Welcome to another of my explorations of all the weird versions of the Street Fighter games. In today’s discussion, I’ll be diving head first into the Commodore 64 version, which has to be seen to be believed, and has to be played to be fully appreciated.
Luckily for you, if you want to see the game in action, you can check out the video version of this article which is live now on the Geek Battle Gaming YouTube channel.
To set the scene on the C64 version of Street Fighter 2, I think it’s only fair to read the onscreen disclaimer that the game gives you when you boot it up.
It warned you that ‘due to the limitations and spec of this machine, some of the implementations contained in the manual may be incorrect.’
Weirdly, the text seems to have a full stop after the spec and no comma after machine, but heck this isn’t punctuation fighter, this is a fighter where you be punch-uating M Bison in the face! But seriously, this warning should be noted, as the C64 is has very limited specs compared to the arcade machine this game originally appeared on.
But for so many people, if they had a Commodore 64, this version of Street Fighter 2 is what they had to look forward to, and did the graphics really matter as long as it brought the gameplay from the arcade home?
Well…yes and no.
Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, the graphics of a system became increasingly more of the focal point of which games where compared across systems, but whilst the C64 version may not have the prettiest graphics out there, I’m sure there were many players who were still very excited to experience this version of Street Fighter 2 on their home computer.
Previously on Weird versions of Street Fighter games, I checked out the Brazil only Master System game that released six years after the arcade game and also when the Master System had been replaced by both the Sega Mega Drive and Sega Saturn and was one year from the Dreamcast launching.
Then I dove into the Amiga version which had a bizarre control scheme, and whilst it looked great on paper, it had massively reduced animation. I also checked out what is the strongest candidate for awful versions of Street Fighter 2 yet in the ZX Spectrum version, which was entirely two tones, and had massive loading times on original hardware.
Well, I didn’t think the versions could get any weirder or more reduced, but then I played the Commodore 64 edition.
If the ZX Spectrum game could be criticised for looking like someone got photos of the arcade game and scanned and photocopied the graphics onto coloured sheets of paper, the first thing that is bound to strike you about the C64 version is that it looks like you’ve opened a jpeg in Microsoft paint in 1997 and reduced the image size go be a small enough image file to go on your geocities website!
Anyone else remember geocities? I digress.
But of course, there is more to a game than just the graphics…but we’ll get to the rest in a minute, as I’m not done talking about this graphics. The good news is that in one sense, everything is represented in this version of the game. All of the characters are present, and you can recognise the locations and the character designs. None of the characters have faces at all in gameplay, and weirdly in this version Ken has black hair. Probably because he’s just a palette swap of Ruy in the truest sense imaginable. But if they could swap his gi to be red, but not just change a couple of extra pixels to be yellow?
Looking at the stages, I think you’d only really know what each one is meant to be if you knew the original game as a point of reference. Looking at Chun Li’s stage as an example, I don’t think most people would be able to tell that there are people sat around as onlookers to the fight. I’m sure most would think the splash of green is a push and that maybe the yellow section is a dog with a black head looking up at a window…if they could even guess that far.
The elephants on Dahlsims stage are probably the best-looking background objects in the game and that is simply down to their size. Even with the downgrade in graphics, they are large enough to still be clearly identifiable. The mural of the Hindu God Ganesha though could be a stacked bowl of lettuce leaves for how recognisable it is though.
The game is super zoomed out and doesn’t scroll left or right at all. You do get a tiny amount of vertical scrolling if you jump, but this is also almost non-existent.
I’ve also recently looked at Virtua Fighter Mini for the Game Gear for a video on the Geek Battle Gaming YouTube channel, and although that offers a zoomed in mode, the full stage zoomed out view in this reminded me of how that game looks.
