The Lost Street Fighter Feature: Portmania

While I was looking through the list I made of ideas for Street Fighter articles, it occurs to me that one of them unfortunately didn't make the cut. This happened either because (1) I planned for each entry to only have one feature a day, and this one unfortunately didn't make that, or (2) I was too damn lazy to write it. I'm pretty sure it was the latter, though. Whoops.

So anyway, that brings us to this entry now, just a little late. The Street Fighter franchise's arcade entries have had numerous ports to home consoles, some perfect, and some slightly less than perfect. But there's a subset of them that usually aren't mentioned too often: intentionally imperfect ports. These were the ports that no one in their right mind expected to be anywhere near perfect, but the developers intended for them to be something we could make do with on lower-end platforms. However, they were still perfectly playable and enjoyable, despite their compromises.

On the surface, you'd think the team of people who thought porting Street Fighter II to the Game Boy were crazy. A fighting game that relies on six buttons for input on a system with two? It seriously sounds bizarre, but Capcom was able to make it a pretty solid, but not spectacular, diversion from its big brother. Place extra emphasis on diversion, because there's definitely not enough here for it to replace the original. The monochrome iteration didn't leave much potential for anyone to show off the dazzling combos they could do on the console versions; especially if your favorite character was either Dhalsim, E. Honda, or Vega, since they were cut from this version.

Due to the Game Boy's incredibly limited memory, the backgrounds also weren't as vibrant as the console version, though you could get a partial picture of the color background if you played it through the Super Game Boy; though that's a little redundant if you're playing it on a system that has three great Street Fighter II titles. Don't expect any of the franchise's token voice samples here either, though the nearly 8-bit music samples actually turned out pretty well. This was something you played to keep yourself occupied outside of the house, or merely played for novelty's sake.

It was 1996, and the Playstation, Saturn, and Nintendo 64 (and those other systems that died a quick death) were now on the market. But some of us were still stuck in last-gen with our Super Nintendo's and Genesis', unable to plead to our parents that those new consoles were well worth the asking price. While the Street Fighter franchise had moved on to having a home on the Playstation and Saturn, Capcom thankfully looked out for anyone who hadn't upgraded yet, and made a version of Street Fighter Alpha 2 for SNES. A shame they decided to pass on releasing it outside of Japan for some reason, but Nintendo decided to publish it in America and Europe. The port was expectedly not as good as the PSX and Saturn versions -- which also weren't arcade perfect, by the way -- but it was an incredibly good replica.

SFA2 was one of the few SNES games to have loading times, a testament to how much data was needed to fit into the cartridge. Every character from the game made it into this version (except for a few admittedly silly alternate versions), and unlike SFII for GB, it was a very good alternative to the other versions. Most of the sound effects made it in, and the SNES had six buttons, enough for a player to use every combo they used in the other versions. Though it was a little tough to perform techniques that required pressing all three punches/kicks, but there were arcade sticks made for the SNES. There's no way music on a cartridge could match CD-quality material the other ports had, but the replica the SNES game has is pretty good. It was well worth your time if you still hadn't decided which system to purchase yet.

For the three of you who wanted to know how the original Street Fighter Alpha: Warrior's Dreams would look on an NES, Capcom answered your pleas with a port of the game to Nintendo's short-lived Game Boy Color. In a way, it's kind of similar to the Game Boy version of SFII, in that you're hindered by only having two buttons (you won't be showing off your fancy chain combos here), most of the sound effects and music are left out, and it really only works as a diversion. However, it's not similar in that this game is two-times better than SFII for GB.

The best thing about the port is that it feels fluid, like your moves actually have an impact on your opponent. The main problem with SFII for GB was that it felt like your moves didn't have enough "oomph," but you can actually perform combos here. Also, every character from the original version made it into this game with most of their techniques. Even Dan! All of the stages made it in too, though the original didn't have many to begin with.

Really, the only crippling flaw is that it doesn't allow for link cable battles. It's single-player only. I don't even...what?

Next, we have Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival for Game Boy Advance, the first really stellar portable port of a Street Fighter game. Actually, calling this merely a port is doing it a disservice a little, as it goes slightly beyond that. Capcom added quite a bit to this version, including new special effects (the super-triggering effect is ripped right from the Alpha games), alternate stages for 1/3 of the cast (Chun-li has her Alpha 2 stage, Ken has his SFIII: 2nd Impact stage, etc.), and the character portraits have all been completely redrawn - a sample of which is included in the banner. The fan-favorite bonus stages were also re-added to this version, which were absent from the original. The gameplay is just as balanced as the original, and this time you're only hindered by having four buttons instead of two.

But there always has to be a problem, and the issue here is that ST Revival comes jam-packed with so many glitches that you'll wonder if this game had any QA. In the original game, you had to fulfill specific conditions in order to face Akuma as the final boss instead of M. Bison. That's included here, but instead of fighting him, you're greeted with the game freezing while the background music plays Akuma's theme. There are also other bizarre instances, but the aforementioned one is pretty inexucsable.

That still doesn't stop ST Revival from being a great port of the original, though. It's the best version of the game available on a portable system.

The last portable compromised port we have is Street Fighter Alpha 3 for Game Boy Advance, which is even more of a faithful port than ST Revival. Somehow, Capcom was able to jam most of the console version's features into a GBA cartridge. That includes all 32 characters from the console version; heck, they even added a few - Maki from Final Fight 2, Eagle from the original Street Fighter, and Yun from Street Fighter III. Most of the voice samples didn't make it in, though that's not surprising considering the plethora of sound effects the console version has.

That didn't stop this from being a great version, though, with the game's flow being precisely similar to the console version. Anyone with experience with previous Street Fighter games could easily jump right in with minimal problems (excusing the fact that the GBA only has four buttons). It was the best portable version of SFA3 until the PSP version would come along a little more than three years later.

Anyone who knows Capcom well knows that they're definitely no strangers to porting all of their games everywhere, and Street Fighter was nowhere near an exception here. The good thing is that they did a great job with most of their ports, which shows how much they were concerned with quality and money; pretty different from too many other companies that just love to cash in with haphazard ports that don't work to a specific console's advantages and disadvantages, and that's, sadly, too many companies to name.

By the way, I'll try not to post anything Street Fighter related here for a while. OK? OK.