The second Street Fighter tournament is here - the global combat contest where the best fight in informal locations for the title of the world's best by defeating M Bison - the leader of the sinister Shadaloo. This year the competitors all bring their own agenda to the proceedings. Ryu joins for the purity of the fight - for the skill required to win. Ken enters for the same reason but brings more arrogance with him. E Honda is out to prove that sumo is more than just fat men pushing each other around while Zangief is out to prove that Russia is the home of the most powerful fighters. Brazilian monster Blanka is out to discover more about his past while others have more personal agendas. Guile's best friend Charlie was killed by Bison, Chun Li lost her father to Bison and Dhalsim seeks to stop Bison's reign and bring peace to his home country. Round 1 - FIGHT! Back at my parent's home in Northern Ireland they are cursed with a house that is now very empty thanks to their children (myself included) long time having become adults. The curse of this is not only the loss of family (to a point) but the amount of space they have so that my mother, already a hoarder, has suddenly no reason not to keep this and that around the house. So we tend to have lots of stuff from childhood still kicking around the place. Of course some things have fallen casualty to time (specifically a box of about 30 original Transformers toys and another box containing the Transformers comics from issue 40 until it stopped at issue 300-odd ; sadly all gone to charity shops many years before the 2007 film would have made me a nice little summer bonus on eBay). But I digress.
What we do still have are our original NES and SNES with all the games that we once played and when I occasionally do drop home the one I dust off is Street Fighter II on the SNES. My girlfriend recently commented that it looks "knackered" and she is right because the graphics do look busted and totally removed from the looks and sounds of similar modern games. However this is ignoring several things. Firstly, at one point, this was the "big" cutting edge arcade game that everyone wanted and, when I was of the video game age, this was how I saw it and experienced it. Secondly she forgets that I'm playing it now with the element of nostalgia thrown in.
These two things together continue to make the game appeal to me. It is an arcade classic and I love the fact that last week, despite not having played it for over 5 years, I was able to pull off the special moves etc from my youth. The game has a great retro soundtrack and fantastic sound effects they were great in the day and now they have an extra retro-cool effect, hell I love even hearing them sampled in tracks as they occasionally are. The game-play continues to be good and, although the default level is too easy for me even after all these years, I still get enjoyment and a challenge out of it.
A great game back in its day then but even now it is fun to play. Many sequels and variations followed but for me this is a great game that will only hurt me when my SNES eventually dies.
