Um clássico atemporal que merece o pedestal em que ele se encontra, um dos mais importantes jogos não só do seu gênero mas de toda a indústria como um todo.

Sempre joguei ele quando era criança, mas nunca consegui chegar até o final porquê eu sou bem ruim em jogos de luta e essa foi uma pendência que eu venho carregando a tanto tempo, recentemente, tive a ideia de jogar todos os jogos da franquia Street Fighter, começando pelo primeiro e de verdade, ao comparar os dois jogos eu consigo perceber uma das maiores evoluções em uma sequência de um jogo, parece simplesmente outra propriedade intelectual pelo tanto que esse jogo consegue ser superior em tudo, ele não te pune e não é injusto, muito pelo contrário aqui você está de igual para igual com todos os seus oponentes, com ressalva do M. Bison, esse sim é um personagem complicado de se lidar, mas com uma boa estratégia, até que ele é bem tranquilo de se enfrentar.

Um verdadeiro divisor de águas, sua fluidez para um jogo daquela época é de cair o queixo, a criatividade no visual dos inimigos, cenários, músicas, tudo aqui é feito com um carinho espantoso. É isso que eu tenho a dizer sobre esta masterpiece.

When you talk about the fighting genre Street Fighter II almost always comes up in discussion. This game pretty much started the whole genre and layed the foundation for nearly every game forward. Unfortunately the singleplayer arcade mode suffers from money eating input reading AI which towards the end will just leave you frustrated. There's not even a lot of special moves and the ones that are there do either 50% dmg or are pointless to even use. That being said this game can be fun with friends but if pretty much obsolete, just play literally any other version of SF2, especially Super Turbo.

CAPCATHON, GAME 13: Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (Arcade, 1991)

Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (henceforth referred to as SF2WW) is a landmark title in the world of video games. Thanks to it, the fighting game genre as we know it was born, and while part of it has aged really badly, its rock solid core still makes a great time when played with friends.

Whether you play against a CPU or a human opponent, the basis of the game still remains the same: your character will fight against your opponent's character, and you must you use your character's skills (whether they be greater acrobatics or special attacks) to overwhelm the enemies' defenses and defeat him, or be defeated yourself. The eight World Warriors are all incredibly memorable, thanks to their stellar designs (carried by fantastic graphics for the time) and unabashed use of national sterotypes, combined with normal and special attacks that fit their characters well. Some characters are more powerful than others (with Guile in particular standing at the top) but in most human vs. human matches this doesn't matter a whole lot. Each character also has a beautiful home stage associated to them with a fantastic theme song each (most of which were composed by the legendary Yoko Shimomura). It cannot be overstated just how great this game's music is. On the topic of the game's sound, the character's sound effects are crunchy but meaty and satisfying, especially when a move hits, and their voices, while bitcrushed and at times nearly incomprehensible, have stood the test of time.

Attempting to best SF2WW's arcade ladder is a herculean endeavor. I opted to leave the game's difficulty to its default setting in order to have a fair experience, but beating the CPU is anything but. Not that I'm a good fighting game player, far from it, but the game is pretty blatant in how it likes to turn up your opponent's advantages in order to steal your quarters. From spamming jabs, to performing instant special moves, to doing more damage than you, the CPU will react instantly to anything it throws at you until it decides you can proceed.

If you've played any Street Fighter game after this one, or even any fighting game, SF2WW is going to feel barren or lacking in some areas you'd think are synonymous with the genre. It doesn't have playable bosses, alternate colors, mirror matches, alongside the fact that some characters lack important attacks or proprieties. Also, while its graphics are generally great, especially for the fighters and the stages, their selection portraits look pretty bad.

Honestly, it's amazing that this game holds up as well as it does. Getting together with friends and playing it is still a good time, because it's so fundamentally solid that its strengths still shine today. I wouldn't recommend trying this version of SF2 specifically, but if you're curious, avoid the singleplayer arcade mode and grab some buds- it's still loads of fun.

