Street Fighter II

The last new game I bought for the PS2 was a compilation called Street Fighter Anniversary Collection. Actually, that's not even true. A friend of mine bought the game and brought it to my house one day, left it there for about two years (I had never asked to borrow it), and then refused to acknowledge ownership when I tried to return it to him just before leaving for college. Oh well. His loss was my gain. The disc contained two games: Street Fighter II and Street Fighter III. I beat the first one earlier tonight. Technically, the game I beat was called Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition. Of course, this being the Street Fighter series, there are six iterations of Street Fighter II and the only differences between them all are enhanced move sets and new characters; the games aren't separate so much as blocks that build upon one another. This Hyper version was simply the latest and greatest of the Street Fighter II games. Theoretically, one could say I beat all six of them tonight. But that'd be a stretch, no? Anyway, let's go back to the past for a moment. I never owned Street Fighter II for Super Nintendo, but I sure did play it a lot. I borrowed and rented it numerous times in addition to playing it at friends' houses. So I was certainly familiar with the game and the characters when I dared to attempt to beat the game earlier tonight. I beat all twelve stages in the single player mode as my girl Chun-Li, and it took me 42 fights to do so. The bad news is that this means I went 12-30 overall. The good news is that since each match took roughly twenty-five (and no more than forty-five) seconds, I had finished the game in a mere half hour. And, yes, this was on the easiest (of eight) difficulty settings. At the end of the game, apparently Chun-Li had avenged her father. This made me wonder what the ending would have been like had I played through the game as each of the other fifteen characters. Someday, if I want to "complete" this game, I'll do just that. (That day will never come.) Anyway, there's not much to say about Street Fighter II. It had more frustration and less charm than I recalled. One great positive was the ridiculous poltical incorrectness the game dared to display. This was a 1991 release. Old, yes, but certainly not from an era we tend to think of as tolerant of stereotypes and ethnic caricatures. Yet Street Fighter II teems with such taboos. There's a Japanese lard-ass sumo wrestler. The Russian guy has body hair that approaches animal levels. Blanka, a Brazilian, was raised in the Amazon and is literally beastlike in his posture and appearance. When you fight in Mexico, you do so in front of a bunch of Aztecs and Mayans. And, in my personal favorite "oh no they didn't!" moment of the game, I was beaten by a Jamaican opponent who proceeded to celebrate by whipping out some maracas and dancing around with a huge "watermelon grin" on his face. Wow. Aside from the unintentional comedy, there just weren't many positives that I took away from my first bout with Street Fighter II in some ten or fifteen years. Oh well. At least it was quick and painless.