Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 386: Street Fighter II Redux

Episode Date: June 28, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Kat Bailey, Shivam Bhatt, and Sam revisit the World Warrior circuit to talk even more about Street Fighter II—or rather, the MANY iterations and permutations it undertook between 1992-2017. Turbo, Hyper, Ultra, even Rainbow! It's all here.  Art by Shaan Khan. Edits by Greg Leahy. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts!

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, we finally defeat Shenlong. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish. And we are once again talking about Street Fighter because, as mentioned a few times before, Street Fighter 2 turned 30 years old this year back in February. And so we've been making our way through the franchise. I don't know how far we're going to go. I kind of tapped out at Street Fighter 4, but, you know, there's a lot of history there, and we're talking about it. And last time, you know, we talked about the final fight, but before that, the last formal conversation we had about Street Fighter was Street Fighter 2, but that was just the World Warrior. That was just the original arcade release and its super NES port, which were, you know, both of those were big deals.

But the thing about Street Fighter 2 is that that was not the end of the story. And this was not a case where it was like a bunch of systems got Street Fighter 2, and it was the same thing with some little differences. No. Capcom released like a billion versions of Street Fighter 2 in arcades, and those came to consoles in various forms with various variations and mutations, and the overall result is one of the most iterated upon video games of all time. And I guess that's not super remarkable in these days. this day and age, when people release a video game, publishers release a video game, and continue updating it through, you know, DLC, through patches, through updates, you know, they just, especially like an MMO or something, but even single player games,

something like Celeste, you know, will receive a patch that totally rebalances it, changes fundamental play mechanics, and basically turns it into a different game. Well, they didn't have that capability back in 1993. So instead of, you know, releasing DLC patches for Street Fighter 2, Capcom would just, you know, put out a new version of it in arcades. And then they would adapt it in various ways to home consoles. So we're going to talk about that legacy of iterations leading all the way up to the most recent supposedly final iteration of Street Fighter 2,

which was released in 2017, which was 26 years after the game made its debut. in arcades. That's a long time to iterate on a single game. So we're going to talk about all of that. And with me here, to do that, we have returning from, I believe, last time the Street Fighter 2 episode.

The beautiful do not know defeat. It's Kat Bailey. And also a recurring retronauts, or returning retronauts contributor new to the topic of Street Fighter on this show. It behooves us all

to go home and be family men. Shiven Butt, hello. And finally, new to Retronauts altogether. Hi, I'm Sam from the Polygon Symphony's podcast, and hopefully today I won't have to hold down the start button to find my additional comments. No, but if you change and, you know, press the controller in the right direction,

you can change to a different color. Yes, I'm looking forward to that. Oh, man, Super Street Fighter, 2 Turbo. I got, I've got somebody There's a lot to say about that one. Yep, okay. So we are going to get to those stories. I'm looking forward to hearing about everyone's anecdotes.

I shared pretty much all my street fighter anecdotes about how I'm a bully and terrible to children last time. People are still giving me grief about that on comments. It's great. But, you know, just in a joking way, in a joking way. Just like Jeremy's a bully against children. They had it coming. He did.

In Game Center CX, whenever Iron O plays Street Fighter 2, the only people he can beat are, like, six-year-old children. And he always does, he always plays up the, eh, yeah, I beat you a little kid, ha-ha. So there you go. That's terrible. He's an old man now. So that's even worse than me. He's like 50 now, so. Wow.

But the little kids are like in Back to the Future's tile, like, what, you have to use your hand for this game? You can't touch the screen? Where's the funny skeleton who talks? Isn't this undertale? yeah so anyway just as a quick recap of the series to date we have talked about the original streetfighter and it's kind of precursors namely oh man I just totally blanked out in his name Nishiyama his work with Irem creating Kung Fu Master before Street Fighter

and then you know he would go on to S&K to create Fatal Fury and the King of Fighters and I believe now he works at I want to say dimps. But anyway, he was kind of the godfather of all this. Nishitani, Akiman, he was the lead designer on Street Fighter 2, along with Yoshiki Okamoto. There are a lot of Nishis and Yama's and in here. It gets a little confusing. We constantly stumbled over it in the last episode, and I won't even try to keep all of that straight this time. It's just like, yeah, yeah, it's just easy to say the wrong thing by mistake. Anyway, the important thing is Street Fighter was innovative and different, but not actually

that great. And then its sequel, Street Fighter 2010, the final battle, or no, sorry, the final fight was neither Street Fighter nor the final fight. It was a like a bounty hunter action game in the future for NES. And then Final Fight came out. And as Nishitani has said, that was going to be Street Fighter 89. And they created it as a belt-scrolling brawler because they only had so much memory. He wasn't really a big fan of that game, even though he created it, and wanted to create a sequel that would be better than Street Fighter.

