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Review: Street Fighter Alpha 2 [SNES] |
The year was 1996 and Street Fighter Alpha 2 had just hit the arcades. And at that time, I was completely obsessed with the game, including the cute new shotoclone, Sakura. This game is arguably one of the best Street Fighter games ever: The graphics were crisp and smooth, the BGM was pretty good with remixes of great tracks (although Dhalsim’s was strangely not…), the gameplay was solid… at least until you activated a Custom Combo… (c. Roundhouse, juggle LOL).
In many ways, SFA2 was the “Empire Strikes Back” of the Alpha trilogy, while SFA3 would turn out to be like “Return of the Jedi” (Some great stuff, but diluted by an increasing margin of gay)
Back in 96, I was desperately clinging to my poor SNES, not wanting to spend $200 on a new system (or rather, not thinking of a good way to convince my parents to buy it for me, I was 15…) so you could imagine my delight when SFA2 was announced for the SNES. Little did I know, the horror that would come from it…
So I get SFA2 on the SNES…
AND IT SUCKED
First off, this is the first and only time I’ve ever seen a cartridge that needed load time. And Capcom goes and decides to put the load time in the most awkward of places. Right after you select your character, and see who you fight, you are transported to the stage and shown the character portraits (which were horribly compressed for 16-bit) and THEN after the character portraits go away, but right before the fight starts the load time happens. It’s nothing longer than 3 seconds, but strange nonetheless.
But wait, there’s more (load time). After the announcer (who is the best announcer the series has had since the original in SF2:WW) calls out “Round 1, FIGHT!” in horribly muffled sound, the game just stops for 2 seconds and then the round begins.
Terrible.
Another thing with this translation is that certain characters are missing key moves. Sakura got the worst of it as she lost her jumping MK, which was crucial to her game. Now, both her LK and MK jumping attacks are the same and have the same hit boxes, so there went her crossup game…
This phenomenon is nothing we haven’t already seen since the first SF2 port to SNES, but still annoying…
All things considered though, for an SNES port, SFA2 does pretty well for itself. Only one stage got cut (Bison’s Waterfall stage which no one cares about anyway…), so yes, the Sagat stage from the SF2 anime is intact. All of the characters made it in, even OG Chun Li. All the music is there and decently translated (read: not quite painful). The audio samples, however, leave much to be decided. They sound like someone taped all the voice work from the game onto cassette, ran over the tape with a car, dunked it in water for 15 secs, and then vainly tried to fix it before using it in the game.
All in all, you could be playing worse SNES fighters: Killer Instinct (I defy you to look me in the eye and tell me the SNES port was good), Shaq-Fu, Rise of the Robots, etc. SNES SFA2 is a decent effort from Capcom to release a popular game on a dying system. In fact, I think SFA2 was the last game to be released on SNES…