Whilst you may get away with this on a tiny 1990s handheld, this is a game people would have played on their family TVs back in the day. Well maybe…I would always have my games consoles play on a small TV growing up with me sat about a foot in front of it like how close people will sit to a laptop. Even to this day, I find the transition to play modern games on a big screen HD TV whilst sat on the sofa difficult. But enough about me, and my need for glasses…
But whilst the graphics may not be all that, surely this was a needed reduction in order to maintain the gameplay from the arcade, right? Well, of course not. The game kinda plays in the same realm as the Amiga and ZX Spectrum games I’ve previously looked at.
Now, with this one, after reading the comments on my previous discussions, where it’s been pointed out to me a few times that the Amiga game would allow you to use two fire buttons, one for punch and one for kick, but I just played it with one…I was sure to check out if this could be played with two fire buttons. And low behold it could.
This means it’s similar to what I experienced with the Sega Master System version. No instead, it’s still like the Amiga version. A combination of directional push and the fire button will determine what punch or kick you pull off. This is fine, or would be but the rest of game is all a bit of a mess.
I experienced Vega climb his wall and then float in air for ages, at times my character would just face the wrong direction. Just like on the Spectrum version of the game, you end up doing a weird flying punch which just looked like the standard punch animation in mid-air. This means in theory that you are guaranteeing that the punch will miss. But don’t worry as this is actually really effective and will land on most occasions.
The game is kinda easy to pull of special moves which is good. I’ll be honest, this was probably the easiest version of Street Fighter 2 I played and was no trouble to beat.
I could have won the whole game with just the punch button, but as I’m not the greatest Street Fighter player in the world (not to say I’m bad as I think I’m pretty good) I did try to play this game by pulling off a variety of moves just to keep the footage of the game for the YouTube video more interesting than my usually spamming of fireballs and hurricane kicks!
When you beat the game the ending you get will just be an image of your character’s face form the character select screen. Considering in my playthrough I played as Ken who was always shown with black hair in the game, but may be forgiven for thinking that the image is of Lisa, Ken’s girlfriend who has the first line of dialogue when his ending plays.
So, this game lacks proper endings, but at least they’re still included in text form, as this betters what the Master System and Spectrum did. The game also lacks the special stages where you’d destroy the car or break brick walls or barrels. This is also just the original Street Fighter 2, so you can’t play as the boss characters in the game which is a shame.
Music wise, you had better hope that you like the character select screen music from the arcade version, as it was pretty much all I heard throughout the whole game until the end.
There may be one or two other tracks in the game, but maybe you get something different if you play as some characters or others. I’m not sure. There’s not much in way of sound effects either, but what there is just about does enough to fit the action on screen.
And look, this is a series where I look at all the weird versions of Street Fighter that I can find out there, and I think there are still a few more weird and quirky versions before I may have to start renaming the series Street Fighter…the Good Ones, just to tell the most complete story.
But after the ZX Spectrum game, this may be the most visually striking as different from the arcade game. It’s just a shame that they didn’t manage to replicate the gameplay of the arcade, as I think, especially many years after release, players are now much more appreciative of gameplay over graphics.
But all this said, I’m sure there is a wash of nostalgia for some of you reading this who grew up with this version and maybe loved playing it.
I grew up mainly with the Amiga and later the Super Nintendo games, so this has been fascinating for me to discover and try to get my head into how it would have been viewed and enjoyed by C64 owners from 1992.
If you’re a big Street Fighter fan, I’m sure this would be fun for you to check out just for curiosity’s sake, so whether you’re new to the Commodore 64 Street Fighter experience or not, this is definitely worth checking out.
But heck, this series has focussed just on ports of the original Street Fighter 2 so far, and any Street Fighter fan will know that the series didn’t stop there with all the Supers and Turbos and Ultras that are to come. But the series also didn’t begin with Street Fighter 2, and as far as the Commodore 64 is concerned there are still a couple of Street Fighter games that are definitely worthy of this series in the forms of variations of the original Street Fighter game!
So, let me know your thoughts on the game in the comments.
Did you play this back in the day? Or do you think you’ll be checking out in the future?
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