What Went Wrong with Street Fighter 2 on the C64 | Nostalgia Nerd

[Music] street fighter 2 what a game what an event even before we'd seen slow cumbersome unsatisfying and often painful fighting games but here was a new competitor a competitor that seemingly had everyone hooked from the go in 1986 a new arcade game took over the world it was called street fighter and it really was the granddaddy of all beat em up street fighter 2 the world warrior arrived in japanese arcades in february 1991 and spread around the world like a pandemic building substantially on its 1987 predecessor we now had a wealth of players moves backgrounds fighting styles and combos because of this the contemporary systems of the time almost universally received ports the super nintendo seemed ideal for the colorful graphics and rapid gameplay especially when paired with nintendo's eight button pad arriving just over a year later which seemed like an age for most people at the time the snes port did not disappoint and even helped nintendo shift systems whilst sega were grinding their teeth on the sidelines but yet the following year both the snes and mega drive would receive the latest street fighter 2 iteration in the form of the turbo edition or special champion edition for sega's console but whilst gamers were knee-deep dishing out even faster combos on their 16-bit consoles us home computer owners just looked on we tried not to be jealous we tried to act like we didn't care like we had better games to play already but deep down we wanted a slice of that sweet sweet street fighter pie in fact we spent so long trying not to be jealous but most of us didn't even realize versions were released for our home micro yep 1992 had seen street fighter 2 released for the amiga atari st and even pc i mean they weren't great conversions especially the st port but they kind of looked the part and owners could just about grin and bear it pretending they were receiving the same experience as everyone else [Music] but in 1992 there was still commodore 64 and spectrum owners about yes i know this because i was one of them and although i caught glimpses of the game and the likes of commodore format tracking a copy down in shops was easier said than done but it's now 2019 and it's time to see exactly how the developers of this version creative materials manage to pack such an incredible game into the humble hardware of our 8-bit micros this is the commodore 64 version and from the outside it certainly looks the part i mean the artwork is right the box is nice what's on the back well apparently no screenshots whatsoever hmm interesting maybe they just wanted to pack as much information on here as possible there'd be no room for screenshots nothing to worry about but it does say gargantuan sprites and stunning fights the game the machines were made for alrighty then sounds good to me maybe a quick flick through the manual will help so here's the street fighter 2 manual and it covers all the home computer versions of the time including the amstrad cpc which was never actually released it's very generic stuff you'd expect from a simple manual we also get a roster of the characters including their date of birth height all the stuff you normally get on the console or arcade versions on the intro screens there's also a helpline which i think will probably be calling at some point [Music] okay let's load it up due to the limitations and spec of this machine some of the implementations contained in the manual may be incorrect well that's certainly not reassuring especially as there wasn't much in the manual anyway and look at that logo just look at it it hasn't even been cut out properly from whatever the source was we've got music and although it's actually the arcade character select music it's a reasonable enough rendition by dave lowe if a bit jolted and only what eight bars long i'm going to go for a single player game and leave the options as is for now we get the character select screen with wait a minute that's the title screen music now i presume attention to detail is a bit lacking here at least we get all the characters from the original i'm going to pick a blanker i usually go with either blanca or e honda because their moves are pretty easy to pull off oh look there's another poorly digitized image in fact they are all poorly digitized images it looks like they've got no eyes like some kind of sick horror film what follows is another session of loading and this is a long one seven minutes if you have the tape version best grab a cup of tea and settle down although it's not much better with the disc version it's also the first of many loads as each stage is loaded separately unlike the original fighters are always loaded in the same order the order they're stored on the tape or [Music] disk oh god that music isn't leaving us is it and look at the size of the fighters gargantuan my ass so the animation doesn't look atrocious although it's quite broken and jagged and e honda well he doesn't really seem to be doing much mate are you okay oh he did the background looks recognizable although there's no side to side scrolling it's just like we're playing street fighter but standing further away and not wearing our prescription glasses we do get a tiny bit of vertical scrolling though what's that about eight pixels worth four as we go from stage to stage nothing else really changes subsequent opponents don't really get harder they just tend to stand there flapping their arms if we go back and ramp the difficulty right up the challenge is still minimal it's like your opponents have been lobotomized it doesn't take long to realise you can just walk up to them and hit them until they fall down but hey this is street fighter 2 you can tell it's street fighter 2 just but let's take a look at the larger picture here well i say larger picture we literally play in half of the screen yep we have a raster split of 120 pixels with the top half dominated by information which is usually super imposed onto the game playing field you can tell that system memory and development time were likely issues here as we're treated to no less than the standard rom character set to convey all this information the sprites themselves are drawn in chunky multi-color mode which makes them hard to discern and good grief look at the size of that girl's head she looks like a bloaty head patient from theme hospital anyway yes everything here is rather raw rather basic and well i'm polished even the frames of animation are jarring as your player snaps from one pose to another in a blink of an eye or levitates in mid-air in the most nonchalant jump ever witnessed sometimes