If you've ever wondered what it takes for a game to become a sport, the answer you were looking for was Street Fighter II.

Video games had been competitive since they day they were born. Literally Space War is a one-on-one PVP multiplayer game. Pong is based on (stolen from) the Magnavox Odyssey's Table Tennis, which is based directly on an existing competitive sport. Arcades were leaderboard galleries, and almost every game in them revolved around the comparing of scores, and yet Street Fighter II was able to change everything.

Before Street Fighter II, if it was deep it was about scoremongering, and if it was actually about two people in direct, contemporaneous competition, it was a shallow thing that one or both contestants could master in no time at all.

Street Fighter II is a game that you and a friend could play every day for months on end and still develop new and interesting techniques. It was something you could study, and your rivals would constantly redefine what mastery means. Even with its many rereleases shifting its meta and smoothing over its cracks, the original release of SF2 is solid enough to remain unbroken, even in current year. It is a genre's bedrock, even if it's not so terribly exciting anymore in this world so populated by its progeny.

plenty of improvements here, I'm sure playing this with someone would suffice and be more enjoyable but man does the solo experience suck ass. from the get go the CPU picks up difficulty right away and I almost gave up pretty early but then started cheesing the game as E Honda. special fuck you to whoever coded Guile and Vega they were just straight assholes. it's interesting how impactful this game is for the rest of the franchise onwards in regards to the character design and certain character moves. it's pretty obvious why the car bonus stage is very much remembered and referenced compared to the 2 other bonus stages lol. I know there's documentation and guides on how to properly defeat each character but fighting them feels like a massive effort even with the safety net of SF30TH Collection's save states.

(This is the 36th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Hey, we made it to 1991. This is the first game in my challenge that released in 1991, as Street Fighter II: The World Warrior graced console players (SNES) on February 6th of that year.

This game needs little introduction, as it changed the fighting game landscape forever. How has it aged though? Well, my subjective opinions on that are down below. Spoiler Alert: Plenty of games from 1990 aged poorly, some however aged really well. I would put Street Fighter II somewhere in the middle, though closer to the "aged poorly" side of things.

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STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS
The game does actually have storytelling, but only a very brief cutscene when you win all battles with a character. Then you will be shown how the characters react to defeating M. Bison. The oddest one? Chun Li goes to her father's grave to tell him that she has avenged him by defeating M. Bison.... and that she can now go back to being a young single girl! WTF! So 90s.

So this does add some recognizability beyond their gear and special moves to these characters, but it's pretty limited of course and you only get the one cutscene per fighter. Despite this, some of the characters have "icon" status in video gaming, like Ryu or the aforementioned Chun Li. Hell, I've never played a Street Fighter game before this in my life (Tekken only back in the day) but even I recognized them immediately.

The manual includes a short bio on all of the 8 main characters and a list of their special moves and how to execute them.

There is good variety among these characters. Chun Li is speedy, Ryu is a martial arts expert who can also do a cool fireball attack (Hadouken!), Honda is a big sumo wrestler, Blanka has a low center of gravity, Dhalsim is a lanky piece of shit and Ken ... is another Ryu? Not sure why they made them so similar. If you listen to the experts, there are differences between the two, though I'm not sure how much that applies to Street Fighter II. I didn't play this game that much to be able to tell you whether there are slight differences in footwork and pace or whatever. But to conclude, there are a bunch of different characters here overall with different abilities.

There are also bosses, one of whom looks like Mike Tyson (which he didn't know about until recently funnily enough). Even more funny and interesting: Mike Tyson's character in the US is called Barlog. There is a different character called M. Bison who is wearing a red military uniform or something.

In Japan, M. Bison actually stands for Mike Bison and is the name given to the character that looks like Mike Tyson. They've changed names around when they localized the game out of fear that they'd be sued.

Less funny story: The M. Bison in the US version can fuck off kindly, man is he tough to beat.

GAMEPLAY
In this game, you can either play simple 1v1 fights or choose a character and then travel the world to fight all the other characters plus some bosses that are non playable characters, like Barlog, Vega and M. Bison.

