Street fightin into 3 dimensions. Sort of.
Written: May 20 '05
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Playable
Cons: graphics,speed, bloody Green Hadoukens
The Bottom Line: SF completeists, and those who are looking for a decent, cheap, fighter only. It's not anything great, but is fairly amusing at a low cost.
|
|
|
| flash-hammer's Full Review: Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha for PlayStation 1 |
In 1997, after countless rehashes, prequels and prequel rehashes, Capcom decided to take a bold step and make its legendary Streetfighter fighting games in the third dimension. Sort of. While the character models would be created from polygons instead of pixels, the gameplay would be almost 2D in execution, with leaving the 2D fighting field only done really when knocked down, apart from Akuma's teleport style move. The game also wouldn't be made by Capcom, but it's Streetfigher name and characters licensed out to a smaller company named Arika.
Released in arcades to minor success as Streetfighter EX, a port for the then all powerful Sony PlayStation was commisioned, and in to give the game a true Capcom feel to it, it was given a ridiculous add on to it's title, and Streetfighter EX+Alpha (Streetfigher EE-EX Plus Alpha) was born.
The game is a pseudo 3D fighting game, in which the game is essentially 2D, but the characters are made of polygons and the camera angle changes. It works the same way as the majority of Streetfighter games, you have to win the best out of 3 rounds of combat where the idea is to reduce your enemy's energy bar to empty using a variety of punches, kicks, throws and special moves.
The basic gameplay should be the same as that in the latest 2D Streetfighter games, but there is just something about the gameplay of EX+Alpha that makes it seem more like a competent SF-clone with 3D graphics than Streetfighter 3D. It's a lot slower than the 2D games for a start, and slowness just doesn't suit SF style play.
The game features a Super Move bar, that is filled up the usual way, landing and blocking attacks, and fills up three blocks, allowing you to have 3 Super moves. What notable about this game, is that if you finish your opponent with a Super move, the background goes all crazy and a big meteor crashes. This is intended to add some form of cinematic spectacle I think, but it ends up being more unintentional comedy.
The beginning of that paragraph sums up basically everything that's wrong with the game: it simply isn't Streetfighter, and why the fact that it advertises itself as such actually harms it. Had this featured all unique characters, and I had went into it with no expectations, then I probably would have looked upon the engine far more favourabley. But the fact is, after years of playing and loving the games, I now have a certain, fairly high, expectation that comes with a game being titled 'Streetfighter', and this game, while playable, was far too slow and clunky to ever live up to them.
If there is one aspect of the game that I look favourabley upon, it's the number of modes at the player's disposal. As well as Arcade mode, which is the basic single player experience, defeat a number of opponents and unlock a short CGI movie, the standard 2-Player Versus mode, a 5-a-side Team Battle mode, standard Time Attack and Survival options, a watch mode and possibly the game's best point: it's practice mode. There are two types of practice mode, Training and Expert. Training is your bog-standard, fight against stationary opponent, and Expert is what gained the game a lot of plaudits. Here you are actually attempting to perform all the character's special moves, and learn how to link them into combos, this was a great feature, and really helps new people to SF games learn the moves for a lot of the characters, although it's a shame it's in such a poor entry of the franchise.
The aforementioned CGI endings are a fairly nice touch, and introduce a Tekken series style flavour (I think Arika really wanted to make a Tekken game), but these little videos are nowhere near on par with the endings of Namco's games, and are usually something silly and throwaway like Ryu, in a blurry fashion, fighting a bunch of guys or something original like that.
The character selection is also a bit of a sticking point. While legendary Streetifighters Ryu,Dhalsim, Ken, Chun-Li, Zangief, Guile, M.Bison, Akuma and Sakura all appear, the game is overflowing with Arika's own characters, including teenage heroine Hokuto (read: Kasumi Todoh from King of Fighters), ex-crime syndicate bouncer Cracker Jack, an ex-soldier with a grudge against Guile in the form of Doctrine Dark, Eastern Princess Pullum Purna, Skeletal Superhero Skullomania, Hokuto's 'Evil Ryu' brother Kairi, Dan Hibiki wannabe Allen Snyder, Indian wreslter Darun, rich fighting girl Blair Dame and spiky samurai demon thing Garuda.
