The Game That Spawned a Genre

Even the most casual gamer who has never played anything more than the occasional round of Bejeweled has heard of Street Fighter II. Like the fighting tournament it's based upon, the game is fraught with feuds, rivalries, a massive cast of characters, and a steady evolution to produce the sharpest, toughest fighter in the land.

Street Fighter® II' Hyper Fighting, Xbox Live® Marketplace's featured version, is the latest, most logical progression of this historic fighter, putting it back in the hands of a global arena.

These two just don't like each other.

In 1987 Capcom released the first Street Fighter, designed by Yoshiki Okamoto (whose credits include Time Pilot, designed against his employer's instructions, and Gyruss) and an uncommon fighting game that pitted players against each other in hand-to-hand fighting when most arcade fighters had a character march sideways through a scrolling field filled with enemies to beat up.

Joystick Revolution
Street Fighter , a modest success, featured selectable fighters and variable punching, kicking, and special move attacks which formed the basis of their monumental breakout Street Fighter II, released in 1991. To the observer, Street Fighter II featured more selectable fighters, including enemy characters from the first game, and a large array of six buttons laid out next to the joystick, a move in the opposite direction of typical arcade design, which focused on simplicity.

Players could throw punches and kicks of varying lethality, from fast, light strikes to slower moving (and easier to block) blows. The original game had only used a single button for a punch or kick, demanding the player hold the button for varying lengths to select attacks.

Blanka has a powerful electrical attack.

The true innovation of Street Fighter II, more than its cast of characters or global fighting arenas, was entirely under the hood—the new CPS2 hardware board the game was built around could scan the controls faster than ever before, allowing the onscreen characters to respond to the player's moves to within tenths of a second with no lag in reaction time.

For the first time, the game was faster than the player, which meant that when player faced off against player, the game wasn't responsible for slowing either of them down or getting in the way. Players honed their attacks to such precision and complexity that they were timed down to individual frames of character animation.

It's as blisteringly fast as you remember it
in the arcades twenty years ago, and adds
a few wrinkles to pump up the tension.

Combination attacks and "juggling"—knocking a character into the air and beating them up while in midair and vulnerable—could overwhelm a novice player and render them totally helpless.

Signature Style
The signature style has been imitated by dozens of clones, copies, and competitors, but none are as memorable or as recognized as the original. Entire websites are devoted to the dozens of releases of Street Fighter II alone as well as its sequels, with every tweak, adjustment, addition, and evolution. The key elements of the game have always been a cast of selectable fighters, each distinctly different in nationality, with a unique fighting style and selection of moves and attacks—from Ryu and Ken's karate, to Zangief's wrestling, to Chun-Li's Tai-chi and kung-fu.

Hand-drawn artwork for all of the characters depict a stylized, almost comic-book feel to every single frame of every attack, giving every move a flashy, dynamic action.

Special attacks are another Street Fighter signature—a mark of a player's prowess was the ability to execute these moves with greater lethality, which involved rapidly tapping in a sequence of button or joystick presses of varying complexity. Each of the characters featured a rich backstory, establishing their motives for entering the tournament and their rivalries with the other fighters.

Choose fighters and arenas from all around the world.

The arenas in which the characters fought were as distinctive in nationality and flavor as the fighters themselves, with animated backdrops setting the fighters against each other in Japanese bathhouses, Chinese marketplaces, American airstrips, Russian military bases, and Indian temples, among others.

Landmark Franchise
Street Fighter II exploded in arcades, and between all of its spinoffs and sequels the game has made more money in twenty years than Jurassic Park made in theatres, twenty five cents at a time. The game has spawned prequels, sequels, 3-D versions, and spinoff crossovers, pitting the characters of Street Fighter against the combatants of rival developer SNK's Fatal Fury and other games, Marvel's X-Men and other superheroes, and pretty much anyone else who's thrown a punch or picked up a weapon.

Imitations and evolutions included Midway's Mortal Kombat, which featured live human characters digitally scanned into the game and gory, violent finishing ("fatality") moves which caught the attention and anger of concerned parents, senators, and the mass media Several animated movies, videos, and television series have been based on Street Fighter, and action figures, toys, keychains, puzzles are just the top of the merchandising mountain built on the game.

A live-action feature film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile and Raul Julia as Bison was perhaps the least successful attempt to cash in on Street Fighter's popularity and spawned perhaps the most peculiar spinoff—a Street Fighter: The Movie arcade and home game featuring digitized versions of the film's actors playing the fighters. It was a video game representation of a movie representation of a video game. Like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, the game was muddy, unclear, and failed to impress anyone.

Best-Seller in Xbox Live Arcade
Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting is the latest version of the game, and brings the 2-D fighter to its ultimate expression—on the fastest home console in the world, linked up to a worldwide network of players ready to fight their way up the global rankings. The game has ventured into online territory before in a few different iterations, including the Xbox® game Capcom vs. SNK 2: E.O., and Marvel vs. Capcom 2. They were met with mixed reaction from both critics and players—for a game based on microsecond reactions and sophisticated timing of attacks, the slightest lag in online communication can turn the game into an exercise in pure frustration.

With the game brought to Xbox 360 in gorgeous high-definition graphics and with online code tightly optimized to exploit the high-speed broadband arena of Xbox Live, Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting is as blisteringly fast as you remember it in the arcades twenty years ago, and adds a few wrinkles to pump up the tension.

The Xbox Live Quickmatch and Optimatch systems work well here, where players get a provisional ranking until they've played twenty online matches against various opponents, at which point they can be accurately matched up with opponents of appropriately challenging skill. Xbox Live leaderboards show players in the same ranking bracket as yourself, as well as showing who the toughest fighter in the entire world is. With a little practice, some good combo moves, and a lot of guts and perseverence, that title could be yours.

Article by Xbox Addict