Saturday, July 07, 2007

SGM Super 30: Video Game #3


Street Fighter II


This game was easily the template for every 2D fighter made afterward, and the measuring stick - in my opinion - by which every fighter from now on should be measured.

The layout of having eight fighters to choose from - Ryu, Ken, Blanka, Guile, E. Honda (Piston's cousin), Chun Li, Zangief, and Dhalsim - was easy enough. The game had three additional fighters, in the form of the four bosses - Balrog, Vega, Sagat and M. Bison. M. Bison was originally supposed to be the name of the boxer boss, and Balrog was the "boss of bosses." At this writing, I don't know why the switch was made (but I'm sure that Wikipedia has some info on this ... or at least someone might have made something up).

If you were to ask me, as well as some of my high school cronies, this game is (lossely) based on the Jean-Claude Van Damme film, "Bloodsport." There's a sumo fighter, a weird African fighter that moves like Dhalsim, a burly musclehead (Zangief), and a few more. Sadly, no Blanka counterpart, but that would have made the film, y'know, a little weird.

My favorite character of use: E. Honda. The flying headbutt & "hundred hand slap" felled many opponent back in the days of pushing groceries at the Newport Food City. One simple combo I'd use to detract a whole lotta energy from an opponent was to use a jumping medium kick (a belly splash), then either the "hundred hand slap" or try a sumo throw (medium punch, but in throwing range ... almost always happened by chance). If I had an opponent dazed, I'd add some insult to injury with a jumping strong punch (an open hand slap). If the opponent was low enough in their energy, a jumping weak kick (a butt splash) would seal the deal. Remembering all of this, I think what appealed to me about Street Fighter II was how the game allowed a player to develop finesse and flashes of style with their fighter of choice.

One of my favorite arcade memories was going to East Towne Mall in Knoxville and running the Street Fighter II machine at Aladdin's Castle for easily an hour. Playing the game, I attracted a crowd - perhaps because no one had really made it all the way through much of the game on one quarter. Finally, one or two players got the moxie up to pop in a quarter and challenge me. I beat the first player, then the second player ... pretty soon there was a line of players, just wanting to challenge me. And when I say a line, I mean, between rounds, I turned around to stretch and the line was out the front double-doors to the main part of the mall. After everyone was tired of getting bitch-slapped and sat on, "hundred hand slapped" and flying headbutted, I was left to play the game through, and after almost getting stomped in the third round by M. Bison, beat the game. I had beat the game several times up to that point, but it was something about that win that will stick out in my mind for a long time.

This is one of my favorite games; when it came out on the Capcom Classics Collection for PS2, I grabbed that game on the first day of release and beat it again, just for old time's sake. Yep, me and Street Fighter II, we share some deep rooted brotherly love.

2 comments:

Nate said...

Oh, and the anime movie - "Street Fighter II: The Movie" - isn't too shabby. Waaay better than "Street Fighter" starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, featuring Raul Julia's final role (as M. Bison).

Rev. Joshua said...

The names of Balrog, Vega, and M. Bison were switched when the game came to the US from Japan. Capcom feared a lawsuit from Mike Tyson over the likeness issue as the boxer is M. Bison in Japan. (The bullfighter we call Vega is Balrog and the final boss of SF II we call M. Bison is Vega.) I had heard that years ago and checked Wikipedia for confirmation; I had forgotten that Vega was involved. Aside from Balrog, which really doesn't make sense in any context, the original names seem more fitting.

A friend taught me how to kick ass with Dhalsim very effectively, which was always a fun way to piss people off. I could also whip ass with Ken and Ryu even without using the Dragon Punch to any great extent because I never could get the motion down for it.

In the course of playing this game I witnessed the utter destruction of two SNES controllers in frustration and one cartridge that had been reduced to nothing more than the inner chip taped inside fragments of the game casing in order to plug it into the SNES. There's also a funny story about the theft of a SNES and SFII cartridge that I may tell later.