Street Fighter II: Difference between revisions

Street Fighter II
Street Fighter II
	Street Fighter II Title Screen
Developer(s)	Capcom
Publisher(s)	Capcom
Release	1991
Genre(s)	Versus Fighting
Mode(s)	Up to 2 players simultaneously
Arcade system	CPS-1

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Revision as of 20:03, 22 April 2006

Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1991) was a highly popular and immensely successful fighting game created by Capcom. It centers on two characters, Ryu and Ken (the two main characters from the original Street Fighter), facing the evil villain M. Bison (Vega in Japan).

Today, Street Fighter II is routinely listed as one of the greatest video games of all time. It is widely considered to be the "Grandfather" of the fighting game genre, and is still considered by many purists to be the finest example of the genre, relying more on control and playability than graphics or flash. In particular the control system was often emulated by later games, including other Capcom fighters (see below).

Karate Champ and Street Fighter, two one-on-one fighting games which preceded Street Fighter II, are now largely forgotten.

The game featured a line up of eight characters which a player could choose from to battle all the other fighters around the world. Once the other characters had been defeated, four boss characters could be battled, finishing off with M. Bison (Vega in Japan).

Legacy

This popular fighting game inspired several updates of the game:

Street Fighter II': Champion Edition (Street Fighter II Dash in Japan) - Champion Edition included several signifcant updates:

1. All 4 boss characters (Vega, Bison, Balrog, and Sagat) were playable. However, because these characters were not originally intended to be playable, the characters had smaller regular movesets than the original 8 characters.
2. Players could both choose the same character against each other. It was the first fighting game to have same character vs. character by using palette swapping.
3. The backgrounds of each player's stage were modified (a theme throughout most of the revisions).
4. There were various bug fixes for serious glitches (such as Guile's Handcuffs), as well as some balancing of the characters.
5. Added the ability to execute reversal attacks (special attacks either when blocking or rising from the ground that would cancel the animation frames and give higher priority)

Street Fighter II' Turbo: Hyper Fighting (Special Champion Edition on the Sega Genesis) - was released in response to an explosion of modified bootlegs of the original game. Changes included:

1. Faster gameplay.
2. Many characters gained new moves, and several that could now be perfomed in mid-air.
3. All characters were given new color pallettes.

Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers - This was also the first Street Fighter game that Capcom would release on its CPS-2 hardware. All prior Street Fighter games had been released on Capcom's CPS-1 hardware. The arcade version of this game also included a variant that allowed eight arcade cabinets to be connected together for simultaneous tournament play. This version contained the most extensive changes introduced in the series:

1. Four new characters were added (DeeJay, T. Hawk, Fei Long, and Cammy).
2. Boss characters received updated regular move sets, to put them on par with the original 8 (and 4 new characters).
3. Each character could be selected with one of 9 different color pallettes.
4. The original 12 fighters received new art and audio.
5. The speed introduced in Hyper Fighting was reduced.
6. A combo counter (a first despite combos being in the game since the original), as well as point bonuses for first attack, combos and reversals.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo: Grand Master Challenge (Super Street Fighter II X in Japan)- a slightly updated version of Super Street Fighter II. This version introduced:

1. The addition of the "SUPER" bar. This allowed character to build up and unleash a very powerful special attack (typically a special attack with more strength, and the character gained "shadows" of the previous frames of animation.
2. The speed was again raised from Super SF2, to close to Hyper Fighting levels.
3. Intentional Air juggling (a series of attacks that could hit an opponent while airborne) (Note: a glitch in Champion Edition allowed Dhalsim to be air juggled under certain conditions).
4. The ability to tech non-multi hit throws (teching allows a character to land on one's feet instead of on their back, resulting in less damage).
5. A new secret character (Akuma).
6. Alternate versions of each character that played very similar (but not quite identical) to their Super Street Fighter II incarnation without the super bar or the ability to tech throws.

Ports

Street Fighter II has been ported to almost every console available since the creation of the game. Some noteable versions:
Street Fighter II, in its first three versions, were ported for the Super NES (Champion Edition was only released in Japan), which were the most popular ports of this game. The Sega Genesis got an updated version of Champion Edition known as Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition..

NEC also developed a port for the TurboGrafx 16. It is a fairly faithful adaption of the original and is commonly put along with the Super NES ports as one the best. It is also one of the few games for the system that uses a 6-button pad.

In Brazil, there was an official port for the Sega Master System, developed and published by Tec Toy. While this version had collision detection problems and some slowness, it was still very popular in that country.

Characters

The characters in Street Fighter II were all associated with different countries around the world, although some countries had more than one representative.

Original Eight

These were the eight World Warriors available in the original Street Fighter II.

Bosses

Four boss characters (listed in order faced) were only encountered after defeating the other normal fighters. They were not playable characters in the original Street Fighter II, but they have been playable from Champion Edition onward. Three of the four characters had their names changed for the western version; see individual entries for the explanation.

