I've re-named by blog "Game Nostalgia" for now, because that best sums up what it is I'm hoping to achieve with it. As for today's game, I expect a lot of flak... I'm not a fan of fighting games as a genre, and I'm pretty brutal in my short account of the game. I'd love to hear someone argue why this game was great, and I would read it with an open mind.
Street Fighter II
Developer: Capcom
Platform: Arcade
Release Year: 1991
Impact on my life: 4/10
Impact on the world: 9/10
Objective Rating: 7/10
The game you still see in pretty much every fish'n'chip shop in New Zealand.
Basic Plot
There was no real story. I'm assuming there was some kind of competition going on?
Gameplay
Street Fighter II defined the fighting game genre.
Players controlled a fighter and would compete against another fighter in an arena. Each battle was broken up into "rounds", to win a round the player had to defeat his or her opponent (by lowering their health bar to nothing). This could be achieved in several ways; kicks, punches, and special moves.
It introduced multi-input combination moves (special moves), as well as multiple characters with unique fighting styles. Although most players knew the moves and executed them carefully and with purpose, I adopted the "mash the input keys until something happens" approach.
E Honda attacks.
Positives
It re-defined the genre of fighting games and added a layer of technical skill that lifted it above other games at the time.
Negatives
It just never did it for me. I even enjoyed Mortal Kombat more. I am not a huge fighting game fan, with the exception of One Must Fall 2097.
I can't say much about the calibre of the fighting games that followed... that genre has been flogged to death many times over. This was like the monkey that bit someone and started an ebola virus outbreak.
Ryu fireballing Chun-Li.
Memorable Moments
I played a port of this game for PC first. It was terrible. The scale of the characters wasn't right. Dhalsim's arms and legs were extra long so you could win any fight simply by hitting the kick button over and over.
If you watch Chun-Li as she kicks carefully you can see she has a camel toe. That's pretty exciting for a 13 year old boy.