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Street Fighter Fail: Turbo

Street Fighter Fail: Turbo

Street Fighter is, as the title suggests, a fighting game. In its basic form, you choose a character and the game randomly picks an opponent for you to fight. Much like a boxing ring, the match starts with a signal and the player uses a combination of button mashing and strategy to take down the opponent. Frankly, the game is a less bloody version of events like WWF. A good thing, in my opinion, because some of those hits would break more than bones.

The series began as an arcade game, becoming the first mega-hit fighting game franchise. It was there in all its pixelated glory to make sure you kept pumping in quarters to hit the high score. It was all about the points and executing the best combo attack ever. Never as bloody or gory as Mortal Kombat , Street Fighter still held the thrill of spending round after round smashing your opponent into the ground.

As arcade games fell behind in light of console systems, Street Fighter became something you could play at home for as long as you liked, without the quarters. The conversion was simply a matter of adapting the controller. The game itself did not truly change very much. But as its audience grew older and the game industry changed, the need for context became more and more necessary. It wasn’t long before Street Fighter had a story, a reason for all the fighting to happen. Certain characters became part of the good side, and others the bad side. And if the good side lost, the end of the world was nigh.

Unfortunately, I do believe the heart of the arcade fighting game became lost amidst the console war. It wasn’t the audience that demanded the story anymore, it was that all the other games were doing it. The logic of that is a little flawed, however. Call of Duty , for example, has a reputation for being a violent first person shooter with a shallow storyline, but it was never an arcade game. It doesn’t have the base of one 8-bit screen and presenting one-on-one matches over and over until the money ran out. Street Fighter simply cannot be compared to any game that didn’t begin in the arcades. The very game mechanics are completely different. Until quite recently, there was no world to explore in Street Fighter , much less a cheap hero’s journey narrative to experience.

Street Fighter Fail: Turbo

The mythos of Street Fighter became rich over time, in its own way, but I still don’t think it’s enough to justify entire cinematic cut scenes. The players are there to fight and take down their opponents with the highest score possible, not listen to hastily compiled manga.

Thus, I am under the firm belief that if they’re going to spin a good story for Street Fighter , they better give it an entirely different title. Such a game would no longer resemble anything that makes Street Fighter the game that it is. Indeed, their flimsy attempt at storytelling completely undermines the arcade feel of the game. In fact, I would go so far as to say that taking out the arcade mode entirely was huge mistake, the beginning of this spiral towards a useless story mode. Instead, Street Fighter should stick to its arcade roots and remember what the heart of a fighting game really is.

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