This emulator offers some historical information and other fluff. It should’ve better offered proper video options. All you can do is turn off garbage usa scanlines, and pick between “original”, “full” and “wide”. Whatever they mean. Because there’s no pixel perfect, no integer scaling, no scaling with keeping the aspect. The so-called “full” is still a windowbox with a lot of space above and below. And of course this is baked into some envelope, so on my 4//3 screen that i use to play 4//3 games it runs with letterboxing even before adding all other boxings. There’s only one save slot, buried in stupid menus and pop-ups. Which is more than nothing, but it is an invitation to accidentally overwrite the progress. The available version is the usa one, instead of the original or a new subtitled original. But this is an arcade game, so any option to just play it beats studying MAME for the next 10 years and fail to launch it anyway.
The insanity with aspect ratios in olden games breaks all limits once you start to do any research. Not only there’s the NTSC / PAL differences, not only devs used drastically different hardware from the customers, other companies and each other, not only some people used early professional widescreens, not only there are different operating systems, but also everyone did use different software.
There is a video somewhere on YouTube, that you will never be able to find because the search sucks balls marinating in arse. In it some retro gamer booted several old machines and used several different programs which were documented to be used to create some games. And you can see that some software translates your circular drawing motion into ovals, other software saves files with aspect correction but displays them without, some does it other way around. It’s an absolute crapshow.
So when i launched this game and saw the squished humans i had to switch to the “wide” option. This 16//9 mode is not a perfect fit for this 1,71 picture, but it is way closer than 4//3. I have never met a person more pickier about correct aspect ratios than me. I always can spot the common stretching multipliers from one frame. Proper circle swastikas and loading animations in Wolfenstein 3D are not worth it playing with wide nazis, playing with proper spherical geoscape and some other elements is not worth it playing with wide troopers in UFO, having proper minimap and a circular CD in the loading screen are not worth playing it stretched in Dungeon Keeper. But here i can name only, like four possibly stretched sprites in the intro when playing it in widescreen. All the rest here is wide. I didn’t get obsessed with circles in the GUI elements, what i saw being stretched is the human models.
The whole thing with aspect ratio is an evolutionary advantage to spot abnormalities, and more so in human form. I don’t care how it was played back in the day. This is not back in the day. And my experience is already not pure, it doesn’t cost me real life money for every attempt and i have saves, and i have turned off the stupid usa scanlines. I overlayed both a 4//3 logo, and a “widescreen” logo on the arcade flyer of the time. They both don’t match it. Severely.
And here’s the kicker. The usual arcade cabinet with this game runs at 4//3 and is visually squished. But there’s the deluxe version of the arcade cabinet of the time that runs on a wide screen.
Hearing the words “Street Fighter” you expect to see a tournament fighting game, primarily designed for PvP, with barely any focus on a solo mode. So… This is a series of fights against the AI, instead of a real fighting game. It’s not a left to right progression of Karateka, there’s the three round system, but it’s not similar to the single-player modes in the fighting games. You have only one character with barely any moves and you have a set progression of opponents where only the first two pairs can be swapped around.
There’s no manual inside the game, and the internet says the special moves were secret. The controls suck a bit to begin with, and then this is a 6-face game, in a world where it is extremely hard to find a 6-face gamepad, and none of them is XInput either. The binds of this game to my Series X XInput device were awkward no matter how do you assign them. And then it doesn’t matter anyway, because the default moves are nearly pointless. You land ten hits on the first guy and he loses barely 10% HP. Meanwhile he can smite you in three hits in seconds. You can look up the special moves on the web or inside the emulator. But they are written in pictograms. Sorry, i don’t speak ancient egyptian. What the hell that anti-Z is supposed to mean? If you make that movement with your knob it does nothing. And, well, everything does nothing. Because the other two moves are quarter circles, and they do not work. Doing it on the knob or doing it on the D-pad that has no diagonals, the moves just do not trigger. And the specials deal, like 50% damage on the opponent, so you can’t win without them.
These idiotic circular controls aren’t really working in Samsho19 and they work even worse in this coprolite. I can perform some moves there sometimes, if not the advanced or simple ones, i can perform the ult at least 55% of tries. Here it’s borderline impossible. To even see the moves i have to just furiously wiggle or rotate the knob and spam a punch / kick button. Doing them on command is not for mere sane people with consumer hardware.
The stupid joke is that if you try to play this game it is impossible. But if you just wiggle the stick while spamming one button it’s a 75% chance that the enemy would kill itself of your failed attempts at special moves. With some luck you can easily one-coin this game up until the last three fighters. The enemies get a bit of damage from you spazzing around, that also somehow blocks a lot of incoming attack, including the ranged ones, and when you finally accidentally do one special move the opponent loses a lot of HP.
But on the last three guys the game stops to pretend it’s not cheating. The special moves just don’t work anymore, the game start to ignore inputs. I think it’s up to half the time on the last guy. I am literally pressing down and nothing else, but my dude is standing still. And that last enemy cheats openly. You usually die before the countdown begin. If you kill him his corpse will throw a fireball at you to make it a draw. If he starts to lose he just does 1HKO you despite you still having full HP.
What a turd of a game.
Inside my shell i milk and hate 