Street Fighter Alpha Anthology
Score: 80% ESRB: Teen Publisher: Capcom Developer: Capcom Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 - 2 Genre: Fighting
Graphics & Sound: Back in the early 90’s, Capcom was riding on the still extremely high success of its line of Street Fighter II games. They decided to try a new type of fighting game, one with a more anime look and faster, more varied gameplay. This game would eventually become Street Fighter Alpha and its two sequels. The entire Alpha line has been put together in one package with Street Fighter Alpha Anthology. The title contains Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold, and Street Fighter Alpha 3. Also included is Pocket Fighter, a cute little fighter featuring Street Fighter and Darkstalkers characters in a cutesy, super-deformed art style. The games included in Anthology haven’t been messed with in any way. So we’re talking about 2D sprite-based graphics that are often over ten years old. The strength of the original art still shows its power as the games’ visuals are still very appealing. Each game also features an increasingly large assortment of stage backgrounds, usually one or more for each character. With character counts nearing the 30's in Alpha 3, this means there are far more stage backgrounds than most contemporary fighters, either 2D or 3D, can boast. The art isn’t as good as say, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, but still holds its own. The audio is classic Street Fighter fare. All the crazy voice acting and battle screams are there. With each stage sporting its own theme, there’s plenty of variety in the music as well. Ken’s stages have always been my personal favorite.
Gameplay: I’m going to keep this simple. If you have no idea what the gameplay of an Alpha game is like, you probably don’t care about picking up Anthology anyway. Thought it sounds odd, like most of these classic compilations, you want this game if you’ve played these games already. What you really care about is how well these games have been ported to the PlayStation 2. As far as presentation and the technical stuff goes, I never noticed any odd anomalies or slowdown issues. These are clean ports and have been done well. Do these games play well with the PlayStation 2 controller? Well enough. Its not like being in the arcade with a joystick and the D-pad takes some getting used too, but if you consider yourself a hardcore fan of the fighter genre, you have your own joystick controller by now anyway.
Difficulty: Each of the five games offered in Anthology boasts a highly customizable difficulty setting with at least eight settings - not that you’ll be playing single player much anyway. Like all fighters, the real fun is to be had in 2 player mode, so the difficulty is left up to the caliber of your friends (or enemies).
Game Mechanics: Okay, I said if you care about Street Fighter Alpha Anthology at all, you’re familiar with these games already, but I guess you might not know too much about Pocket Fighter. Pocket Fighter plays like a highly simplified Street Fighter game. Most characters have the same types of special attacks that they do in their normal games, with the same motions, but everyone only has one punch button, one kick button, and a special button. Different combinations of these allow you to perform things like grabs and combos. Another key element to Pocket Fighter are the gems. Each character has three primary special attacks that they can power up by collecting gems that appear in the fighting area through various means. As an example, a level one Ryu fireball is very small and will hit the enemy once. A level three fireball is extremely wide and will cause multiple hits to your opponent if you connect directly with it. If you don’t like the Street Fighter Alpha series, you obviously won’t want to buy Street Fighter Alpha Anthology. But since you’re reading this, you probably do and I can tell you, it is worth the money. My only beef is this - if you want to stand out as a collection of older games, you should throw in some extra features like interviews etc. - something that Anthology lacks.
-Alucard, GameVortex Communications AKA Stephen Triche
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