well often they'll stay there as well this bug happens all the time sometimes it looks cool like your opponent is standing on a piece of the background other times it's just irritating if we put all that aside and focus on gameplay how it feels then it's just lacking aside from the horrible joystick responses where you barely feel in control when you do land a punch it's completely devoid of satisfaction sometimes you can hit your opponent from a few meters away sometimes a punch up close will do nothing at all but regardless it never feels like you're doing anything and that's made worse by the single fire button to operate all moves though there are special moves but activating them is often just quite bizarre sometimes you need to do a different move first in order to activate another one and by the time you've managed to pull it off the likelihood is it'll just pass straight through your opponent without a scratch in fact i found it easier to do special moves using keyboard controls but that isn't ideal for a fighting game the whole experience leaves you feeling empty waiting for stage after stage to load in for 15 seconds of fighting is a bit like waiting for a bus to work there's little excitement and when it's ready you feel like you've just been robbed the game is probably akin to playing a tiger lcd game except without the novelty of playing outside of the street fighter 2 handheld game 100 hand slaps and rolling attacks fireballs and hurricane kicks are your weapons you might think this overview is a little harsh especially given the hardware limitations but the real test is whether the game holds up on its own if you remove the connection to street fighter 2 and just look at it objectively is it any good no no it's not of course from a street fighter 2 perspective a lot of the game elements are missing special stages destructible elements any form of challenge gameplay the will to keep going on but and i will keep saying this it is still street fighter 2 on the commodore 64. that at least should count for something i mean you wouldn't even expect it to be on this machine [Music] the game does get marginally better in two-player mode mainly because you now have a challenge even if you're playing against your four-year-old brother but all of the faults are still present and this isn't going to keep you entertained for long in fact you'll probably just end up losing your friends over it not really worth the risk even taking into account hardware limitations it falls short of expectations now just as much as it did back then i guess the only saving grace was it only cost about 20 quid rather than the 65 pounds being splashed out on console versions the prices we paid for some cartridge games back then still blows me away today but i'd still rather have paid that and been kept entertained for weeks than paying a third of a price for utter utter detritus that slogan on the back of the box the monster has been released they really weren't lying were they the size of him [Music] so what went wrong here i mean this isn't that bad given we're using a commodore 64 but the machine is capable of a lot better than this just take a look at international karate from 1987 or fist 2 the legend continues they are both fast and ultimately very playable fighting games the graphics aren't outstanding but they're clear concise and paired with simple gameplay create some very playable games although street fighter 2 is intrinsically a more complex game you still know there's room to do better ok let's rewind a bit maybe that can help shed light on this situation let's go back to the original street [Music] fighter even in the arcade the first street fighter was visually unimpressive slow and really quite boring it makes sense then that the 64 version has all these traits just in 8-bit 4. after all we know 8-bit arcade conversions can be done and done well but yet even this conversion was several magnitudes more abhorrent in fact it was so bad there were two versions of it yes the european version developed by tiertex and released in 1988 was so tragically bad that it was bundled with the american release on the opposite side of the cassette when published by us gold's budget label kicks it's like an apology of sorts the full story of this will get to another time but it stands to reason that the same publisher us gold wouldn't let that happen with the second iteration surely well development rights weren't handed to tiertex this time a good move instead it would fall to a team called creative materials the same responsible for bringing final fights of a platform okay so they had some skills in this area especially given final fight was originally poised to be the follow-up two-street fighter but that's not the entire truth because the task was then subcontracted out to a chap named james mcdonald who was single-handedly tasked with this huge undertaking thankfully this wasn't james's first game with titles like star ray postman pat three and cisco heat under his wing so maybe not the best back catalogue but nevertheless james acknowledges that this and these titles have their own stories but this was now the 90s and the popularity of the commodore 64 was waning somewhat the idea of unleashing a whole and costly development team on the case wasn't really appropriate nope we were back to the early days the days of a single coder to take on the world it was also due to this waning popularity that us gold picked up the tab to publish the game this wasn't something capcom were interested in pursuing directly their sites were aimed on the consoles of the time and were therefore happy to sell rights to the highest bidder this was the first problem although us gold have published decent titles in the past their output had always been a little bit of a mixed bag and here in 1992 the mix was becoming a bit more sloppy the second problem was time with 1992 well underway us gold wanted to make their investment worthwhile and get this headline title out whilst the name was still fresh and crucially before half the remaining c64 user base deserted to a more powerful platform come that christmas james has stated in a previous interview that originally the game graphics were outsourced to a graphic artist to be created from scratch and if we take a peek at commodore format issue 26 from october 92 we can see that at this stage the game graphics look very different in particular the backgrounds this is guile's jet fighter round and just look at the size of that plane it's so huge you can only see part of it at a time which not only implies that these visuals were set to be very different from other versions it also suggests