The Xbox 360 Street Fighter 2 release on Xbox Live is a hot topic. I ran into a listing of classic screens of SF2 from mobygames. A set of which, is apparently the ZX Spectrum release. I love the warning message (the first picture), which is nothing more than saying, “WARNING: THIS GAME LOOKS LIKE ASS”.

And the warning is not without reason. At the time, SF2 was popularized in the arcade with fully dedicated hardware, expense hardware, elite hardware. Anything in the arcade trumped what you had at home. SF2 wasn’t a game with intense drama, story and deep elements. It’s a fighter that would have been hard to come home to if your Old Brown Shoe was a ZX Spectrum.

The lack of color and detail is both confusing and frightening. I appreciate the 360′s faithfulness to the original but hiss at anything more backwards. If SF2 was designed first on the ZX Spectrum, it would have been simpler from the start, rather than a weak copy. A copy that was so weak that it warranted a disclaimer in green.

Curiously, a strong memory of Street Fighter 2 was the bonus round where you could beat up a car on a dock. It was a button mashing fest of guyish proportions. Violence + Cars. And if you choose Chun Li, then you almost had the holy trinity in a pixelated managerie: Violence + Cars + Women.

In the arcade version, there was enough graphic detail that you could see a little Lexus ‘L’ symbol on the front grill. Usually within seconds, that grill was flying across the arcade screen and the car was no longer recognizable. For the curious, the make/model was likely a pixel-art drawn Lexus LS400 (’94). Knowing the make and model surely makes the destruction that much more enjoyable, similar to skeet-shooting fine wine: “2001 Pinot, France. Lovely. Pull.”

In this modern age, I embrace our improving retro thinking although I’m not likely to drop $10 to play something that is otherwise freely available. But to each their own. The quarter mode reels my interest back in, a mode where you can watch a fight in progress and drop a virtual quarter to say “I Got Next”. Just like the good old days. However, I am saddened that you would get gamer points on Live for simply queueing up for a game. Microsoft rewards simple online interaction too much. For example, these two achivements have the same reward of 5 points:

12 World Warriors
Play a match with all twelve characters in single player arcade mode – 5g

I Got Next
Play a match in the online quarter mode – 5g

Fine. I see that they are pushing people to jump online but the trend seems to be increasing too rapidly as if they are not getting enough Live subscribers. If this is true, they need to focus on releasing more content more often. Recently, they at least had a content news page which shows upcoming (promises) releases. It’s a start. But I bet it came about out of complaints.