Street Fighter: Anniversary Collection
Score: 85% ESRB: Teen Publisher: Capcom Developer: Capcom Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 - 2 Genre: Fighting/ Online
Graphics & Sound: Street Fighter: Anniversary Collection isn’t quite the compilation most people are looking for. It only contains Street Fighter III: Third Strike and five different versions of Street Fighter II. While there are many gaps that could have been filled with other variants of these games, the developers at least spent the effort to make them look good. Street Fighter III is arcade perfect, what with the fluid animations and sharp graphics. The same can almost be said for the Street Fighter II games if it wasn’t for a slight drop in frame rates, but only those who lived in front of the arcade game will be able to detect any difference. The sounds follow much the same pattern as the graphics. Street Fighter III’s bells and whistles are pulled off without a hitch. There are no problems with timing and things sound clear and crisp. Again, Street Fighter II falls a bit short of the mark, but not by much. There are some glitches with tracks switching prematurely, and the default musical score is beyond sub-par. Thankfully, you can choose to listen to the original soundtrack if you so desire. The final major flaw with SF2 is the announcer. Arguably the most annoying announcer is used and there is no option to switch this around.
Gameplay: Street Fighter: Anniversary Collection is a misleading title. It implies an anniversary of all the Street Fighter games, but in reality it only contains a single untouched arcade port of Street Fighter III: Third Strike. The other Street Fighter II games aren’t really pure SF2. Five iterations of the old arcade game have been lumped together in a single playable experience called Street Fighter II: Hyper. This may serve to please the casual Street Fighter fans, but purists will definitely feel they have been cheated. The good news first: Street Fighter III: Third Strike is a great port, and probably the best rendition of the Street Fighter III arcade game. Capcom wanted something new and fresh with the third installment of their classic fighter, so they scrapped most of the old recognizable characters and added a whole slew of new fighters for players to master. Though the old characters will be sorely missed, the game offers some very interesting people to fight with, and it still retains classics like Ryu, Ken, Akuma, and Chun-Li. Third Strike isn’t just a template reconstruction of the old SF2 games. It has new features like selectable super moves for each character, which must be chosen before each match. Learning what super move to use on which character adds some good depth to the strategy of this 2D fighter. There is also a new parrying system that, when mastered, dramatically changes the game. Now for the bad news. At first, it may seem like the Anniversary Collection comes packed with five different versions of SF2. But in reality, the original SF2 and four of its variants are squashed together to make, in essence, one more Street Fighter II variation. Though you are able to pit characters from different SF2 games against each other, it would have been nice to have been given each of the games separately so they could be enjoyed in all their original glory. There is even more bad news. There is no sign of the original Street Fighter. With a name like Anniversary Collection, you’d think that there would be lots of nostalgia shoved into the box. Instead, you get a quickly assembled array of games that won’t introduce the new player to the SF series properly, and may even turn away the hardcore fan. The one redeeming quality of all this is that both games can be played online, and since the Japanese version has been out for a while, there’s no shortage in online players.
Difficulty: The pattern in Street Fighter: Anniversary Collection does not stop yet. Third Strike is a well balanced game and can be picked up by new players who can learn the ropes with just a small amount of effort. There is also a training mode that allows you to work on your moves as well as perfecting the parrying system, a very useful tool indeed. Hyper Edition goes awry here though. The default difficulty is so hard that even veterans may want to tone it down a bit. The computer executes its moves with scary precision, and often thwarts even your best efforts to escape from its throws (T-Hawk is especially bad). Hyper Edition also suffers from poor explanations in the instruction book. None of the five variants of SF2 are explained at all, leaving it up to guess work for the new player to figure it all out.
Game Mechanics: Both games in Street Fighter: Anniversary Collection can be controlled with either the D-pad or the joystick on the Xbox controller. Third Strike is the luckier of the two again, as it seems more responsive than Hyper Edition. The old Xbox controller is not recommended to be used in any game, but it is especially difficult to use here. In Third Strike, you can gradually figure out the technique needed to pull off the moves, but in Hyper Edition, it’s a chore to even execute a fireball. On the plus side, the old controller’s buttons are laid out in a similar way to that of the arcade buttons, but this does little to alleviate the pain of the overall design. If you can get past all of the annoyances in Anniversary Collection and really look for the one good thing it’s got, what you’ll find is a great port of Third Strike. All the other stuff is just fluff, even the censored version of the “Street Fighter: Animated Movie,” and won’t keep you occupied like Street Fighter III will. If you loved Third Strike in the arcades, you’ll love Anniversary Edition. If you’re looking for a great compilation of everything Street Fighter, you may want to hold out for something better in the future.
-Snow Chainz, GameVortex Communications AKA Andrew Horwitz
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