They were like, you need to make another Street Fighter game. And he said, but I don't really like Street Fighter. So he went and he played the game and said, OK, I see what the essence is here. Now I want to make a game that will live up to the potential of this 1987 arcade game. game that was kind of a mess. And so he and his team spent, you know, probably like six weeks, however long games were iterated upon back then before an arcade release. I think it was more like six months.

But they built a game that was stunning in its ambition and scope. It was a fighting game where this was essential. Almost all the computer-controlled opponents that you had to face could also be. played as there were 12 characters total and eight of them were playable and you know logistically that's a nightmare but it was really really revolutionary for fighting games at that point because you did tend to have games where you would control a character or two characters and maybe those were like the characters you could play versus with if it even had a versus mode but then the rest of it would just be like computer controlled opponents you look at y'i r kung fu or something like that and it's

just, you know, it's not great. It's very limited. Street Fighter 2 was, was big and bold. Like, it had amazing visuals because Aki-Man is an artist, you know, Nishitani. Like, that was his calling. But also, it just had so much to it. Every character had so many abilities. Just, and by abilities, I just mean, like, they could do so many things. They had so many frames of animation, so many capabilities. They each had six different attack buttons. And where they were standing the context of what they were doing when they launched into attacks, like that changed the nature of those attacks. And then they could

combo those attacks together. And then they had special abilities locked away behind controller inputs beyond just the six face buttons. And each of them had different abilities. Like Ryu and Ken were pretty much the same. But Gile and Chun Li were nothing at all alike. Dalsim and Zangy were

nothing at all alike. All these characters were wildly different from each other. And somehow despite all of this, despite the memory limitations, despite all the things that should have made this game a disaster, just an over-ambitious mess. It was not. It was fantastic.

It was addictive. And it was an instant hit. Like, you could not go anywhere in the early 1990s without just seeing Street Fighter 2 everywhere. It was all over magazines, game magazines. But, you know, beyond that, the cabinets were just installed. anywhere someone could stick an arcade cabinet. The characters showed up in ancillary media. There were movies, cartoons.

There were action figures. There were, you know, other collectibles and merchandise and things like that. You know, for a game about ethnic caricatures punching each other, it was surprisingly, it was surprisingly popular. It just was, you know, like mainstream success. It's really remarkable. Well, it's one of the, uh, the problem. with that much success is what we're going to get on to later, which is going to get copied. And it was a victim of its own success.

And one of the main reasons we're going to talk about all the iterations today was the piracy that was involved. You know, when you get such a hit, people want a piece of that pie, but they don't necessarily want to pay you for the piece of the pie that they should. And one of the main catalyst that brought along all of the various streetfighter two versions, versions was piracy. And it's funny that you mentioned, like, the fact that this was basically a beta version that got patched over and over and over again because there was a joke for a long time when I was a kid that Capcom couldn't count past two, right?

Like, Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 2 champion, Turbo, Super Turbo, but it was just always... Alpha? Alpha 2, what? What are you doing? Right. And in Japan, Alpha was called Zero, so they were counting backward. They were counting backwards. so funny. in, well, shall we start talking about Champion Edition? Well, first I'd like to hear, you know, Kat was on the previous Street Fighter 2 episode,

but Sam and Shivam, neither of you were. So I'm curious what your first encounters with Street Fighter 2 were. And, you know, at what point you were like, this is my thing. I love this. Shewim's grinning. Like, Shiham was in ground zero of Street Fighter Mania, man. He grew up around here. Yeah, he's like, oh, the stories I could tell you.

