It’s time for another edition of weird Street Fighter games, and in today’s discussion, we’ll be going toe to toe with the Street Fighter 2 Special Champion Edition Plug and Play!
It comes designed as an arcade stick. Pretty decent looking joystick. Six buttons. But even though there’s only one game on this unit, the buttons aren’t labelled light, medium and heavy punches and light, medium and heavy kicks. Instead, they’re labelled ABCXYZ. Wait…is this the arcade game you’re going to be getting? because this sounds more like it’s going to be an emulated Sega Mega Drive version of Street Fighter 2. Let’s find out!
Plug and play games are the perfect stocking stuffers at Christmas and there’s been a ton of them over the years. Often, they come on weirdly shaped controllers, and they can vary as to how many games they come with built in. In the case of this Street Fighter 2 one, the device is shaped like a single player arcade stick, and it has precisely one game on there. And no, it’s not Street Fighter 2. Instead, it’s the Sega Genesis Street Fighter 2 Special Champion Edition…but actually it’s not even that.
Allow me to explain. Even though this thing is just called Street Fighter 2, it lists on the box that it is a 16-bit version of the game, and this is true, but this isn’t the same version that came out on the Super Nintendo, and is instead an altered version of the Sega Mega Drive Street Fighter 2 Special Champion Edition. And the differences are many and I’ll say straight off that none of them are for the better.
At some point in this series I’ll get to the good versions of Street Fighter 2 and when I do, I do consider the Sega Mega Drive game to be one of them, and whilst this is almost the Sega Mega Drive game, it has some baffling alterations and choices around this release that make it justifiably weird and borderline bad.
This game is definitely the Sega Mega Drive version, but they’ve tinkered with it. The first clue is that it comes up with the logo of MSI Entertainment LLC, and fair enough as they’re the people who have released this. But this is the warning that these people have messed with the code. From here you get the title screen which confirms that this is Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition, but also, and impressively I may add, adds the year 2018 to the credits at the bottom of the screen. Now we’re cooking. What have they got planned for us??
Well, there’s no menu like you’ve got in the Sega Mega Drive version. It says press start, but if you wanted more options like you’d get in the Sega home conversion, they’re not here. This means you can’t change the difficulty. Is this a worry? Have they set this at the hardest level to give a true arcade experience that would eat up all your money for extra credits, or have they gone for the middle ground. Challenging for new players, but probably a breeze for experienced players. No, now I’m not certain on this, but I think they may have actually set this on near the easiest difficulty level possible.
I could tell this was easy as I could go straight up to opponents and grab them into throws and they wouldn’t put up any fight. I even beat M Bison on my first attempt.
That isn’t to say I won’t ever fight, but the reason I lost a few is something that makes this release particularly strange and I’ll get to that soon.
Even though MSI have tinkered with the game, and removed the menu and ability to listen to the sound menu, change the difficulty and the speed of the game, the game is all essentially there.
There are all eight original playable characters from Street Fighter 2, and there’s also the four boss characters because this is Special Champion Edition.
The game even displays the player two press start sign flashing at the top of the screen even though this is absolutely a one player game with no way to do a two-player game. So yeah, this was odd. They changed the game to remove the menu option for a two player game, but left the tease of a two-player game by forever asking player two to press start on a controller that cannot be plugged in.
But now let’s address the elephant in the room. And I don’t mean the ones on Dalhsim’s stage. I got my unit recently off of eBay, and I’ll be honest, I got it so I could make a video on it for this video series based on the weird Street Fighter games. I’ve had it a few weeks, but only just plugged it and in, and was a bit annoyed to find that it doesn’t work!
The unit switched on. I instantly noticed that it was definitely a janky version of the Mega Drive game, but the real trouble started when I started to play. The unit for some reason has a joystick that will perfectly move up, down, left and right, but wouldn’t register the diagonals at all.
My spidey sense told me that maybe all hope wasn’t lost here as it seemed weird that all four directions would work so well, no work for diagonals at all. I also looked up a couple of online reviews and found other people had the same issue. Did Capcom and this MSI company really put out an arcade joystick with Street Fighter 2 on where it’s no possible to jump over your opponent or pull of half the special moves including Ryu and Ken’s hurricane kick, fire ball and dragon punch?
The answer is yes…or at least that’s how they sold it to people.
When I realised this was the issue, I felt that maybe I should open this thing up and see if there’s something that isn’t connecting or something has come loose.
But before I did that, I figured I’d play through the game as much as possible to capture footage in case something went wrong and I bricked it!
