Gaming Target - Game Boy: Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival

Written by Thomas Wilde on November 29, 2001

Review: It's the title that started it all!

Capcom's reputation for squeezing successful franchises until they squeak like scared mice began with Street Fighter II. Originally an arcade title, SFII was subsequently released and rereleased and revamped and updated and rereleased and ported and cleaned up and ported again. Each release had a new adjective or modifier added to its title, until every video game player in the world had at least three copies of the damn game cluttering up their shelf and people started screaming.

We thought we'd seen the last of this series with the PSX/Saturn release Street Fighter Collection. This title featured Super Street Fighter II Turbo, the SF revision that the hardcore shoryuken.com SF fans consider the apex of the game (which is hard to believe considering that it does not have Dan in it). Having only previously appeared on the 3DO, which only one guy in the continental United States bought, SSF2T was finally released on a system that people actually owned. Finally, Capcom could move on to squeezing the Alpha series like a python on angel dust, until every last penny, rupee, yen, mark, pound, franc, and eight-hundred-pound stone wheel from the Isle of Yap (you should see their vending machines, they're really neat) had fallen out, and we could all stop playing those damn SF2 games after ten years.

We were fools. We were all fools.

Exhibit A: SSF2T: Revival.

Honestly, I never played much of SSF2T. I played the hell out of SSF2 on the SNES, but SSF2T just never made it into my home. Guile and Ken have new stages although I don't know if they are new to this version or not. Other than that, and the addition of super meters this is a slightly-less-graphically-attractive yet fluidly-animated port.

Oh, there is one more thing.

They took out medium-level attacks.

That's right, medium kicks and short punches aren't in this version. It still plays, yes, but some characters are massively hurt by the omission. Sure, scrubs won't care, because that won't do anything to hurt their fireball traps, but for characters like Blanka, the absence of medium attacks bites down hard.

Revival is for the newbies among us. Anyone who was into console gaming during the sixteen-bit era made up their mind on Street Fighter 2 a long time ago, and probably played too damn much of it. Even the hardcore SF players, who might have been looking forward to portable SF2 so they could finally walk and talk smack at the same time, just let out a snort of disgust and are over at shoryuken.com or alt.games.sf2 right now, expressing their anger and closely held hate ("No medium attacks?! NOOOOOO!").