Finally got around to picking up the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary collection. This is the 4th or 5th collection of Street Fighter games ive purchased over the years, not counting stand alone titles, but this should be the last time! Other than a few specific version upgrades for the Alpha series and a couple remakes of SF2 titles, its pretty much as complete as its gunna get. Its a series I still love and always wins me over when ever I boot a title up. SF2: World Warrior is where it all got started, certainly for me, so I felt compelled to make some art focused on the classic roster.
MEMORY LANE
My specific earliest memories of SF2 are as follows:
1. Being part of a group of kids gathered around the World Warrior machine watching another kid complete the game with Blanka at a Dog Racing Track while on vacation.
2. Pouring over either the EGM or Video Games & Compute Entertainment magazine with SF2 cover stories. I felt like I had discovered gold when I saw the cover art of the magazine at a grocery store. At this point I had only seen the game for one weekend and this propelled my obsession.
3. Renting the SNES version of World Warrior and being baffled by the move list. Once I could achieve firing off a Hadoken, my brother complained that those moves are cheating, “its like being able to punch someone from across the room”.
Ive been progressing thru each game on the Collection; completing the single player mode with Ryu. SF1 is quite charming and has really wonderful stage art. Its incredible the jump from SF1 to the SF2 however. Its fun to be able to easily see and control all the differences with each iteration of SF2. Simple things like the changing color schemes on the stages feels exciting, or how and when they update character portraits and ending art. Its also a nice reminder that Super Turbo arcade has really jacked up A.I. difficulty by default. May have to come back to that one later and progress onto Alpha 1 because I dont feel I will be making a lot of progress anytime soon.
I sampled some online play and was quickly dispatched in each SF iteration I played. I fared the best in Super Turbo, but was absolutely squarshed in SF3: Third Strike. The last time I played those online was over the original Xbox Live via the 15th Anniversary collection, so, a bit rusty — but, the thrill was still there.