Oh, my God, dude. Okay, so I love it. I love Street Fighter. I've always loved Street Fighter. It's like one of my favorite games. I mean, I feel that I say that every time I come on Retronauts, like, look, this is my favorite game of all times. That's because we tilt the odds in your favor. We always call you in for things that you love. You're like, dude, you got to get me on an episode about this topic. So we do. You're like, I love this thing. But I mean, that's, you know, it's just natural. That's how it goes. It makes total sense. Now, here's the thing, right? So I'm born and raised in the Bay Area. So Sunnyvale Golf Land, which was ground zero for Capcom testing, was down the street from my aunt's house, so I used to go there quite often. But I actually discovered Street Fighter when I was living in Massachusetts on the other side of the country. Really? That's so interesting. Because I was, I mean, in 1993 or so, 1992, I was a kid in Massachusetts because we had moved to the east side before we came back.

And I discovered in this arcade where so many people I saw Chun Lee fighting against Dalsam. It was the first time in my life I'd ever seen an Indian character in any video game ever. or any media of anything. And I was like, look at this guy. He's got Ganesha in the background of a statue. There's elephants. His arms are super long and he's breathing fun. It was neat.

It was cool. I mean, now I'm kind of like a little cringy about how, you know, he's got like this necklace of skulls and the ink on his head and all this. But when I was a kid, I was like, look, it looks like me and it's awesome. And I was immediately enthralled by this game. And of course, my favorite character became Raiu, right? Because it had nothing to do with him, but Raiu was cool. cold fought in that waterfall at the end of the game

had no cared about anything and threw fireballs but I was completely obsessed like you would go and try this game out and you'd get your butt whipped up and down the street by other people who've been playing it more but I've jammed quarters and every time I'd figure out oh if I do this if I jump up hold down and punch I can spin like a tornado whoa it's wild but what got me

and the weird thing this is like the weirdest way you can get into a game is on my birthday I think of my 11th birthday, I got, my friend gave me the GameSpot issued Street Fighter 2 strategy guide. The Street Fighter 2 strategy guide that they came out with for champion edition and for normal edition, what it was was a thick, like one of those old, like, you know, magazine-style books, and it had pages for each character. And the first page would be every single normal move and the percentage of life you lost. So it would be like, you know, Ken does a jab and it loses 16% life. He does a fierce. It loses 24% life.

You know, that sort of thing. And then every special move and then a number of combos you can do. And I read this book like it was the Bible. Like, I read it every day. I memorized all the move list and all the combos. I learned how to do air hurricane. Like, you know, Ryu jumps forward, doesn't air hurricane

to hit Saget and, you know, all the weird two and ones and all the weird three in ones. And I became obsessed with this game. And they put out a supplement in GamePro, which was for Super Turbo, I mean, for Super Super Super Super Super Fighter, the first time they had one of big Japan versus America tournaments. It was like the first time anybody ever heard of Daigo, for instance.

And you would learn things like they would show you recaps of all the big tournament moves, all the big like battles they had. And you would learn like, oh, if you're Zangif and you duck five times and do a jab, you can dizzy somebody. Or here's like a 15 step thing that Gile can do that will let you double dizzy someone. And I'm like, wow, I need to learn how to do that. And if you try that in the arcade, of course you lost because you're spending all your time faffing around trying to do a 38 hit combo.

Well, the other guy is just punching you until you die. But Street Fighter just grabbed me. The big, bold characters, the fireballs, the actions, the fact that you were globally traveling around this world, each background was vivid. You know, Sagitt's background had the giant sleeping bada in the background. You know, M. Bison's got the big temple bells, like Ryuz on the moonlit, like, you know, platform up there. It just took you to a different world every level.

And the game was so addictive. and then when I got here to Cali and I started going to the arcades you would see like the real players like John Cho and all these guys who were like hardcore street fighter players and they would be doing things with this game that you couldn't even fathom.

I went to like the first two evos because they were at the arcade that was close to my college before they were called Evo back when it was like Battle by the Bay the big street fighter tournaments I remember when like you know the first time that you see things

like Justin Wong or Daigo fighting in person when you see these guys go into Zen State go and just start doing things with this game that by the time you've processed what they've done, there are already four moves ahead of you. And it just took me to this entire plane of existence. Street Fighter is a game that I will never be able to play at the level that I appreciated at. But I love it so much in like my fibers. I love this game.

Like I was such a deep member of just watching Street Fighter. And like when Twitch started, when people would start playing Street Fighter tournaments and Avo would start being broadcast, It was like a holiday for me. I'm like, I tell my wife, like, take all my meetings. I'm not going to talk to anybody until Tuesday. It's me and Evo right now. This is what's going to happen for the next three days. I'm going to sit in just like mainline street fighter matches.

