Welcome to part three of my explorations of the weird versions of Street Fighter games. In the previous two parts I first explored the Brazil exclusive Sega Master System port, and in my last video I looked at the Amiga version. Well…they are nothing compared to the treat of the Street Fighter 2 version we’ll have under the microscope today.
The ZX Spectrum version of Street Fighter 2 proves Capcom were willing to see the game launch on anything imaginable. The ZX Spectrum was a home computer first released in 1982, so the fact that this little system that could, would get a version of Street Fighter 2, which was an arcade beast released in 1991…is something of a miracle. It’s even more of a miracle that this version didn’t release until 1993 when the ZX Spectrum was all but done as a viable product on the market.
So, when it actually comes to it, I have to say that I was beyond impressed with this version. The graphics, the locations, the full roster of characters, it’s all there. And it all looks like the arcade original…except maybe one major point.
Yes, the graphics are entirely two tone and effectively black and white. In practice, of course, this game is blue and white or green and black, or some other combination of two tones to represent light and dark. And it works surprisingly well. The initial shock of seeing it may make you think this is the worst version of Street Fighter 2 available, at least from a graphical perspective, but I think that’s quite unfair.
The two-tone nature of it puts in the same conversation as the Game Boy version. When you compare this to the Game Boy version, this instantly looks closer to the original. And yes, I get it, the Game Boy version was played on a monochrome screen, and the ZX Spectrum version is played on your television, so there is the instant expectation that it should be in full colour. But anyone who had a Spectrum through the 80s will be used to the idea that some games don’t have all that much colour involved.
In one sense this is a bit like the Super Game Boy version of the game, as when you played your Game Boy cart on the Super Game Boy using a Super Nintendo you would get coloured energy bars and likewise this gives you a bit of different colour around the edge.
Having played this in modern times, I had the benefit of modern tech to play this, but haven’t heard that on original hardware this version has extremely long loading times. If you go to the options menu when the game first starts you have the option to switch music and SFX off which may improve loading times, and you also have the options to switch the backgrounds off which may be a unique feature of the ZX Spectrum version.
In one sense this may make you think that each fight will take place in a black void like boss battles in NES games, but no, it just means you see the characters and nothing more and the background becomes a wash of whatever colour is used to show either light or dark on the stage. So, get ready for the game to look like a full screen of blue or red with just the light parts of the characters moving left or right.
I’ll also be honest. I had a nightmare getting this to run to capture footage from it. I couldn’t get it to work across a few different emulators, and even tried to get it going on my Spectrum Vega with no luck. Eventually I got it to work on Speccy, but then had to remap the controls to that I wasn’t playing the whole thing with the numeric buttons. Bizarre.
But where there’s a will there’s a way.
Much like the Amiga version that I looked at in the last part of this series, the game is played with just one action button. Coming to this after the Amiga version I felt quite at home with the concept but it’s not identical. I was often finding that characters could hit standing punches whilst in mid-air and there is a sense that you can walk through opponents and face the wrong way or that they can walk off the edge of the screen.
Throughout my play through, which as usual, was either as Ryu or Ken, I found the game fun to play. Once again, for a home port of this era of arcade games you only get a certain amount of credits and truthfully, I was desperate not to have to restart this version multiple times if I lost any fights. Fortunately, this wasn’t an issue as I almost never lost a round, let alone a fight.
The only opponent that gave me real trouble was Vega who constantly climbed the wall in his stage and could easily keep up with you moving away so you couldn’t escape. Other special moves weren’t much of a concern to dodge though as I even found that I could punch M Bison out of the air when he was flying towards me surrounded in electricity…or flames…whatever it is that Bison does.
The game will show you a screen of your opponent gloating if you lose but won’t show one of you talking smack if you win. Well, not until you’ve beaten Bison that is, and then this single screen acts as the ending of the game.
The controls make this version gimped, but it’s like the Amiga version, which is still clever in its way of combing directional button presses with the fire button to pull off more moves than you’d imagine can be done on a one action button set up.
The graphics are very impressive when compared to some versions of the game, but only if you can make peace with it looking like a Virtual Boy game…more on that in a future video though…
One feature which I believe is unique to this version is that you’ll often find there are blocks or posts on stages that you can break in the foreground of the fight. Other versions have oil drums and crates, and they’re usually to the far sides of a stage, but this has runic cube style blocks or bollard like posts right in the thick of the action. I couldn’t tell if this absorb strikes instead of your opponent, but I always wanted to get away from this as they felt a distraction.
There are moves missing, and obviously this doesn’t have as much animation, and the backgrounds, when you do have them switched on, are completely static. But for kids who may just have had a ZX Spectrum as their computer or gaming device, this did an admirable job of bringing the arcade game home. I can’t imagine that many kids would have been proud owners of this compared to friends who had the Super Nintendo version though.
There is only music on the title and character select screens and, in the fights, you only seem to get a retro style Space Invaders or Pac-Man style sound effect for defeating an opponent, so don’t expect much from this game in the sound department.
My understanding is that this version only came out in Europe which makes sense as the Spectrum was only really a thing in the UK and maybe other places in Europe. This still places it in the weird position next to the Brazil only Master System port.
One day, I’d love Capcom to release a collection similar to the Disney Lion King and Aladdin collections that feature versions of those games from various platforms so you can relieve the same version of the games that you knew as a kid. These days Capcom only will rerelease the Arcade version of Street Fighter 2 on modern platforms and that isn’t how anyone experienced it until at least the Sega Saturn if not the PlayStation 2.
What would you rate the game?
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