Street fighter 2 release date series#

The three different kicks and punches and three speeds of projectiles required a lot of strategy-and counter-hits. Only Dhalsim, with his floaty jump, was difficult to make a contender in versus play. You could be skilled with one character and just as quickly be dominated by someone who had mastered another. In these days of release now and fix later, it's not hard to appreciate how much work it must have taken to release a balanced 1.0 game with six buttons. When you land a late hit in SFII, it feels like you've gutted your opponent. AdvertisementД«ut you can't talk about the sound without talking about the deeply satisfying hits. The music of the character selection screen still teems with anticipation. That SFII's music is exciting and not mind-numbingly irritating after hearing it over and over is a great accomplishment in itself. It's like a logo in music-it has to be appealing but age well, and it can't be catchy to the point of being distracting it's muzak and a jingle all at once. Making game music that you know people will have to listen to for hours and hours on end must be a daunting task. That's a splotch of a single color and you don't even notice it knocking out the background. Notice how the colored shadows factor in the scene's ambient light. It boggles the mind that the level artists chose a complex palette of complementary colors: Then, with those limitations in mind, you have to make it attractive. Well, imagine doing that for an entire game level while factoring variable characters with their own colors. If you've ever done graphics for Web, you know how difficult it can be to fit pleasing gradations into a limited GIF palette. What really made SFII's graphics exceptional were the artists' masterful handling of a limited color palette and that almost comically low resolution. Where most side-scrolling games at the time were a dead set of two or three layers of sprites, Street Fighter II's scenes were alive with animation and the pixel-level single-point perspective scrolling of the floor blew my mind when I first saw it: It's hard to appreciate how good Street Fighter II's graphics were at the time, but the perspective effects of the floor and depth layering were really advanced for the time. Graphics, in 12 luscious bits and super-crisp 384x224 Sure, Street Fighter IV has more bells and whistles, but it is just an introduction for new generations to the game that started it all. But then you get your ass handed to you by the AI Ryu, and you realize not much has changed. You can't help expecting to be underwhelmed, like you're going to be going back to legs that just walk after running for so long. It was an artful mix of sight, sound and mechanics that still surprises me when I load it up in MAME, or play the recently released Capcom Arcade for iPhone. Even with all of the other entries into the pantheon of great fighting games, none has aged as well as SFII. That was almost 20 years ago-long enough for grunge and layered plaid to make a comeback. Bussing to the smokey arcade, Nirvana blasting on my yellow Sony Walkman and many, many quarters spent perfecting its intricate combos and counters. It's hard for me to disassociate the game from the time when it made its mark. It was so huge that it even managed to make 'hadouken!' a commonly recognized meme, even though it was an arcade-only game for years after its release. It spawned many, many successful sequels from Capcom and it set a new standard for strategy, graphics, sound, and gameplay. Even after the unsuccessful clones and the innumerable follow-ups, this game still has it all.Д«efore they had the complementary outfits, before it was super dynamic cooking time, before Ken did stuff like this, there was the original Street Fighter II, a masterpiece of fighting games. Even today, it's Capcom's golden goose and it's not hard to see why. Street Fighter II was an arcade monster that has stood the test of time. We still enjoy a good bout of SFV but #SFII is forever the masterpiece /IH33kxbPdJ This appreciation was originally published on December 27, 2010.

Street fighter 2 release date series#

While every entry in the long-running fighting game series has found an audience (including the recent SFV), Ars is resurfacing this retrospective of perhaps the most iconic edition: 1991's Street Fighter II. This week, the Street Fighter franchise celebrated its 30th birthday.