Balrog - United States (M. Bison in Japan)
Vega - Spain (Balrog in Japan)
Sagat - Thailand
M. Bison - Thailand (Vega in Japan)

(Note: M.Bison is not a native of Thailand, as his origin is unknown, but simply fights there in this series.)

The New Challengers

These four new characters were introduced in Super Street Fighter II.

The Grand Master

Akuma (Gouki in Japan), first appeared in Super Street Fighter II Turbo. He was not given a country of origin. Akuma is a secret character in the game, and is only playable via a secret code.

Other media

Street Fighter II was adapted into two different movies in 1994, an animated movie in Japan (later released as Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie in the U.S.) and an American-produced live-action film, Street Fighter. The animated movie is more popular with fans than the live action film; the live action film is largely considered to be awful.

There was also a US Street Fighter cartoon, and a anime titled Street Fighter II V.

The noise rock band "Champion Edition" (Alton, Hampshire, U.K.) are named in honour of the video game. Songs include the self titled "Champion Edition", "Urban Strike", and many more [1]...

SFII in Capcom Classics Collection

Street Fighter II and the other two original versions (Champion Edition and Turbo) are featured in Capcom Classics Collection, a compilation of classic Capcom games from the 80s to the early 90s, available for the Xbox and Playstation 2. Street Fighter II and the other versions in Capcom Classics Collection are actually ports of Street Fighter Collection 2 for the PlayStation, complete with its special modes including versus mode, CPU battle mode, training mode, and more. Even the cast artwork and information is the same as Street Fighter Collection 2, but there is some new unlockable artwork that was not featured in that collection. One complaint about the game is that it has loading times, which is very unusual for a contemporary video game console running older games. Perhaps the best feature for fans is the Street Fighter Deluxe mode in all three versions of the game, which allows players to battle with characters from different versions of the game, for example, matching Champion Edition Ken vs. Turbo Chun-Li. The Deluxe mode is not unlike the normal playing modes in Street Fighter Anniversary Edition and Capcom's Vampire Chronicle.

SFII in pop culture

The 1993 Hong Kong movie Chao ji xue xiao ba wang (Future Cops) featured SFII characters.
In the movie The Perfect Score (2004), Roy (played by Leonardo Nam) talks about how he played SF2 for hours and wanted to grow up to be Blanka.
In the movie City Hunter, Jackie Chan's character collides with an arcade machine and randomly transforms into various SFII characters, along with his opponent.
Dan Haigh, the bass player in the post-hardcore band Fightstar, can be seen in the video for "Lost Like Tears In Rain" wearing a t-shirt with the word Shoryuken, there is also the now legendary instructions to perform the move written in small unreadable text on the t-shirt.
One can find mention of Ryu's Hadouken in the online web comics 8-Bit Theater and Neglected Mario Characters.
Characters in the Internet webisode series entitled Pure Pwnage play Street Fighter II and make reference to Ryu's shoryuken, among other things.
The British rock band Arctic Monkeys have an instrumental song titled "Chun-Li's Spinning Bird Kick."
Princess Fiona executes a Spinning Bird Kick, followed by a Shoryuken, while fighting bandits in Shrek.
The noise rock band "Champion Edition"[2] (Alton, Hampshire, U.K.) are named in honour of the video game.
In a Homestar Runner cartoon, "dangeresque 3", Homestar uses the Hurricane Kick, screaming, "The pipes are broken!", a mishearing of "Tatsu Maki Sen Pu¯ Kyaku". In a later video game, the future version of Homestar uses this as an attack.
The Maskate newspaper of Manaus, Amazonas State, Brazil, known by publishing news in a comical way is famous for references to Street Fighter. Everytime there´s violence between politicians or any street brawl, the newspaper uses words like "Shoryuken" and "E.Hond salps" and "short Psycho Crusher" to describe the action. A text once said a representative was speaking when an adversary gave him a "Shoryuken".

Trivia

A version of the game was planned for the Nintendo Entertainment System and a half-decent illegal version of the game was sold and noticed by several major video game magazines. However, Capcom cancelled production of the game.
Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) created a hoax as an April Fools' Day joke that a character by the name of Sheng Long could be unlocked.

External links

Shoryuken.com (the online center of competitive Street Fighter)

@@ Line 110: / Line 110: @@
 * The [[noise rock]] band "[[Champion Edition]]"[http://www.myspace.com/championedition] ([[Alton, Hampshire]], U.K.) are named in honour of the video game.
 * In a [[Homestar Runner]] cartoon, "dangeresque 3", Homestar uses the Hurricane Kick, screaming, "The pipes are broken!", a mishearing of "Tatsu Maki Sen Pu¯ Kyaku". In a later video game, the future version of Homestar uses this as an attack.
+* The Maskate newspaper of Manaus, Amazonas State, Brazil, known by publishing news in a comical way is famous for references to Street Fighter. Everytime there´s violence between politicians or any street brawl, the newspaper uses words like "Shoryuken" and "E.Hond salps" and "short Psycho Crusher" to describe the action. A text once said a representative was speaking when an adversary gave him a "Shoryuken".
 == Trivia ==