Street Fighter (1987)

Even the most diehard Street Fighter fans will say that the original game is far more interesting for what it sets up than what it actually is. Capcom's first attempt at a fighting game is rough, to say the least, with collision extremely spotty, special moves seemingly happening at chance sometimes, and matches that can end in five seconds or less.

I had played Street Fighter before, but I could usually only testing it out for a round or two before giving up. But this time, I finally powered through, and I can honestly say the only thing that got me through was pure blind luck. This is the definition of a button-masher when it comes to fighting games, and I found myself just hoping that I'd get lucky with each new round. But the game is so awkward and hard to control that even though I'm glad I finally beat the game, I didn't really have any fun with it.

Again, the best part about this is what it sets up for future Street Fighter games. There are little elements here and there that would be brought over to the far superior Street Fighter II, like the plane flying around the map, and also the appearance of some characters that would become mainstays. There are also the little challenges that pop up after a few rounds, which also aren't particularly that fun.

As a Street Fighter fan for as long as I can remember, I enjoyed this more as a piece of history than as an actual game, which was not a pleasant experience by a long shot. But hey, at least I've finally finished the first Street Fighter.

Haha yeah, this one was as bad as I had feared it would be.

I am a total novice to fighting games, only having real experience from beat 'em ups and some Kirby mini games. But after giving this title a genuine try, and comparing it to Street Fighter 2 on my 30th Anniversary Collection, I still feel that I confidently can say that this is a broken mess.

I succeeded in beating 8 of the 10 fighters in the campaign of the game playing as Ryu (who, by the way, is the only playable character apart from Ken), but admitted defeat after failing to even win one match against Adon after 50 or so tries. The main idea of having fist and kicking moves with different power is actually kinda good, but the normal attacks barely do a scratch on the enemies. Meanwhile, they do absurd amounts of damage just by regular attacks, making close combat far from worthwhile.

Instead, you only have a decent chance of winning by doing any of the combo attacks, preferably the two that shoots fireballs. 2 Hadouken attacks are enough to eat up more than 80% of health on all opponents. The fun thing is that this game is infamous for inconsistency in actually being able to pull the specials off. I maybe managed to do Hadouken for 40% of the times, and the rate didn't increase with playtime, implying input problems inherent to the programming.

To get the full experience, I also played a couple of local co-op matches with my better half. Neither of us really enjoyed the combat system, and quickly moved on to a couple of matches in Street Fighter III instead out of pure boredom.

I don't know how hard one should be on a title such as this one. While I acknowledge that it is a pioneer in a genre not even remotely popular as of 1987, I can't close my eyes to the fact that there are so many more enjoyable games released around this time. While I haven't played them, I would guess that Double Dragon and Punch Out from the same year are fighting-focused games that do not put the original Street Fighter in a good light.

If I take something positive with me, is that I am more excited than ever to delve deeper into the fighting game genre now. It can't get much worse than this after all.

Everyone knows this game is trash. It may have gone on to spawn the franchise that defined the whole fighting game genre, but its first entry is more or less a worse version of Yie-Ar Kung Fu. I have no shame in admitting that I set this to the easiest difficulty, saved states after every round victory, and got through almost entirely by spamming Ryu's extremely fidgety but very powerful specials. I even beat Sagat with a shoryuken, which I think is canon.

I'm playing this (and the the rest of the SF series up through 3rd Strike) in the 30th Anniversary Collection on Steam, but I'm logging them separately for historical purposes.

Street Fighter is a bit of a forgotten step, a building block to the Street Fighter II that would define fighting games from then on forward. That said, there are some bits that this entry starts up with that may make up for the incredibly rough edges.

The player may be either Ken or Ryu but both play the same moves. There is an eight directional joystick, three punch buttons, and three kick buttons. The player can jump, crouch, block by pulling away, and do three special techniques, all of which are particularly powerful and can trivialize some battles if the player learns them.

The player can battle either 2 player or battle ten opponents in a single player mode. The challenge is relatively limited as 2-player consists of characters with the same movesets and AI can range from simple to insane in terms of strength. Mastering the special moves are key, and even then players might have a really rough time.

The soundtrack is a little forgettable, having exciting blurps and beeps but not necessarily with the same catchiness as its sequels. The sprites and backgrounds are also simple, if not a little ugly in terms of character designs. Nothing really stands out except some of the later character designs (Birdie, Eagle, Adon, Sagat) who would be used in later entries.

Street Fighter builds a moveset that would be mastered in later entries but is rough to play and a bit too simple in the multiplayer department to get a lot of fun out of.

This message on boot was my favorite part of the game

Minigames in Street Fighter are simple but cool ideas. What a cheesy scene this is!

Many elements of the game carry over. It overall feels like a beta or early state of SFII

This element looks like Final Fight

This is an overall silly game. The controls are not very responsive and the AI is quite whack. Once you learn your any of the THREE combo moves you basically can spam them until the final boss, Sagat! The games main merits though are the digitized voice sampling. We're talking rather thick Japanese accented pronunciation of words (truly a crime). The credits song is also pretty impressive, and the rendered backgrounds aren't half bad. Having six different attacks is also pretty neat, a shame you just don't have much control over them for whatever reason.

Playing this makes one appreciate the technical improvements of the CPS-1. While a very dated machine, it's light years beyond this thing.