The good news is, with limitations come new challenges and also comes creativity.
I decided that I’d see if it was possible to beat Street Fighter 2 where I couldn’t use diagonals at all. I’ve heard of people doing blindfold runs of games or one credit runs, so this would just be an interesting different challenge.
To do a no diagonal run, the first thing I had in my favour is this version of the game seems fixed to a very easy mode, so I knew that beating the game without diagonals may be possible.
The next issue would be choosing the optimal character for this challenge. My usual choice of Ryu and Ken didn’t seem good as all of their specials require hitting diagonals, although their throw moves are still powerful if I could get in close to opponents. With the likes of Sagat, and Guile throwing projectiles I knew getting in close may be a challenge. I could jump up to dodge projectiles but would have to edge my way in.
I did try Ryu and Ken for a little while, but felt there must be something better.
Next up I chose Guile as I could pull of his Sonic Boom by holding left and then hitting right and punch without needing a diagonal, and his Flash Kick by holding down and hitting up and kick.
Unfortunately when against other projectile throwers you often get into a war of throwing a sonic boom or fire ball just to block and cancel out the other character’s projectile. Without ever being able to jump over the projectiles this quickly felt tedious and that they were getting the better of me.
I still needed to explore other tactics.
Next, I looked to Blanka, Chun Li and E Honda as all have special moves you can pull off just by tapping a single punch or kick button. This may be my secret weapon. But I still needed to get in close to pull these off. E Honda seemed good as he has specials that either send himself in as the projectile or achieve a diagonal motion.
E Honda worked for me for a little while. But again, when faced with Guile or Ken their fire balls would damage E Honda’s flying headbutt.
And then I found the solution. M Bison. His sliding low kick and his psychic crush were both moves that will move you across the screen and in particular when you hit a psychic crusher even if your opponent blocks, he will continue to fly through them and take off some of their energy. Projectiles will still stop him, but more often than not opponents will either try to jump or block this move. By hitting it I would either get them to jump over and open themselves to a kick or just absorb some damage whilst blocking.
Success. Even though I didn’t have diagonals, and found I needed a few attempts to figure out strategies against Ken and Sagat, I was still about to beat Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition by changing up characters and dominating as M Bison.
Ok, so now I’ve beaten it, I could risk bricking it and open this thing up to see what’s happening inside.
As it happens, I was able to fix the unit quite easily. For some mad reason, the stick has stuck circular plate around the joystick and when you move it up down left and right you can hear the stick register a click, but when you hit diagonals you don’t hear it register anything. By removing the plate and adding a screw back in to secure the joystick it now worked perfectly.
Well as perfectly as a janky version of Mega Drive Street Fighter 2 can work that is.
So, if you have an arcade stick that has this issue and in particular have this or another one from MSI, this is an easy fix by removing this unneeded piece of plastic.
Oh, and let’s talk about the graphics. This is a plug and play that released in 2018, but doesn’t connect via HDMI. It connects via composite cables and just the white and yellow connections at that. No red connection cable here. When plugging this into my old CRT TV this looks just as I remember the game looking on the Mega Drive and is a nostalgic trip through my childhood.
But two things here. One, I’ll need to connect this to my capture card to get footage for this video and there’s not a lot of good options when it comes to composite cables and two, this thing released in 2018. When you consider that gaming started going to high definition with the release of the Xbox 360 in 2005 and this came out thirteen years after that, the choice to release this as not using HDMI is baffling. It’s not like HDMI cables are expensive.
Connecting this to my computer, my HDTV stretched the image and it looks far worse in the footage you’re seeing than when it’s on my old school TV. Muddy and blurry graphics do spoil the fun somewhat, but the next big issue is the sound.
Let’s listen to what the Sega Mega Drive game is supposed to sound like when it loads up.
And let’s hear what this thing sounds like.
It’s slow and terrible sounding. Did no one at Capcom say this isn’t good enough? Or did they just sell the sleights to the company MSI and not think to check in on it at all? To be honest I can believe it, as although this was in 2018 and you’d think Capcom should know better, this is the same company that in the early 1990s allowed the likes of US Gold to release botched versions of Street Fighter 2 on the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64.
So that will begin to wrap things up for another edition of Weird Street Fighter games. This isn’t the only Street Fighter plug and play out there, and I may yet get to another, although from my understanding these also have the Sega Mega Drive Street Fighter 2 Special Champion Edition game on them. They come with classic Mega Drive controllers so hopefully they shouldn’t be plagued by the janky made joystick on this plug and play.
What would you rate this game?
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