Street Fighter Legends - Page 1
A Star is born.
Way back in 1987 a company called Capcom released a fighting game for the coin-op market featuring one of the most interesting control systems in the history of videogames. Depending on who was asked, it was either an idea that was way ahead of its time, or an over-ambitious yet ultimately flawed idea, or even the stupidest looking thing ever.
What was that control system you ask? Well, some bright spark over at Capcom decided that it would be fun to have a screen along with pressure pads that the player would need to hit with varying degrees of force, and your virtual fighter would then hit their opponent with the corresponding degree of force. If you tapped on the pressure pads, your character would strike a light blow on their opponent, and conversely if you put every fibre of your being into a single blow on the pressure pad, so too would your character.
The problem with this approach was that before too long Street Fighter machines displayed the lovely Out of order sign, proudly displaying that people had been overly enthusiastic on the pressure pads and thus the machines were frequently being damaged. Needless to say arcade operators werent impressed.
This forced a rethink on Capcoms part to make sure Street Fighter didnt end up falling off the face of the Earth. And so, the legendary 6-button control system was born with three buttons on the top representing light, medium and heavy punches and three buttons on the bottom representing light, medium and heavy kicks. Im not sure if Capcom realised this at the time, but out of necessity, they had created quite possibly the perfect control system.
The revised Street Fighter was subsequently released and many including myself had grown quite fond of the game, along with its multitude of opponents and special moves. During that time there was no other game quite like it, where else could you select which country you got to fight in first and then proceed to battle your way through the other countries, with the ultimate goal to make it to Thailand to fight against the two best opponents in the game Adon and Sagat?
While player 1 could only fight as Ryu with Ken going to player 2, Street Fighter did introduce a lot of characters that would eventually find their way into subsequent versions of Street Fighter. Even though you couldnt choose all the other fighters, somehow Ryu was all a player ever wanted.
As good as Street Fighter was, all things considered it was heavily unbalanced. For instance, connecting an uppercut (famously dubbed Dragon Punch in the sequel) on an opponent took away 75% of their energy bar, using a fireball (Hurricane Punch) took off about 30% of the energy bar, while connecting all kicks of a helicopter (Cyclone Kick) lopped off around 50% of the energy bar. Yes, using the right moves bouts didnt last long, but what a hell of a fun time it was.
Years passed, and other games such as Out Run, Space Harrier, Hang-On and plenty of others had taken the limelight in the coin-op arena. People had had other games on their minds; they had pretty much forgotten about Street Fighter. Capcom obviously had been working hard.