Like, what, the 38th pot of no-name people from the Philippines, just fighting out for glory and joy? How can you not love that? How can you not love everything that Street Fighter is done for fighting and for games in general? It's the greatest game of all time. No pressure. Sam, how about you?

how do you follow that up jeez sorry i like punching people yeah uh well the the game of choice in my friend group when i was growing up i think i'm a little bit younger than you guys i'm just i'm between 35 and 40 so i think i'm a little bit younger than you guys but the main game of choice for my friend group was mortal combat and in the uk i would probably go to say as mortal combat, probably had like 75% of the fighting game market, and Street Fighter and Killer Instinct had kind of the rest, you know, like the other 25%. I got into Street Fighter and mainly there was a local, like a family restaurant in my town, and I believe the cabinet they had was Super Turbo because it had the attract screen of Ryu,

you know, psyching himself or jumping up and down. Like 20 moving parts that just kind of show. shift up. Well, that's it. It was that a track screen of him moving up and down. Seeing that, I was like, that looks so much more interesting than Mortal Kombat. What, I don't understand what you guys are getting out of Mortal Kombat. And then when I started playing it, the depth that was in Street Fighter compared to Mortal Kombat,

I had Mortal Kombat for the Super Nintendo, Mortal Kombat 2. I never actually had a copy of Street Fighter. at home until probably the PS3 sort of time but I always managed yeah I know it was actually for the Super Nintendo it was kind of hard to get in the UK a power copy

just because of the proliference of Mortal Kombat was so big over here I don't know what it was like isometric stuff and pre-rendered stuff we just kind of love it here I remember the big conversation around this time was Street Fighter versus Mortal Kombat and it kind of reminded me

a bit of the conversation about Mario versus Sonic. Mario was maybe more refined, but Sonic was kind of cooler. And maybe the same was the case with Mortal Kombat, right? Like, Mortal Kombat was more beating you over the head with its approach

to motion capture and everything. It wasn't as refined and nuanced as streetfighter. But it had its own appeal, I think. Well, I mean, it also was like, you know, the other battleground on the playground with Genesis versus Sega, right? And Sega had the bloody Mortal Combat. And SuperNsendant the sweaty Mortal Kombat.

There's something to be said for both. World Kombat shamed SNSEN to having actual blood. Yeah, well, that's probably like more of the sort of obviously being from the UK to Genesis or Mega Drive over here was a lot more in a lot more homes than Super Nintendo was. And I think, obviously, with marketing and things like that, Mortal Kombat kind of got attached to Sega.

But yeah, I think, as you were saying, Kat, the instant you see Mortal Kombat you kind of get it you get everything in one glance like oh yeah it looks like that it does like that

there's blood everywhere great but Street Fighter too you had to spend time at and if you was only playing it in the arcade that meant you had to spend money on it

so if you spent the time and the effort with Street Fighter you got back more than what you would with Mortal Kombat but because Mortal Kombat gave you everything bang one quarter

or 50 pence pieces who's over here gave you it instantly street fire you had to invest the time we've bought if you did invest that time you got

so much back so with. So with that said so with that said thank you both No, no, I think both of you kind of bring up some points that are very important to why the game was iterated on so many times by Capcom. You know, the experience you've talked about playing in the arcades, one of the things that I picked up by reading interviews with Nishitani especially is that Japanese players and American players approach Street Fighter 2 in very different ways. he said took a very aggressive approach

and you kind of see this reflected in how Kin and Ryu play versus each other like Shiva you mentioned like the kind of cringy stereotypes of doll suitmen yes absolutely but to be fair to that game or I guess like unfair to everyone like all characters were ridiculous stereotypes even the Japanese characters you have a sumer wrestler

and you have Ryu a man who doesn't care about anything except honor that's all he cares about but But he and Ken are basically, you know, like in terms of mechanics, in terms of skills, the same characters, but Ken rewards a more aggressive play style, a more physical. Like his, his forte is the punches, the dragon punch, whereas Ryu is more about the spirit, the chi that he projects through his projectiles. So you really kind of see that as a reflection of how the developers saw this game being experienced by people in different countries. And at this time, like, the American arcade industry drove the conversation because it was so much bigger than in Japan. So they really had to think, like, try to try to understand what Americans wanted, you know, by going over and just playtesting and watching and observing probably a golf land.

