Street. Fighter. 5. For a few years there, it felt like the series was never going to move beyond 2, but boy oh boy, has time flown while kicking and spinning in place.
It's kind of amazing that the granddaddy of modern fighters is only five games old. After all, later serieses like Mortal Kombat, Tekken and Soul Calibur are looking at 10, 7 and 6 entries.
I guess you could say Capcom prefers quality over quantity. But it'd be more accurate to say it's easier to make a bunch of bad games, then produce some new shotos and everyone will forget. Here's the five games you can fondly look back on and say "yep, them sure was bad times."
Street Fighter
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| Dropping the Mike. |
It's kind of hard to fault the original SF for being a shitty fighting game, because a lot of what made fighting games non shitty did not yet exist or was very hard to do. In fact, the game was originally controlled by punching it, which means it actively counted on your hate.
But it's on this list, because in it's anniversary, Capcom released a big box of filled with pretty much every game, anime and movie based on Street Fighter BUT Street Fighter. That's a sad way to spend a birthday.
Street Fighter Movie
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| THE ONLY FIGHT IN THE GAME. |
No, not Street Fighter THE movie( The Game...see below). Street Fighter Movie is an FMV game with some fighting game frosting, based on The Anime of Street Fighter 2. You play the role of a robot quietly stalking fighters and learning their moves, and near the end you can have a fight with Ryu.
So, you know, the next time they give Chun Li her own movie, remember that they gave a generic robot from the anime a game all to himself, and that's more solo game that they ever gave Ryu or Guile.
Street Fighter Mouse Generation
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| Why, yes, that IS Barrack Obama. It was...it was a weird time. Liking an American President hadn't been easy in 8 years and... |
Sometimes I play fighting games on a keyboard, okay? Sometimes you can't wait of your arcade sticks arrive to take your MUGEN for a spin.
But a few years ago, Capcom tried for something even less good, with Mouse Generation. The game, playable online, had you do motions with the mouse.
It also had a feature to swap the parts of the characters, so you could put Chun Li's legs to Bison's torso, creating presumably a self hating abomination.
You could also swap body parts with characters from anime like Cyborg 009 and fish and shit. And now you can't, because it's offline.
Street Fighter Ex
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| I...mean to high five you ! It's not my fault my hands are blocky Hulk gloves! |
Street Fighter 4 is considered the serie's entry point into the 3rd dimension. After all, we all remember Street Fighter 3's beautiful 2d sprites.
However that's because most fans tend to outright ignore Ex, a fighting game that awkwardly bumbled the series into the poligonal world of the Playstations 1 and 2.
For 2 games(or 3? Is Ex + Alpha it's own game?), the series had the classic fighters in a morose, endingless, floaty mess of a game. In the end Arika, who developed the game for Capcom, went it's way and took every character they made for it.
Street Fighter the Movie
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| No. |
When you do a big movie you do a tie in game. But what if the source material IS a game? Then you leave it alone.
Hell naw! You make a game of the movie anyway! And so, since Street Fighter the movie was based on a precise fighting game, the one that set the bar, naturally they got the developers of unplayable mess Time Killers to handle the game. That's like getting M Knigt Shyamalan to direct Star Wars. The fact he's directed stuff before is evidence only to him being wrong for it.
The gameplay is the worst of any Street Fighter until you can prove you played Mouse Generation. An infinite can be a simple as "hurricane kick then dragon punch."
Streef Fighter The Movie also takes a cue from Mortal Kombat, with digitized sprites (that's fancy talk for "photographed images")of the cast that was willing/alive. It doesn't feel like playing the movie, though. It feels like somebody vomited Mortal Kombat all over my Street fighter.
Street Fighter 2 Tiger Handheld
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| WHERE'S SAGAT? HE'D LOVE THIS! |
For those who were born after the towers fell, Tiger handheld machine were basically as powerful as calculators, and their games just as fun. For around 20 dollars, you could get this individual games, and while there were many original games, many were licensed franchises.
So obviously, you slap a Street Fighter sticker in a that sucker and you cash in. For those who didn't buy a console, didn't ever see the inside of an arcade, and whose parents couldn't tell the difference between Mortal Kombat and Myst, this might have been their first "taste" of Street Fighter.
Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter
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| Cylsim forever! <3 br=""> |
You know, X-Men vs Street Fighter was a pretty cool game. It was Street Fighter's first real crossover game, and kicked off the Vs series, of which Tatsunoko, Tekken, and Snk saw entries.
And most importantly, each game in the vs Marvel series had new characters that hadn't been Sprites for other games. Obviously XvSF had Rogue and Sabertooth and Cammy and Guile, Marvel vs Capcom had Venom and Captain Commando, Mvc 2 had The Cactus Guy and Cable.
But MvsSF suffered from a bad case of not giving a fuck, so it had none inherently new characters, unless you think putting a coat of dark on Sakura makes her a "new" character. In fact, it has the same final boss, with a somehow robotier Akuma as dressing.
So while I'm sure it's a perfectly playable entry into the versus series, in a RELATIVE way, compared to other games in the series, it FUCKIN SUCKS!
You may have noticed 7 is larger than 5, which may indicate Street Fighter has more misses than hits. So I want to be fair : there's been a fair amount of non-numbered entries that have been fairly good, such as the Alpha series. And most of these games are better than, say, getting punched in the asshole(Not YOU, Sf1 and SF The Movie! Sit down.). In the end, we love Street Fighter, even if one fourth of the cast is Ryu with a different head and the vanilla versions become outdated in 6 months. Even if our favorite characters, haven't been seen in close to two decades. We wouldn't care if Sf made a bad game only if we did care about SF at all.
