Retro Reviews from Memory
Welcome to a new segment where I review my favorite childhood games from memory, go back and play the game. Then revise my opinion because, let’s face it, some of those games from the 80’s and 90’s just don’t hold up. The Score above is provisional. I’ll be back (probably, maybe, like… solid 25% chance)* after I play the game again and write a new review and link it to this post.
Enough of the preamble… on with the review!
Ok. So first, just a little side rant. When the SNES came out every god damn title had “Super” in it. Super Metroid. Super Castlevania. Super F-Zero. Ok, I made that last one up, but you get the point. I was pretty happy that Street Fighter II didn’t have SUPER attached to it, until it did. But by that point I guess they had progressed through standard street fighter II… to the turbo version… to the champion edition… So I suppose by the time they added the SUPER moniker it really did fit the bill. In any case, we’re here to talk about the sequel to the game that started it all.
This was the best fighting game on the SNES. Sorry Mortal Wombat** fan boys. You were so excited by the gore you let them get away with shitty controls. Street Fighter II, on the other hand, had perfectly intuitive controls and impeccable timing for each of the 6 basic attacks you could use. Even the special attacks for each character were well aligned with their unique timing and hit boxes. The only special attack I found to be hit or miss on the timing was Zangief’s spinning piledriver. Even against a defenseless, unmanned, player 2 controller I couldn’t pull it off more than 33% of the time. It may have been a skill issue, but I think it was also a bit of a finicky input scheme because of how much damage it did when you pulled it off. Overall, Zangief, was my least favorite character but that doesn’t mean he was a “bad guy” as we learned in Wreck it Ralph.
I had fun playing against my friends with any of the characters and, when I would babysit, the kids used to like to pick my character for me vs their siblings. I ended up playing a LOT of Zangief. He was sort of their anti-hero. That, along with a damage handicap, meant they could beat up on the babysitter pretty consistently. All in good fun though.
The last thing I’ll mention is this game had a nearly perfect intersection of arcade dominance and console translation. Most arcade games translated poorly to the snes but this one absolutely kicked ass on every front.
Here’s my Super Street Fighter II Tier Ranking
S Tier
Ken/Ryu
A Tier
Chun Li
B Tier
Guile
C Tier
Blanka
D Tier
E. Honda
E Tier
Dahlsim
F Tier
Zangief
Disclaimer(s)
*We should probably keep in mind that, when I was a kid, we didn’t have much money for games. Where others may have experienced the “rent before you buy” phenomena… that wasn’t really a thing in our house. I saved up babysitting money for an entire summer to buy the SNES. If we were doing well, I might get a single game for Christmas or my birthday, but they were almost always used from the swap meet or new from the discount bin. We didn’t have gamestop or many used game store options at the time. In any case, a LOT of my historical game memories are based on a rental window period that had to align with money, time (I had school, sports, occasionally a girlfriend, and a few part time jobs to juggle with my gaming habit), and whether my save file still existed when i rented the game a second time (assuming it was even available). Some games I didn’t play in their entirety until I got to college and had a tiny bit more money and a teensy bit fewer obligations. Which is to say, these reviews are patchwork at best. But let me know in the comments if you want me to replay any of these games and do a revised opinion review!
**Mortal Kombat basically was every character using the same moveset animations, a couple wonky specials, then all the dev effort went into needlessly complex “fatality” maneuvers that pretty much did nothing for your victory since you’d already won by the time you could enter the control stick/button sequence. No, don’t ask me to play and review Mortal Kombat. I tried it in the 90’s. It sucks. I won’t.
