usa by mail.
But our market was exactly just ripe for Mortal Kombat. It has a DOS release, a good Sega MD2 port, and romhacks for famiclones. The sequels were also released on the PlayStation for rich kids. Only few games ever became culturally relevant for general public in the region. Even Mario is known only in the form of Super Mario Bros. (refreshed by the recent cartoon). Mortal Kombat was relevant from the first game until the Trilogy, and had two popular films. If someone would play a fighting game, they would accept no substitutes. There was just no place for Street Fighter II, the only people who were properly familiar with it are the people who were paid to.
This is literally my first time playing Street Fighter II, and i play games for more than thirty years, and a lot of them. I never heard anyone mention it outside the western YouTubers, and gaming magazines.
The first game is in that fleeting Karateka-like PVE fighting genre. But the sequel was made into a proper fighting game. It has just eight fighters. I guess you have to start somewhere, but they really had to add one more, since the mario and luigi from the first game are just a reskin of each other. Including both was a good call for the integrity of the IP, but that’s one moveset for a whole quarter of the game. Besides them there’s an unattractive sumo guy. Some magic green man. A generic yankee soldier. A generic racist caricature of a russian gay bear. A cool magic fighter, that looks like nothing from bharat, because he is literally based on JoJo. And a girl with a big muscle-arse, and outdated clothes which do not look fit for a fight. The bad shading makes it look like her thick blue clothes are see-through, especially the blue nipples.
On average the characters have about two-three special moves and that’s all. When there are a lot, it creates an illusion of abundance, but mostly it’s just a filtre for people who can’t remember all of them, and also execute each perfectly, and do that at the exact opportune moment. Abundance is very good in PvE content, but only makes PvP content unfriendlier. So i don’t think having few signature moves is bad.
[Up] for jump sucks A. F. on gamepads. I’ve never played with a fight-stick which have a bigger range of motion, but on DualSense and Xbox Pulse Red both the D-pads and the knobs make jumping in diagonals terrible. The software side is not analogue, and the knob is not discrete, it’s all just guesswork and you guessed wrong. The movement system feels sticky icky.
This is a six-face game, and all you have is a modern four-face gamepad. No matter how you bind it it will be bad. If you try to bind the keyboard, half the buttons are ignored and are unusable. Select and start bindings are swapped and you cannot change them.
But why do you even need six buttons? Why it has three kicks and three punches? Two of each is enough. Especially since there is no block button, but there are several block stances.
I dunno about a fightstick, but on a gamepad these terrible directional inputs necessary for every magick are a pure cancer. They are basically uninputable with a D-pad, and with the tractor sticks the game can read any direction it wants. That’s without counting the increased travel time and the leverage. The timings are extremely tight, so you can execute an anti-Z move, like, one time out of twenty tries, that is if you will be given time and will have no distractions. In a fighting game.
I don’t give a crap about PvP because i’m not a jobless teenager, i’m not sad about the size of my weewee, and i don’t give a crap how this game plays with friends, if the “friends” are not included. And well, anything is fun with friends even playing with dolls and building mud castles sitting in a pile of mud. How is this game on its own?
On the lowest difficulty “0” the game lets you play for a bit, gradually increasing the difficulty until the last guy, who just cheats. The pacing is broken up by useless mini-games. The car breaking is dumb. The falling barrels are dumb and RNG, their HP and directions are unpredictable. The flaming barrels bonus game at least has clear rules and clear progression. Still pointless.
When you won the tournament your reward is beating four extra cheating bosses in a row. And it turns out your entire life was a lie. They swapped the names for the yankee language: the boxer is M. Bison (Balrog), the claw guy is Balrog (Vega), and the cap guy is Vega (M. Bison). Damn.
So M. Bison (Balrog) is cheating like absolute hell. I connect a long kick to his balls, he teleports in one frame back out of the hit and punches me for 50% HP.
You press a punch button and your health goes down. You can barely touch the AI. The enemy ignores the attacks, its punches go through your attack hitbox and hit you in the face for half HP. The AI is cheating and is literally playing by your inputs, not your animations.
