Old School Crawl: Street Fighter II

A few nights ago I spent a couple of hours or so with Street Fighter II. The original.

Of course, Street Fighter is the real original, but it didn't make waves like Street Fighter 2 did. Street Fighter 2 is the game that single-handedly created the genre as we know it, and almost everything that followed afterwards did so in its footsteps.



When I was cruising through potential labels for the entire genre, before settling on Karate Supers, I kept coming back to street fighting video games. I didn't use it, because it did sound too much like it just meant the games in this series, but at the same time, that's the long shadow that Street Fighter casts over the genre, and Street Fighter 2 is where it all really happened.

I played three characters all the way through and watched their endings (Ken, Chun-Li and Blanka, for those interested) and played around with a few others, especially Dhalsim, as part of my Old School Crawl review. My first thought when firing up the game was remembering how primitive it all looks in comparison to what followed. The graphics and sound aren't really too much better than the original Street Fighter in many ways. Althought it seemed like a big deal in 1991, the choices of characters (eight) seems really depauperate compared to what we're used to now. The gameplay was slow, and until I got my groove on, it felt floaty and difficult.

Of course, after a round or two, I fell seamlessly back into my groove, and it felt natural again to be playing. I had the timing right to pull off the moves and strategies that I was used to. Moreso than other games that followed later, the original Street Fighter 2 was not nearly as reliant on combos, super or otherwise, nor was it necessarily reliant on special moves. Special moves existed, of course, and were important to playing the game, but regular, basic moves were just as important, and strategies often relied more on predicting AI patterns, at least in single player mode.

Despite the primitiveness, I found that I quite enjoyed revisiting this game. It's still got it. The tweaks that followed in the series and spinoffs that came later didn't necessarily improve it, and in many instances, Capcom tried to recapture the magic that was the original Street Fighter 2.