For the most part, these new characters are all bland and boring, and with the exception of the quite cool Garuda, the only standout is the just plain silly Skullomania. In their defence, a lot of the characters have unique movesets, apart from Kairi and Allen, who are almost standard shotokan fighters, but I'm sure the majority of gamers would rather have had a classic Streetfighter cast in 3D with a few new characters than an almost equal amount. It's almost as if Arika was working on a completely unrelated fighter, got the SF license and decided just to merge the two together into one mediocre game.
The controls are as follows:
Square:Light Punch
Triangle:Medium Punch
X:Light Kick
Circle:Medium Kick
R1: Strong Punch
R2:Strong Kick
The 4 face button controls are in the normal manner for a Capcom layout on the PlayStation controller, but I do have to applaud Arika for their implementation of the Strong Punch and Kick moves to the Right Shoulder buttons, as anyone who has ever tried to perform a Quarter-Circle-Forward rotation on the D-Pad(especially this horrible D-Pad) and press strong punch will testify. Personally I would still recommend investing in an Arcade stick or alternative form of control for the game, something with 6 easy access face buttons and a better control method than the Dual-Shock or standard PSX Pad's horrendous D-Pad.
Graphically speaking, the game is rooted firmly in the 'just there' category for PlayStation games. The fighters are animated fairly well, but my god are their models blocky, and when you see them up close for victory poses it's almost cringe-worthy how lego-like they look, and we won't even talk about the texture clipping. Seriously, this makes the Tekken games look like graphical masterworks.
The pyrotechnics for the special moves are decent, nothing more. I was greatly disturbed by the fact that for some reason, Arika decided to take liberties and change Ken's Hadouken to Green. Green? are you mad?!, Hadoukens are blue!, well, apart from Akuma's but his are super, why Arika thought they could get away with this I don't know.
The stages are actually comparable to the Tekken games in the way they work, going on to infinite lengths with just boring ground, with something in the background. The fact that the backgrounds are all boring and bland really doesn't help the game, the thought of Ryu squaring off against Akuma in what looks like the gardens of a Private School never really captured my imagination.
Sound in the game isn't much to sing about either. Voice work is ok, but for some reason, I just feel a lot of the voices do not suit the characters. Music is also passable at best, poor at worst. None of the tunes here will ever rival Capcom's music, especially in the legendary second Streetfighter game. All with the exception of the tune that plays when the ending videos show, which is absolutley hilarious, gameshow-esque music that actually must be heard to be believed.
In general, I really don't know how to sum up Streetfighter EX + Alpha. I mean, it's not really a bad game, but the fact is, it isn't all that good either. It just sort of falls in the middle, playable, fairly enjoyable in 2-Player, but not really all that memorable. The only reason as many people have played it as the figure is, is due mainly to the tacking on of the Streetfighter name and characters. Personally, I feel the game is ok, but when compared to the other, Capcom made, Streetfighter games, it just pales in comparison, and is highlighted for what it is, a mediocre fighter on a console with way too many fighters to really care about mediocre ones. I feel the game has enough going for it to warrant 3-Stars, because, as I say, it's at least decent, and I'll even recommend it, mainly because it's nowhere near being the worst fighter for the PSX, and is even quite fun on 2-Player, but personally, I would go for any 'proper' Streetfighter game first, and recommend you do the same.
More Streetfighter Related Reviews
Games
Streetfighter Alpha 2 for Sega Saturn
Streetfighter Alpha 2 for PlayStation
Streetfighter Alpha 3 for Dreamcast
Streetfighter 2 for Super Nintendo
Streetfighter 2: Turbo for Super Nintendo
Streetfighter 2:Special Champion Edition for Sega Genesis
Super Streetfighter 2 for Sega Genesis
Super Streetfighter 2 for Super Nintendo
Super Streetfighter 2 Turbo: Revival for Gameboy Advance
Streetfighter 3:Double Impact for Dreamcast
Streetfighter 3:Third Strike - Fight For the Future for Dreamcast
Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Streetfighter for PlayStation
Marvel Vs. Capcom:Clash of Super Heroes
Saturday Night Slam Masters for Super Nintendo
Final Fight One for Gameboy Advance
Movies
Streetfighter 2:The Animated Movie
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
flash-hammer
|
 - Top 500 |
|
Reviews written: 728
Trusted by: 107 members
About Me:
NICE!
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2010 Shopping.com, Inc.