Reviews

US Gold must have been mad to take this one on.

And they nearly got away with it.

You see the spectrum version of SF2 shows a great deal of promise - especially when you have a look at what our C64 playing friends had to deal with.

Sprites are well drawn, animation is serviceable but jerky, sound effects are sparse but functional and all the World Warrior characters are available looking and behaving as their arcade counterparts do.

So what the problem?

The problem is that you just spent 30 minutes of your life (that you're never going to get back) trying to load in what when shrunk down to the speccy is a fairly basic one-on-one fighter.

Every character had to be multiloaded in - and there wasn't even an option to repeat a fight you'd just spent ages loading.

Barely a fraction of the moves from the arcade parent have made it onto the spec and some are incomplete whilst most just don't work as they should. Some characters have moves that only work from the left side of the screen for example - suggesting that the game was released without being finished.

SF2 is one arcade that requires tactics and skill to master - but all of the games subtleties have been lost.

Even with speeded up .tap files on an emulator I'm not sure this is a good demo of what the speccy is capable of. Several games such as Shadow Warriors and HKM had used large sprites in a beat-em-up more succesfully years before this came out.

A daft title to take on for the spectrum then.

Surely the Spectrum could have done without Street Fighter II. Sure its nice to have it in the archive, but in truth the game was nothing short of a crisis.

It wasn't a bad start with the title screen and a nice rendition of Balrog's theme by Dave Lowe. Why Balrog's theme and not the classic theme for the title tune is beyond me, perhaps it was a personal peference. Now on to the character select screen and its then when we hear familiar music from the arcade though it appears to suffer some slowdown as it gets quicker as you select your character, but it a nice effort.

Now the problems begin...multiload! You spend 20 minutes or so loading your game for a five minute fight. A multi-load on a 128K game is telling something. Now to the game itself, okay so the characters are nicely drawn out despite the fact they are the same colour as the background. The game plays slow and sluggish and there are no music during the fights, well okay in fairness we didn't expect any, that was a bridge too far perhaps. But the main part of SFII's gameplay is the special moves, Ryu and Ken's Hadouken, Blanka's electricity, E.Honda's thousand slaps and Guile's Sonic Boom, on the Speccy however they are very hard, if not impossible to perform, leading some to wonder if they were even included.

So Street Fighter II on the ZX Spectrum, c'mon admit it, it was pretty much doomed from the start, perhaps one license the Spectrum could have done without.

Yes, the tape multi-load was a pain in the neck, and at times it was quite slow, which for a fighting game is a real sin.

But if you consider the complexity of the original coin-op, especially the fact that you simply could not replicate all of its subleties with just a Z80 CPU, 128K RAM, a lever and one button available, the Spectrum version wasn't all that bad, especially if compared to the Amiga version for instance, which could have been much better given the available resources.

Not the best fighting game on the Spectrum, but far from the worse - Oriental Hero, anyone? - and a brave attempt in itself.