I wasted an entire hour on the cheating boxer alone. I somehow just spammed him with med-jump-kicks to death. Balrog (Vega) just randomly goes immortal and you can’t do shit. After some time i tried medium kick jumping. And it worked again after a couple tries. It was also effective against Sagat from the first try.
And then it’s the Vega (M. Bison) fight, where he cheats and spam super powerful attacks. I tried to spam kick-jumps but they rarely connect. Nothing else is working anyway. So after wasting another hour i was just saving after each time i managed to scratch him and survive. A damn waste of time. Usually i beat fighting games with each character, but i had enough. I played for a bit with the others, i’ll just watch the endings on YouTube. There’re still too many more Streets Fighters Twos.
It’s just a shitty arcade fighting game. Of course it sucks. The AI is fucking cheating, it goes through your punches and punches you instead. At best you get simultaneous hits. The AI is spamming magics because it doesn’t have a shitty gaypad, nor elderly fingers. It doesn’t even input commands for charged attacks. It just directly translates its will, and controls both the game, and itself, and the judge.
The characters are damn boring. A half of them are just off-brand real people. The other half is just racist stereotypes. The animations barely have any frames, and the hitboxes are terrible. They just don’t match the sprites at all, so the punches either don’t connect, or enemies go through and inside each other, where the hitboxes don’t connect. The game doesn’t feel impactful or fluid at all. The fights are just crappy.
The PvP play is your anus being torn apart in a second without you lending a punch. It’s just lonely predators looking for kids trying this out for the first time.
Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection is a yet another bad half-arsed Digital Eclipse emulator envelope with half-arsed «“fun” “facts”» copied from Wikipedia no one cares about. Just as always the emulator of old 4//3 games runs baked into a terrible window-boxing envelope. Window-boxing carl. You have a 4//3 screen to play old games, and it runs windowboxed and letterboxed. Oh the humanity. There are no video options, all you get is digital garbage noise instagram filtres.
The input delay between hardware and the software is small, but then there’s another small input delay between the emulator and the game itself, whoever’s fault that is. But there’s an insane extreme input delay between the hadware and the menus. They all have pointless stupid redundant pop-ups, each with terrible time-wasting bad animations. And each step of the process is extremely unresponsive you have to smash the button 3-5 times before it registers. There’s only one save slot with no hotkeys. There’re no rewinds in the single-player. And this is an arcade bullshit game. It is designed to be impossible to beat, so you gonna scream at that deficient moronic absolutely unresponsive menu for hours. On top of that each and all of them reset continuous inputs, so once again you have to smash every button 3 times for it to register, but it’s already to late, re-load, you are dead.
Fighting games market is as small as darts because it’s the same as darts. There’s only the casual play with friends, where no one knows what they are doing. And the sports level where you get annihilated for daring being alive. It’s not a real fight, and it’s not a real game. While you play with your eyes and hands, nerds ignore the game and the visuals. They memorized the clock cycles, animation frames, and actual hitboxes, none of which you can see. They play the games in their minds. They memorized all the hacks and bugs, all the times the game’s output lies to you, and they learned to see past the lies. In shooters, RTS, team games i can defeat a nerd from time to time because we operate on the same rules. They can’t see me sneaking behind them, they can’t see me building a secret base two metres away from their peasants. A normal person who looks at a fighting game and someone who wasted time altering their state of mind are not on the same plane of existence. A normal person can’t do anything against a nerd, no matter how much the odds are stacked for one side. This genre exists for a tiny minority of dedicated nerds, and for close parties of drunk adults. Only once in my adult life i managed to persuade anyone to play a fighting game with me, instead of playing poker or watching a film. We had only a couple of matches until he had enough.
If you are not playing it already — do not start, you are not welcomed, and never will be. If you are playing fighting games — you do not read reviews.
You can not learn this shit, you have to be born already on the spectrum. How old is the oldest pro play-pretend fighter? Surely they are not just starting in their mid-30s when they finally got a stable job and the kids grew up enough for them to have some free time.
I would never recommend this game to anyone. Never touch this crap with a 12.0396 metres pole. Not the original arcade version, nor this terrible release. Fuck this “game”-shaped object, created to scam vulnerable children with addictive personalities, by exploiting literal sunk cost.
Inside my shell i milk and hate 