Street Fighter Legends - Page 5
A worthy pretender arrives.
Midway had tasted a bit of success with the original Mortal Kombat, and pulled out all the stops to try and take away Street Fighter IIs crown. Mortal Kombat II arrived, and with it brought a layer of playability, presentation, and secrets to completely redefine the Kombat experience. It was an impressive game, playable to the hilt unlike the original. An insane amount of characters compared to the original. Vastly superior locations compared to the original, and quite possibly best of all, it expanded upon the fatality hook of the original to include babalities, animalities, and various versions of fatalities, and not to mention secret characters to fight against.
It was definitely a worthy pretender to Street Fighter, and the resulting console conversions did well to cement Mortal Kombats place in the history of fighting games. But thats a different story.
The New Challengers.
After the success that was SFII Turbo, Capcom werent done and came up with Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers (SSFII). Creating four all-new characters in the Street Fighter universe, Cammy, Dee-Jay, Fei-Long and T. Hawk all boasted their own storyline and each possessed special moves akin to other characters. A well versed T. Hawk player was soon found to be nigh on invincible, and in many ways Super SFII was a step back from the progression that Capcom had been making with the SF games. It was unbalanced, it was slow, and the original 12 characters had hardly undergone any improvements. In hindsight, it was a very disappointing release.
Nevertheless, Capcom persisted with 16-bit console conversions for Nintendo and Sega. This time Nintendo received a huge 32Mbit cart while Sega got a gargantuan 40Mbit cart. The differences between the two were similar to the previous release, i.e. Nintendo got the better graphics due to superior hardware, while Sega got slightly more, if superfluous, game modes. Unfortunately for Capcom, SSFII wasnt as big a success as Street Fighter II Turbo was.
The Street Fighter star was on its steady course downhill, without much respite. Capcom responded with Super Street Fighter II Turbo (or Super SFII X) and with it introduced a second power meter that when fully charged allowed the player to execute a dazzling super move. Many saw it as Capcoms response to Midways fatality system from Mortal Kombat, while others saw it as a way for Capcom to show their 2D programming nous, after all the super special moves were accompanied by spectacular graphical light shows and sound effects. It really was impressive to not only pull them off, but also use them with devastating effect. The other major addition to SSFIIX was the sheer speed by which it ran, Street Fighter was once again at the Turbo speed that everybody had gotten accustomed to. However, there were no new characters and the super special moves were clearly unbalanced and many were difficult to execute.
It was around this point that Capcom had decided to move further and further away from Nintendo exclusivity and the console conversion of SSFII Turbo was released on the ill-fated 3DO platform. Its fitting that to this day, that conversion is considered one of the premier titles on the 3DO. It was clear that Capcom had made the correct decision to port the heavily processor intensive graphics to the then-most powerful 2D system. The Mega Drive/Genesis and even the Super Nintendo would not have been able to host such a title, or so many believed.
By now it was obvious that the Street Fighter star would never again reach the heady heights of the original Street Fighter II, and yet still Capcom ploughed on with Street Fighter.
Street Fighter had reached the crossroads. After so many enhancements, pseudo-sequels, refinements, backtracking, and plain old greedy console conversions; every man and his dog wanted only one thing from Street Fighter, a real sequel. People wanted Street Fighter 3. Capcom thought otherwise.
Street Fighter II had reached its natural conclusion in terms of technical innovation. Its graphics were about as good as they couldve been, and the hardware on which it was based had reached the end of its product lifecycle.