I don’t remember many games magazines front pages from my childhood, but one that stuck was a Commodore Format cover with a picture of scales weighing a bundle of Commodore 64 games against one console game – which would you buy for £64? The console game in question turns out to have been Street Fighter II Turbo for the SNES, but I just remembered it as being Street Fighter II. Commodore Format had successfully pegged anyone like me using the Commodore 64 as their main games format in 1994 as not the richest around, and in my head, Street Fighter II was the epitome of the glamorous, unobtainable and exclusionary console game. This impression was only enhanced by coming into contact with the arcade version, a dramatic riot of colour and force seen mostly, patiently, in demo mode, and on rare and exciting occasions in full effect with someone else’s huge old 50 pence coin in.
For those not wishing to pay console prices or to stuck with the Commodore 64, there was a middle way. The Amiga version of Street Fighter II came priced at £27.99 and offered an approximation of Street Fighter II to play at home without a console. Better still, it recognisably looks like the same game, a long way from the seeping spectral mess of Ghosts’n’Goblins, a previous UK #1 that was also a Capcom arcade/console game converted for home computers
Street Fighter II on the Amiga with its 32 colours does look a touch washed out, like everything’s been out in the sunshine a bit too long, but the spectacle remains intact. Its versions of the original music of Yoko Shimomura (Street Fighter II’s other female pioneer) aren’t bad. Its world-spanning roster of fighters and their match-ups are as larger-than-life as ever, and watching people play it well would be up there with the dramatic experience of the arcade.
Rather than attract mode spectacle and the odd game, though, the Amiga being in people’s homes meant Street Fighter II actually being played a lot, and that’s where its problems come in. The biggest problem is the same one Ed discussed for the home computer version of Renegade: translating a control scheme designed for pads with six buttons to joysticks with one button is an inevitable road to horrible compromise. Good luck trying to do all of the different strength punches and kicks of the original. And even more so, good luck trying to do the special moves.
I am not a good Street Fighter player. I reached the barest standard of being able to win a couple of games online on Street Fighter IV, playing as an unpopular character, against fellow early 3DS owners. I don’t think that improving further would require skills that different from those that make me good at Sensible Soccer, but I never got beyond that low level. Even I can tell, though, that there is something very wrong with how the Amiga Street Fighter II plays. It shouldn’t be this hard for me to pull anything off, and it’s not just my timing that’s off as its animations jerk. And those things, beyond anything else, are the most important to how it actually plays. The result of its failings is a conversion which doesn’t differ itself enough from the original to turn itself into a different game, but which nonetheless is revealed by anything beyond a quick glance to be clearly inferior.
Still, players could spend their remaining £36 on some games actually designed for the Amiga and, on balance, come out alright.
Microbyte Amiga chart, The One, February 1993
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