You probably hung out with Nishitani without even realizing Shivam. It's entirely possible that you saw him there. And he was like watching you play and thinking, huh, this kid, he's interesting. Well, here's the thing that you bring up a very important point here. And if you compare the way American arcades were set up for Street Fighter versus how Japanese arcades

were set up. In America, we've got the one tall standing console, two players stand next to each other, left and right, we combat, we put our coin up, so we do the thing. In Japan, the Street Fighter games were one player sitting down at a console by themselves, and the other player would be back to back with their own

console, sort of like we were playing Battleship to board game or something like that. This was something that they specifically had to implement because when the game first came out, Americans immediately gravitated toward it. They were like, oh, yeah, it's a competitive game. I'm going to beat the crap out of my buddy. That's cool. Like, you know, it's a great video game tradition since Pong, or actually since space war. Since the very beginning, Americans were making games that were just about destroying another person. And so Street Fighter 2 was part of that great tradition. But in Japan, arcades were much more of a solo experience, you know, I guess

cooperative when you had stuff like Final Fight, but even those weren't nearly as big in Japan as they were here. Yeah. So people were not playing against each other. They were playing against the computer. They were, you know, just playing to complete the game as their favorite character and defeat Bison, or I guess Vega at the end. And so they had to figure out, like, how do we get Japanese players to compete with each other? Because they don't want to. So what they ultimately came up with was the connected, you know, back-to-back cabinets where there is an element of anonymity where you do not actually see the other person you're playing. And creating, I guess, that sense of separation that anonymity, they were able to convince Japanese players like, oh, yes, okay, it's cool

to play against other people. That's how this game is meant to be played. But it was difficult for them to get to that point. Yeah, because there's also this idea of you don't want to be showing off. you don't want to be like, you know, styling on the person you're fighting against. It's like bad manners, right? Like, oh, I just pounded you into the ground. In America, we're just like, you know, puffing ourselves up, crash talk. We're getting in each other's face. That's not what you do in a Japanese culture.

I mean, even when I lived there and I was playing a lot, with the exception of like DDR, there was never a time when I would see two people playing an arcade game side by side. Because that's just like, even when you beat, you know, it's like, please let us have a good fight or a good cause. combat, but it wouldn't be like, you know, next to each other just go and ham. And I think there's a real interesting way that, like, their fighting game style developed because of that. It's really neat. I will say, though, that there is something kind of infuriating about the anonymous approach that they use in Japan, because when Street Fighter 4 first came out, I was like, I was over in an arcade

in Shibuya and was like, oh, Street Fighter 4, I can't wait to try this. So I sat down and played like, you know, a few rounds, beat the first computer opponent. And someone jumped in on the other cabinet that I was linked to and just annihilated me. I was like, I've never played this game before. And someone just silently came in, beat me down, and then that was it. My yen. It was 100 yen. I have to say that I really appreciated having the back-to-back approach over in Japan

because I had always felt incredibly shy, you know, as a girl, walking up to this cabinet with a dude, putting my quarter down. playing Street Fighter 2, like it was actually really intense and anxiety-inducing. So being able to sit down at what would superficially look like an empty cabinet and not having to worry about that, not feeling super crowded by everybody, really helped a lot when I was living over in Japan. Hmm. All right. So Street Fighter 2 came out. It was a hit. It took a while for Capcom to be like, no, Japan, this is how you play, not that. But, you know, people were playing it so much.

it was being just hammered by millions of kids and people were getting really serious about it exposing all the flaws in the programming things like you know invincible the carer throws a handcuffs yeah yes all the way to break the game yep you know like the glitchy fireballs just all these things infinite combos redisies

stuff that weren't necessarily meant to be part of the game I mean even combos weren't meant to be part of the game but they were a happy sort of act But there were lots of unhappy accidents. So, you know, given the popularity of the game, Capcom kind of went back to the drawing board and said, let's fix this and put out, you know, kind of a point release. And at the same time, let's also, you know, throw in some features that people would like to see.

