Monday, 04 June 2007

• "It's Street Fighter meets Mortal Kombat! It'll blow them kids' minds!"

  That's right, it's the game even Capcom won't acknowledge existed: Street Fighter: The Movie, err, the game, featuring a bastardized gameplay engine, Genesis-level sound design and grainy digitized graphics from the 1995 feature film. And plenty of blood, mind you. Yep, let's hear it for bad ideas.

  

  Alright, so here's the deal. The mid-90s were a troubled time for the Street Fighter franchise and its fighting game compatriots. Street Fighter II had come along and more or less invented the genre back in 1991, and the original Mortal Kombat, complete with gory combos and ridiculously violent "Fatalities," had turned simple video games into a national epidemic in the eyes of many a scant year later. Thus, a genre that had operated in relative obscurity for years prior had suddenly ushered in a new golden age for arcades.

  For a glorious five-year period, the genre had literally been at the forefront of arcade technology: the aforementioned Mortal Kombat, obviously, had ushered in an all-new graphical style; Mortal Kombat II, released a year later, had come with the most advanced sound system of any arcade cabinet in history; Sega had released the first 3D fighting game, Virtua Fighter, in 1994; and Midway's Killer Instinct had become the first arcade title shipped with an internal hard disk in 1995, capable of generating eyeball-melting pseudo-3D graphics.

  

  But by 1995, the incredible fighting game boom created by Street Fighter II had all but ended. People no longer lined city streets to put their manliness to the test as Ken or Ryu; the dismembered limbs and charred bodies of Mortal Kombat had created a frenzy, yes, but now seemed old hat. Both franchises still carried considerable pop culture clout, as evidenced by the big-budget theatrical releases of both Street Fighter (1994, universally maligned) and Mortal Kombat (1995, universally beloved), but things just weren't the same. So it was in this turbulent time period that the gaming giant directly responsible for the fighting game craze produced and released a cabinet they would later expunge from their popular mythology in its entirety. According to Capcom, this thing never happened.

  

  Now it's no surprise that Street Fighter: The Movie hit arcades with a whimper and disappeared shortly thereafter. Based on a movie everyone, including your mom, dad, sister, nephew, six-year-old cousin and Grover from Sesame Street has seen and declared the worst movie ever, it's a wonder this thing wasn't axed before it ever got out of the factory. Incidentally, while Capcom plastered their name all over the cabinet, they had virtually nothing to do with the game's development or design. Those tasks went to Incredible Technologies, once the U.S.'s largest developer of coin-operated videogames. Fittingly enough, once Capcom saw the mess they'd unwittingly shipped to vendors across the nation, they attempted to salvage what was left of their reputation by taking the game and totally redesigning it for the home console release (destined for both PlayStation and Saturn.) The results weren't much better.

  So it's a piss-poor game in nearly all respects. But hatred of Street Fighter: The Movie runs deeper than that. Not only does it take the revered Street Fighter brand and sully it with stale execution, something no one else had done before or since, but it also bastardizes the franchise's very soul by literally "Kombat"-izing the graphics, meanwhile adopting many of the controls and gameplay quirks of its main competitor, its longtime nemesis, its incessantly moronic rival, Mortal Kombat. Longtime fans were up in arms. Casual gamers just stayed the heck away.

  

  Still, much like the ill-fated movie the game was based on, Street Fighter: The Movie was conceived, designed, and created with only the best of intentions in mind. In fact, early on, its release was put limbo when conflict arose as to whether or not the game would ship under the name Street Fighter III as a bonafide continuation/upgrade to its legendary predecessor. Obviously, then, both Capcom and Incredible Technologies were banking on the fighter becoming their next big hit. And who could blame them? A direct tie-in to a big-budget action flick, a cast featuring some of the biggest names in the business (Van Damme, Julia), newfangled digitized graphics, and Capcom's immensely successful game engine as a starting point. What could go wrong?

  

  A whole lot, as it turns out. Here are some of the biggest complaints, in convenient bullet form:

  • Why on God's green beans don't Ryu and Ken utter Japanese phrases when performing their Hadoukens and Shoryukens? (There's only so many times you can hear Damien Chapa scream "Hurricane!" before you start to hate this game.)
  • Where the heck is Dhalsim? And Blanka? And T-Hawk? And Dee Jay? And who the **** is Sawada?
  • Blade must be the most uninspired fighting game character in the history of the genre. Ever.
  • Why is Akuma available in the character select screen? Shouldn't he be tucked away as a secret boss character, like he was in Super Street Fighter II Turbo?

  But these are relatively minor quibbles when compared with the game's glaringly bad gameplay, which is so hopelessly shallow it puts Fighter's History to shame. Basically, there are no "weak" or "strong" attacks -- relatively few moves have priority over others -- meaning the whole thing quickly comes off as a coma-inducing button-masher. Coupled with the game's oddball presentation, lacklustre game design and unresponsive controls, SF:TM has all the makings of a really bad arcade game. Then add a truckload of the sort of cringe-inducing notoriety only a disastrous movie license can provide, a few tablespoons of ill-conceived Mortal Kombat graphics, and a pinch of downright stupidity, and you've got one of the most maligned, hated, universally reviled fighting games ever to grace this Earth.

  In other words, the perfect companion to Steven de Souza's Street Fighter.

  

  And what of the positives? While other, less savoury characters would try to paint Street Fighter: The Movie as being entirely without merit, I'd stop a few nanometres short of that, mainly because of the web postings of a certain Alan Noon -- a humourous, well-versed, intelligent fellow who worked as an artist and co-designer on the title. Mr. Noon's thread at shoryuken.com goes a long way in explaining why SF:TM turned out the way it did. It's a bit longwinded at eighteen pages, but an endlessly fascinating account nonetheless. If you're a fan of the film like I am, an avid Street Fighter buff, or just a sucker for the tear-stained stories from the underbelly of 90s pop culture, you'll want to check this thing out. 

  And with that, my fellow Retro-Playbackers, I bid you adieu. As Raul Julia's wonderfully overacted M. Bison would say,

  "Game...OVAAARRRRRRRRRRR!!"

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