Street Fighter II Portable

Street Fighter II Portable | 25,1 Mb

The number of permutations of Street Fighter 2 is one of gaming’s oldest punchlines. Though the joke still has teeth due to plain old nostalgia, savvy gamers now realize that the arcade revisions of Street Fighter added important tweaks and upgrades (and the console versions were various attempts at porting them to limited hardware).

This slow burn through the 90’s finally culminated with Super SF2 Turbo, the last major revision and a game still played today in the tournament scene thanks to its familiarity and balance. The fact that fighting game fans won’t let go of Street Fighter 2 is a testament to its quality, and is the justification for why Capcom chose to make yet another major revision after years of silence. SF2 HD Remix (the full name is much too long) is a landmark release in the series, made exactly the way it should be at this point in the series’ life.

If it seems strange to you that Capcom has invested so much into Street Fighter 2 in 2008, you aren’t crazy. Aside from the fact that SF4 is primed to make a big splash in 2009, we must also consider that sometime around the turn of the century, Capcom ceded to the competition, essentially (not completely) halting creation of new 2d fighting games, instead keeping the older flames alive through various ports and compilation discs.

But today’s Capcom is a different beast. They remain among the top developers/publishers in the world due to good original games and early mastery of next gen hardware. More importantly for the fate of Street Fighter, they have also been one of the few companies that does not look at the community and plug their fingers in their ears. They know what we want and what we are doing, and respond to it with something other than lawsuits. Their recent spat of classic revivals has been filled with loving nods to the fans and plenty of communication about their creation; fortunately Capcom hasn’t been hampered by unnecessary overthought of what should and shouldn’t constitute a modern game.



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