Street Fighter 2 was the reason why I bought a 6 button gamepad for my Sega Genesis. I remember having to buy the cartridge for $75 (!) and the new gamepad. It was not a big deal as I had to have that game.
Flash forward, oh, say 12 years and the Xbox 360 version finally has made it online. I say finally because this was one of the most delayed 360 games we’ve known about..originally due out in early 2006, the game was delayed. People who played the game in beta form complained about the poor online play. Well either Capcom didn’t listen or their definition of “fixed” isn’t the same as everyone else’s, because it seriously affects the enjoyment of this game.
For those who haven’t played the game (and since a variation of Street Fighter has been on practically every console since 1991, that is hard to believe), SF 2 is a fighting game. You pick one of 12 characters and then “fly” all over the world to fight the others. It’s your standard best of 3 fighting game. Once you beat the rest of them you win. Game Over. If you lose a stage, you are given unlimited continues to complete your quest, but the score will reflect the number of continues you have as the last two digits of your score.
Calling this game hard is an understatement. I do not remember this game being this difficult. Even when you reduce the difficulty level to zero stars, the game is still quite challenging. Part of it is due to the horrid controls. The beauty of the Genesis controller was that all six buttons were right there and available for your use..the SNES controller on the other hand only had four buttons and then those L and R buttons which were the bane of my existence.
Well it’s SNES functionality here folks with only 4 360 buttons on the front, you’re stuck with using the triggers as action buttons. In a word: it sucks. Oh yeah, did I mention the d-pad for the Xbox 360? It also sucks. Trying to perform one of Ryu’s moves is terribly difficult because of the controller. Sometimes you can do it, other times, not so much.
The control, or lack thereof, can really affect anyone’s enjoyment with the game. While it was amazing that so many combo moves came back instantly into my head as I can’t remember what I did yesterday, I still couldn’t pull them off with any regularity.
The worst part is – we’re talking about the single player game here – if you think that’s bad, wait until you go online. The online functionality really leaves a lot to be desired. There seems to be an ongoing issue with Capcom games. Capcom vs SNK on the original Xbox suffered from some serious lag issues and SF2:HF also has this distinction.
The problems occur right when you sign on for an online match. Over and over again, you’ll get into a quick match, only to get a time out error. I first found this out approximately 1 hour into the game’s release. I figured, well everyone is buying it, so I’ll wait and see if it gets fixed. Well almost one week into the game’s release and we’re still getting timeout errors when you try a quick match. However, when you go in and create a match you’ll be able to play pretty quickly. It’s almost bizarre why that works but a quick match does not. It’s even more bizarre that this game was allowed to be released that way.
Once you get into a game, voice chat is fine but online play isn’t great. There are times when you see hiccups and trying to time a combo move like on Guile’s Sonic Boom can be extremely difficult. The frame rate is often quite slow, and when you can play a game like Dead Or Alive 4 with some incredible atmosphere and minor lag compared to this, it’s tough to recommend this game.
Graphics are straight out of 1991 and haven’t been dressed up at all for this release. All of the sounds that you recall from the original game are here, and that’s a good thing. Leaderboards are available online and if you don’t play ranked matches (who doesn’t), you can enjoy a ‘quarter match’ that’s supposed to make you remember when you would put quarters on the arcade game to say you have next game. I can’t imagine playing an unranked game unless it was a private session, and if it were private, it would render the quarters moot. It’s an interesting idea, but not very useful.