And, of course, the number one feature that people wanted to see was, why can't I play as the bosses? Why can't I do a mirror match? Exactly. Like, one of the biggest things about Street Fighter was you would sit down, you would pick your character, and if somebody else, and you and your friend, if you're putting down your coins, whoever's going first, and I grab Ryu and they're like, damn it, I wanted to play Ryu. Now I have to stick to play Cannes. I don't want to play Ken. They're functionally identical characters at that point, but one guy had the cool headband and the other guy didn't, and that made all the difference in the world. But, yeah, it just, like, remember how that was one of the big selling points for like the Super Nintendo version was you would be able to sit there and play. as like the player two and player one could play as the same character against each other? Yeah, you had to input a special code, X-A-B-Y or something. Right, you had to put in a code.

That wasn't even a default function. Yeah. That's so bizarre. You'd think it's such a staple of fighting games nowadays, you wouldn't think that that would just be like, oh, hang on a minute. It was kind of like a little cheat. Well, you know, I think the idea was meant, you know, it was still kind of in that ER Kung Fu kind of mode,

street fighter one kind of mode, where it's like, this is a story. You're playing as a character. It obviously doesn't make sense for a character to fight themselves because that would just be stupid. So they hadn't really, you know, considered that. But people, you know, who were good at the same character who, you know, specializes in the same character, wanted that ability. Like, you can, you can trash talk all you want, but you can't really prove who's the best until you actually had the chance to face off against each other as the character you both know best. And, you know, the super NES version launch. a few months after Champion Edition debuted. So I imagine, you know, that it wasn't just like an accident that that code was added in. Like, hey, wouldn't it be neat if we did this? I'm pretty sure I was like, you know, we're selling this as the original. If we don't, nobody's going to buy this game. Well, no, no, no.

That was not an issue. There was not an issue with people buying Street Fighter for Super Ennis. That game was hard to find when it first came out. And it's not because of the code that came out a month later. No, it was a case where, like, well, we're selling. this as, you know, Street Fighter 2, so we can't throw in like the Champion Edition stuff because then people will be like, well, how come I can't play as the bosses? So they've just, I think they just sold it as Street Fighter too, but then they were like, this is a really easy

feature to implement, you know, as a code. So let's just do that. So, you know, that also gave magazine something to publish. It gave them extra life like, hey, you know, two months later, we revealed this secret. And then all of a sudden people are like, oh, I want to go play that game. I want to try it again. I didn't know you could. do this. So I think it was a very tactical choice. Yeah, and it's also like, you know, good recess fodder, right, at schools.

But one of the things that, are we talking about Champion Edition proper now? Yes, we're talking about Champion Edition. So Champion Edition is my game. Champion Edition is like when people talk about, oh yeah, you know, my favorite street fighter, mine is Champion Edition. And the reason is very simple.

Because when you hit start, you would pick the Player 2 color instead of the Player 1 color. And the Player 2 color. And the Player 2 color, and the Player 2 color for Ryu is dark gray with the dark blue headband, which is like my favorite color combination for a character in the history of ever. I've got next to me two statues of Raiu who are gray colored. I've got like, I got one of the artists from Udon who did the art for the version that came out of the remake of Street Fighter 2, Drew Raiu's second player

for me and the looking like the player model. That's my dude. Yeah, Shivam. Blue Ken is my Ken. So that's why like those were the colors that were introduced in Champion Edition. Right. always really like them. And like Dalsim got his gray model. And everybody's like, why is Dalsam gray? And I appreciate that because that was them making Dalsam look like an Indian guru, a sadu who's gone and draped himself in, you know, the ashes of the dead and sits and meditates and does all the things. And I'm like, look, they spent 10 seconds and found a cool way to make him like matter. And it's like, so interesting. That stuff just really like stuck with me. I mean, look, I'm not saying they did everything perfect. They make his fire breathing because he's got bad breath from Curry, right? Like this is not. We're not talking the height of culture, but at least his... Is it bad breath? I thought it was just like curry is very hot. Like, Indian Korea is just like crazy hot.

That's all I took. I didn't take it is like, yeah, he's got halitosis. It was silly. But that, at least that touch made me really happy just because I'm like, look, I recognize and react to this. But Champion Edition was so cool. Because you could sit there, you could go and suddenly there were a whole mess more characters you could play as you got the feeling of like Chunli versus

Tunley battles are so good. Blanca versus Blanca doing the balls across the screen, bouncing off each other and, you know, the animation was sick. One thing, though, I did notice when I first came out is, like, if you look at the boss moves, like, when you look at the basic normals for the first eight characters, they're all varied looking. A short kick looks different from a forward kick looks different from a roundhouse kick. When you hit it with Vega or with a ballrog, it's a punch or just him ducking with the claw exactly the same animation. The only difference is the damage you get.

