Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
Year Of Release: 1991
Studio: Capcom
Description
Here we are looking at the game that changed the way fighting games were made and was responsible for a boom in the arcades in the early 90’s. Capcom released the first Street Fighter game in 1987 (if you scroll down below you can read about it there) Street Fighter II: The World Warrior improved on the first game in every way possible. Fighting games were not all that common in arcades, but once Street Fighter II blew up it resulted in vast amount of one on one fighting games being released in arcades and on the home consoles.
While the Street Fighter game play has been greatly refined over the years and many hard core players find, Street Fighter II very unbalanced. The fact is back in 1992 from a game play point of view, Street Fighter Ii: The World Warrior was a legit game changer. You had six different attack buttons. Three for punches and three for kicks. You had weak, medium and strong attacks. the special moves would be executed via the input of specific commands on the joystick such as rotating from down to forward then punch for a fireball. While we take this for granted today, back then it was a huge deal. Skilled players learned that it was possible to execute combos in Street Fighter II. This feature was not added into the game intentionally, but players found that it was possible to link certain moves and unleash a devastating combo.
As well as playing well, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior offered a choice of 8 characters. Each of the eight characters had their own play style, look and personality and they also had their own reasons for taking part in this battle. Ryu and Ken would return from the first Street Fighter game, but Zangief, Blanka, Chun Li, Guile, Dhalsim and E Honda would be added. Each character was very well animated and had their own stage, some of which had their own background animations. As well as the eight selectable characters, Street Fighter II also had four Grand Masters. Once you had defeated the playable characters. You would then have to defeat, Balrog, Vega, Sagat and the main villain of the game M Bison. Interestingly in Japan the bosses names are switched with Balrog being M. Bison which is clearly a take on Mike Tyson and the main reason of why when Capcom released the game in the West they changed the names as they did not want any kind of legal issues with using Mike Tyson’s likeness and name, even though Balrog still looks like Mike Tyson!. Vega is called Balrog and M.Bison is called Vega.
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior was a very popular arcade game making Capcom over a billion dollars! In arcades it had a very dedicated competitive scene where you would often see a line of people waiting for their change to take on the guy in the arcade who never seemed to lose. It was like every arcade that had a Street Fighter II machine had that one guy who was the master at the game.
Current High Score: NA
Related Titles
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior was released on the Super Nintendo and was a huge success. The game was certainly a system seller and thanks to the 6 buttons on the Super Nintendo controller the game played perfectly. Interestingly enough the Super Nintendo was not the only way to play this game though, as Street Fighter: The World Warrior would also be ported to some home computers such as the Amiga and the Commodore 64 these versions of the game allowed you to play them with only one button! The home computer ports were not handled by Capcom and instead were made by a company called US Gold.
Before the series would move onto Super Street Fighter. We would have Street Fighter: Champion Edition which made a few game play changes and allowed people to play as the four Grand Masters, this was the game that was ported to the Sega Mega Drive. There was also Street Fighter: Hyper Fighting which again tinkered with the game adding a few things. This would be ported to the Super Nintendo as Street Fighter: Turbo.
