[h1]Street Fighter 1[/h1]
Do I have to talk about this?
I mean, this game is...
I really don't want to.
And there are other games to mention, you know.
So, moving on.
[h1]Street Fighter 2[/h1]
There are 5 different versions of Street Fighter 2 included here, and honestly they're not that different from a casual perspective besides later ones having more characters and introducing supers and stuff. The CPU in arcade mode is a dirty cheater but you can ever [i]quite[/i] prove it, and sometimes it almost certainly must be reading your inputs or it'll just decide it wants to throw you for 4000% damage and you just have to take it, but at the same time it falls easily to some random cheese if you can just figure out how to break the AI. Special moves are a little more awkward to pull off than they'd be in a modern fighting game, but honestly it's not as hard as I remember and Fireballs and Dragon Punches were actually pretty consistent. I can only pull off a Chicken Wing some of the time, and genuinely when I was deciding what characters to use in arcade mode part of my pros and cons consideration was "This character, unlike the others, does not have a super" because the input is so impossible for some of them (But I will not be naming names in order to protect the identity of Guile) that it practically doesn't exist, but the basic stuff you'd need all the time worked better than I expected, and, I mean, overall, the game is still neat and probably worth going through if you're buying this anyway.
[h1]Fine, I'll talk about the earliest Street Fighter[/h1]
It's time to talk about Street Fighter Alpha, known as Zero in Japan, ostensibly making it the first Street Fighter chronologically. [spoiler](It isn't actually, and Street Fighter 1 is still first, apparently, but shh, it ruins the joke if we acknowledge that)[/spoiler]
This is a game I'd never played before or, you know, had heard of before playing this collection to be honest, but I was pleasantly surprised by it, and it has a way more modern feel to it than a lot of old games in terms of input recognition and presentation and stuff. If you had asked me to guess, I would have said this was newer than Street Fighter 3, but no, apparently Alpha is from 1995 and 3 from 1997. The biggest sign of this game's age is the lack of dashes, but besides that I'd be hard pressed to guess when this came from. When I was going for the achievements for playing online and stuff, I genuinely considered playing Alpha just because I kind of liked it, though I ultimately went with 3 because I figured it would probably be more popular and easier to find opponents in.
[h1]Okay, okay, there's a game that just HAS to be discussed.[/h1]
Obviously, I can't just [i]not[/i] talk about Street fighter 3, one of the most legendary entries in the franchise, so let's just hop in.
I bought this collection purely for 3rd Strike and the 11 other games were just extra in my mind, and, I mean, 3rd Strike is just a good game and still a reasonably popular tournament game to this day, and it's a super easy recommend, but specifically, there are parries, and parries are great because they mean stuff like anti-airs are never completely guaranteed, and if you can just guess the specific timing it's coming, you'll be able to parry it. This doesn't mean you should just jump in at random, you'll still more often than not get hit, but just having the option to go for it and for it to maybe work is nice. Or honestly, any obvious play just becomes more manageable with parries, and nothing is that safe, that cheap, that undefeatable so long as you can parry it, or at the very least, it feels that way when you go for the parry against Alex's ridiculous EX Air Stampede or something and still get hit anyway because you ain't good enough to actually parry that on reaction in a real fight, but, still, some part of your brain knows that you COULD have, and you're not left asking "What was I even supposed to do there?" but you have your answer.
I mean, there are some downsides to this game, too, and it's kind of strict and personally I feel air attacks have way too little hitstun and it's ridiculous sometimes trying to combo after a jumping attack, and way too many Dragon Punches and the like have almost no recovery time once they hit the ground making punishing them very much a matter of "What's the matter, bro, don't you know the split second timing on that?" but at least these are issues where it feels like if I was better at the game I wouldn't be having problems, and I know that you CAN combo from a jumping attack or punish the things that Ken does in theory.
[h1]The game that started it all in the first place[/h1]
Okay, okay, you got me, this is where I should have started and I'm sorry I've been putting it off. We need to talk about the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection as a whole, and obviously we can't reasonably bust out arcade cabinets to play these old games, and so it wouldn't even be possible to talk about them in the first place here without rereleases.
First off, the game allows you to save at any time in arcade mode in any of the games present, meaning if you're trying to beat Street Fighter 2 nigh flawlessly in order to face Akuma or something, you don't have to tear your hair out because the cheating AI makes that a Herculean effort, but instead you can just cheat right back and keep replaying the same interaction until you win, and that alone is a huge gigantic plus right there.
The training mode is a little bare bones, and it has the basic features you'd want like dummy settings and stuff but is missing some of the more advanced stuff like hitbox display. I also find using the record and replay functions to be a little bit clunky, but it's generally good enough to get the job done even if it isn't smooth the whole time.
Regarding online play, I only really checked for 3rd Strike, but from what I saw and as of this writing, the playerbase seems to be to be sparse but not completely absent. There were definitely times when I couldn't find anybody else playing, but there were also times when I was able to get a decent number of matches in a row, and maybe if you plan around peak play times, you'll do all right, though there were certainly instances of "Come on, it's Sunday afternoon, where is everybody?" and it was enough to make me think that maybe going for that achievement for reaching a high enough rank was probably impractical.
There are a few things I feel the Steam description could have explained better, so for the record, the games present are:
Street Fighter (i.e., Street Fighter 1)
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
Street Fighter II: Champion Edition
[b]Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting[/b]
Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers
[b]Super Street Fighter II Turbo[/b]
Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams
Street Fighter Alpha 2
[b]Street Fighter Alpha 3[/b]
Street Fighter III: New Generation
Street Fighter III: 2nd Impact - Giant Attack
[b]Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike - Fight For The Future[/b]
Of these games, only the ones written in bold can be played online. These are also the only ones you can practice in training mode for some reason.
All of the games have offline arcade mode present, and all of the games can be played in local versus multiplayer.
When the Steam description mentions "online Arcade Mode", what it means is that instead of just staring at some text saying "Searching for opponent", you can play in arcade mode while you wait and fight the AI while the game searches for a match in the background. When one is found, you'll automatically be taken there.
[h1]Quit twisting my arm, I'll go back to Street Fighter 1 already[/h1]
I guess there's no avoiding it, huh? And I have to discuss Street Fighter 1 as best I can, so the thing is--what's that? I'm at the length limit for reviews? Oh well, looks like as much I'd love to discuss it, it's out of my hands now. Bye.