Each character has a few special moves and their own stage. You fight until someone wins two rounds. By now this formula has been repeated a billion times, but of course by then this concept was never done as well as Street Fighter II did it.

And while I can see a young me putting a lot of time and effort into this to get better, the current me simply can't shake the fact that this game hasn't aged as well as some other titles have of this time, including F-Zero and Super Mario World, two other very early SNES titles.

Movement of characters is stiff and pulling off special moves was really tricky because a lot of the time I didn't feel like my inputs were recognized correctly. Or I was doing it wrong, I don't know. But even when I put the difficulty to damn 0, there were some enemies that just didn't let me breath for a second. Hit up, hit low, hit up up up, uppercut and while I learned to block attacks after a while, attacking windows felt so small sometimes and the opponent was able to block so many of my attacks that I had to resort to doing specific OP moves to get them off me. This is actually a gripe I had about fighting games back in the day and I guess will always carry with me, is that abusing the mechanics and quicker trigger fingers will often be decisive of outcome. Maybe this was done better in later entries, but once I got hit in a specific way, especially once I dialed the difficulty up a little bit, I often felt like I was hopelessly at the mercy of my opponent to ever get a chance to hit again. The game also has a feature where you get dizzy for a few seconds, which I think is really silly for a game like this and one I didn't like at all.

Animations and the different attack styles of all characters definitely do feel pretty advanced for a game of this time, so I gotta give credit for that. And now that I've played this, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how other fighting games that released in the coming years will compare.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Voice acting is limited to damage noises and "Hadouken!", which is enough to have it be iconic. Sound design I thought was solid and the soundtrack is about 40 minutes long and includes music for each character. Some of my favorites include the tracks for Guile, Ryu, Blanka and M. Bison.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
I like the character design and the different styles of the backgrounds of the arenas that the characters fight in. I'd say the graphical quality is pretty good overall but nothing that will make you go "wow".

ATMOSPHERE
Seeing groups huddle around to watch you and your opponent fight is always awesome. But the stages themselves are otherwise very static, you can break a few barrels here and there but otherwise the environment you fight in doesn't change anything. The best thing the game does atmospherically during fights is have the tracks fit the "boss" of the arena. For example, Vega fights very fast and his track is also very fast.

CONTENT
You got 8 characters + 4 bosses. You can play any character in Battle Mode and face every other character. This will take you a good 20-30 minutes and you will be rewarded with a short cutscene that suits the character you fought with. When you win with Ryu for example, you get a cutscene where Ryu is supposed to be given an award for winning, but instead he is shown walking off into the horizon because ceremonies mean nothing to him and he is off to the next fight.

In addition, you can fight locally against a friend and adjust difficulty in the Options menu. Plenty of content here, as you get 8 different character "stories" to play through and will need to spend many more hours to properly learn how to fight with each character.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The structure of fights is pretty simple by today's standards. One v One fights, the first to two round wins, wins the fight. It's simple, but effective. You also can choose to play any character's story as I mentioned previously, and what I just said about the structure of fights applies here too.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Can't really do anything but give full grades for a game that has changed the shape of a genre like this. Few games accomplish for their genres what Street Fighter II did back in the day, even if it was the Arcade version and not the SNES version that I played that had done the deed.

REPLAYABILITY
Endlessly replayable to learn how to master this game, though that probably applies to back then more than it does to new players today.

PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.

OVERALL
I can't say it aged as well as some other games from that time period but fighting games were not established at the time like platformers, so to have Street Fighter II take such a leap is to be respected, and it's not like you won't have your fun with it if you decide to play it today. The game delivers beyond expectations in the storytelling department thanks to endings for each character (and a hilarious/ridiculous one for Chun Li), has created characters that are still iconic to this day and has delivered multiple sequels since. And those sequels I'd probably recommend to you more than this game in particular, which I doubt will live on as a great game by today's standards rather than simply being an iconic old-school video game that propelled the medium forward in a big way.