Another week, another retro game! I’m playing every fighting game the Xbox Live Arcade has to offer on the 360…in chronological order. This week: Street Fighter II! Ippon!
Episode 3 – Street Fighter II’ HF
Street Fighter II, to this day is mocked for its “addition editions”. This year, Capcom even mocked itself by announcing its Dead Rising 3 DLC: Super Ultra Dead Rising 3′ Arcade Remix Hyper Edition EX Plus Alpha.
As much as gamers joke about the multitude of Street Fighter II variations, the reason behind them plays a solid role in the shape of the FIghting Game genre we see today.
As arcade gamers warmed to the idea of competitive fighting games, a lot of different, unpredicted responses came from fans. For starters, there was the fabled “combo”. Combo’s weren’t originally built into Street Fighter II…or any fighting game for that matter. What happened, was fighters quickly learned that certain moves could organically flow into other moves, due to the sizes of the “empty” frames either side of each move and the recovery frames in the animation of the character being hit. What came from this was the ability to keep the opponent open to attack and, lo and behold, the combo was born.
Suddenly, from arcade to arcade, challengers were turning up with secret “tech” and comparing the tricks and glitches they’d found in the game…and this is where Capcom made one of the greatest decisions in game developer history; they responded to the fans.
This, of course, was before the days of DLC and patches, so as players found more tricks, they also found out which players held the most tricks and rudimentary tier lists formed – the need for “balance” emerges. Capcom’s reaction to improve the game had to come in the form of another, slightly tweaked game…and then another…and another…and another! From Champion Edition to Hyper Fighting, to Super, to Super Turbo and back to Hyper again, each title brought balance tweaks, speed adjustments, new characters, but didn’t demolish the core elements that Street Fighter II fans held dear.
For their XBLA entrant, Capcom have chosen one from the middle of the bunch – Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting. Hyper Fighting retains the looks and appearance of the Street Fighter II most nostalgic console fans remember, Street Fighter II Champion Edition but with the added feature of a Turbo Setting. For the arcade rats out there, HF was also the final Street Fighter II rendition that ran on CPS1.
One of the main joys of HF is the character selection. You get the “Original 8” plus the four classic bosses; Vega, Balrog, M.Bison and Sagat, instantly on the character select screen, balanced and ready, complete with shiny new special attacks. This was revolutionary at the time. Players of the SFIV era shrug their shoulders at the classic characters, particularly Vega (Claw), but back in the day they struck fear into the gaming masses.
Modern SF fans may also appreciate some heritage with Hyper Fighting, as it was the first version to feature air specials (officially, anyway – arcade cab modders had already glitched out air specials on older cabs), along with E. Honda’s Sumo Splash and Chun Li’s Kikoken.
Since it’s XBLA, you get the added benefit of ranked online mode. However, this is a pretty dead lobby nowadays, unless there’s a livestream on.
Playing this side to side with the Mega Drive/Genesis version (Special Champion Edition) you can see that it’s a good port, but lacks something…it’s hard to tell what, but if I’m ever in the mood for some SFII, it’s the Mega Drive that’s getting switched on.
The XBLA version is nothing to be sniffed at though, you can see how good a port it is. The UI, though different, is still nice and minimal and has been seamlessly adjusted for a 16:9 ratio for modern, widescreen TV’s, though, thankfully, the actual game beyond the UI has been kept in 4:3. Unlike some fighting game ports (Alpha 2 on the Wii, for example) the XBLA version of SFII’ HF is smooth throughout all the turbo settings, and maintains its refresh rate.
Cranking it up to fully turbo, it’s not a bad competitive 2D fighter and you can still see a lot of its pedigree in other fighters today. Despite how quiet the online scene is, it’s still very worthy of sitting in your arcade arsenal, just for old time’s sake.
DownRightFierce 