that there may be a degree of sideways scrolling involved on each level commodore format reported that creative materials had identified three elements crucial to success the huge range of moves graphics and game speed and had promised a choice of control systems including keyboard operation so as not to lose the feel of the arcade six button setup they also noted that although the sprites would be smaller than the coin op all the detail was present allowing you to see exactly what's going on now the sprites at this point also look different perhaps more detailed but also a bit more muddy looking these were simply taken from the pc version also developed by creative materials and squashed in providing placeholders until the final sprites were finished but it's from here where things seem to take a stumble in the wrong direction with three quarters of the game complete new management arrived on the scene the outsourced graphics were ditched and brought in-house for a new artist to tackle the reasons for this are unclear but perhaps they decided larger and clearer backgrounds actually made the sprites look smaller than they are the intention may have been to make screenshots look as close to the original as possible with little regard to the actual finished product with this to be large backgrounds like guile's jet fighter round were removed and backgrounds from the dos version were frantically digitized into the game you can see conversion issues which weren't tidied up and with the new artists struggling to get anything resembling sprites ready in time the previous ones ripped from pc were slightly tidied up and plonked in quite literally whilst the game was waiting for duplication james had driven up to the duplicators in glasgow to implement final changes and apparently these quite significant and crucial ones were part of this parcel so what could have been was not and these somewhat promising screenshots we got treated to never materialized meaning the end game suffered as a consequence of course this doesn't account entirely for the lack of gameplay and the related promises we were told it's just a sad fact that the distant lack of wits in the computer ai numerous bugs lack of combined keyboard and joystick control and all those other gripes can only be put down to a lack of time to get the project done on the humble and dated hardware christmas was looming and us gold weren't prepared to allow the money they paid for the game license to slide it's easy to write the process off as a quick cash grabber playing on the fanfare surrounding street fighter at the time and really it was but i think it's key not to place that blame on the developer this was a publisher problem it's just sometimes like here their hand is commercially forced it's a similar story across all the home micro versions all under us gold's license and all rushed through development some fare better than others but ultimately none really play anything like their console iterations but at least some tended to have the right direction it might play like crap but even the spectrum version arguably looked more like the real thing big clean sprites wonderfully drawn background even sideways scrolling play it on double speed and it's almost actually quite good [Music] of course the hyperbole train couldn't be slowed and the c64 game smashed to the top of a chart during december 1992. in a dire twist of completionist fate this also led the original and arguably even worse street fighter conversion grabbing the number two chart spot as well it looked like c64 owners were in for a double dose of christmas horror you can only imagine how they felt discussing their experiences with their super nes owning friends back at school good god that must have been horrible commodore format ever the machines homeblowers actually awarded 80 i mean come on they knew the problems they knew this wasn't really street fighter 2 but they entered into this collective lie a brave face for the commodore community marching to keep the c64 dream alive even if it meant stitching owners up with a poor game commodore force finally got round to a review in their april issue and gave a more accurate but still fair summary of what was at hand i mean street fighter 2 working on the c64 it was almost like a collective cry for 8-bit micros to stay alive it was the hopes of many owners fulfilled but it ended in a dose of buyer's regret it was a dream but really never a realistic one or was it well roll on a quarter of a century and we have a new challenger oh yes oh ye of little faith a fine gent by the name of paco has been creating a new version of street fighter 2 the version the commodore deserved his plan is to convert the title as precise as possible including special moves characters effects and music all part of a learning exercise in 6502 assembly language in an interview paco said i know it all sounds ambitious but i'm not in a hurry i'm learning programming tricks and management of the scarce resources to make it easier to develop i've got to say on first inspection it looks pretty darn good so far it's been four years in the making but from what paco has showed me i reckon we could finally have a world warrior on our hands in the near future so commodore owners it may soon be time to grab a phone and make a call to all those snes owning friends of the 90s it's time to show them what the commodore can really do also please don't do that because it'll never be better than the snes version you you know that i know that we all know that thanks for watching have a great evening [Music] oh side note there was also an amstrad cpc demo which popped up a couple of years ago haven't seen much of it since but if that comes to fruition it looks bloody amazing

Channel: Nostalgia Nerd

Views: 421,643

Rating: 4.8720918 out of 5

Keywords: street fighter 2, sf2, street fighter 2 c64, commodore 64, street fighter II

Id: haAxGfvCitE

Length: 23min 7sec (1387 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Hi7ch]

Not saying it's a good game but I played it last month through to the end and I must admit I enjoyed playing. It isn't challenging and those one button moves are mostly hilariously bad but damn I had fun.

[u/zombi3gee]

Best part of the video is Street Fighter for Timex Sinclair. Who knew it was even possible?

[u/deadlyhabit]

I remember having 1 for my C64 and it was a hot mess, but young me didn't know any better, just that some of the music was rocking.

[u/palordrolap]

As I recall, Double Dragon was a similar cash grab that didn't quite live up to its counterparts on other systems. I owned a copy of that and I feel like I'm blocking memories of it.