Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight (1990)

Beat in slow motion mode. The 1st stage was less stage and more boss arena with infinite respawning little flying enemies. I got my ass kicked until I looked up the controls and put the effort in to learn and work around them. The guy shot a flurry of blows straight ahead or straight up at close range while standing still, or straight behind while clinging to something. The shots eventually went the full length of the screen with power ups but this reach was partially lost upon taking damage. Holding down while shooting did a kind of diagonal up attack, and only a single shot could be fired during any jump. That is 1 single projectile total from the moment you left the ground until landing. Then the only way to hit downwards was to jump, press the opposite direction that you were facing to perform a backflip then attack to shoot 1 single shot straight down while in mid air. So the controls here defied pretty much every 2D platformer ever by making attacking and jumping at the same time particularly bad, and made combat more difficult than it needed to be. I played it slow and steady by preferring the simple directions where turbo could put out a lot of damage, and rarely did any kind of offensive jumping. If I had to jump it was better to evade the enemies. I had to do a lot of save state scumming to win, including minimizing damage taken so I could keep my reach. The fights were much easier with reach with some bosses even dying in seconds. Not every stage was a boss arena. Some were proper auto scrolling levels, some had no boss, and some were more like single screen simple bonuses. I didn't like this game at first but it grew on me a bit once I was powered up. Still not a good game. Would be much better without the restrictions on shooting.

6.2/10