And I think they did that because they had only done so many animations for the bosses in the first street fighter that they wanted to make sure you mirrored what it felt like. So they couldn't differentiate as much. Like, I remember when Super came out and Vega started kicking. And I was like, holy crap, he could do something other than

just stick his claw forward. I was blown away. Or when Balrog ducks down and actually punches. I'm glad they never gave him kicks. That would have been too much. But Saggett, for instance, every movie did was a jump kick because they never figured out how to animate him punching in the original street fighter

until Super. But there was something about that. When you first pull out M. Bison and you get to do the torpedo across the screen and it's just like, Psycho Crusher! And it's so cool! And it turned your guy blue and it was neat. I mean, look, man, Champion Edition takes me back to being like 10

and just the joy of silly things that are like now just so trite and so, played out. But, like, the first time you could see, like, you know, you really feel that emotional rush of like, yeah, me and Raii were going to fight the world and nobody's going to stop. Look, I lived in a town called Yugasaki. I know how to pronounce his name, but I grew up in America. He had Raiu for my entire life. The rule of retronauts is don't correct anyone's pronunciation unless they're saying something offensive. It's fine. It's important to note as well. it's not only like

oh right they could have just slapped the additional four boss characters on this game and then been okay that's not but they kind of it's very strange because you first look at it and you go oh they just added a few more characters but actually they kind of changed everything in a very small way all the backgrounds

a lot of the moves a lot of the balancing they changed everything very slightly and that's one of the things obviously we're going to get to in in the next and so many different editions of the game is that they put detail into these iterations. I mean, there was a lot of arcade iterations

and also console iterations at this time that were just literally, I mean, look at Final Fight, Guy, you know? Yeah, do we have to? Guy. It was the first idea of DLC in a video game because basically what they were releasing

was not just, they were releasing expansion, right? Where you could play all four bosses and they used the opportunity to tighten up a lot of things, to recolor some things. Actually, I think it was champion edition where I first encountered Street Fighter 2 because my very earliest memories of Street Fighter 2 involved being able to play Vega because Vega was kind of my character to start because

he could slide around and the wall climb and he looked cool with the mask and everything so and Vega was a popular character because the design was like super dope so you would have two players would often pick Vega and would be crawling on the walls and everything and I was talking about in the previous episode how over at my local arcade, they had a setup where they had the screen, a big projection screen, and then a detached kind of control island where people were able to play. So it really took up a big part of the actual arcade. And yeah, my earliest, earliest, earliest memory of Street Fighter 2 is two Vegas going on that projection street and going, dang, what is this game?

I want to play it. That's awesome. It's like the movie trope. You know, the monster you don't see in the movie is the one that's scariest. but the character that you can't play in the game is the coolest. And then as soon as they give you the opportunity to play that character, it's like, yes,

here, have my quarter. I want to try that one and that one and that one, and that one, because I've spent six months not being... But also, for those of us who are old school, being able to do the Raiu versus Saget battles in real life and then end with a Shrodo you can, if you killed Sagitt with a Shrookin while you were playing as Riyu, that was

like achievement unlocked. You did the story moment, right? Like, you know, it's like, oh... Sagitt's like, again, no. I get excited. He's like, oh, it still hurts, guys, it still hurts. And Sagitt was an interesting character because he's so tall. And you get the impression that when they designed him, they weren't really thinking in terms of like being able to actually play with him.

So it's like, oh, well, so he's always felt a tiny bit awkward to actually play as just because he's like twice the size of your average character in that game. Yeah, but if you jump kicked him, right, you could jump kick into an air hurricane kick with Raiyu against Sagit that you couldn't. do against a shorter character, so you always felt like you were getting something over him. Of course, Sagitt was just so strong that he would just kick you out of the sky before you got there, but, you know, it's the little things. Doing aerial attacks against Sagat is always an extremely bad idea. I say this as someone who played a lot of Chun Li and did a lot of jumping. But, yeah, so, Kat, you said something earlier about, like, this was the invention of

DLC and expansion packs and games. I don't think that's quite true. I think this is actually, like, this release, Champion Edition, was really part of a tradition of arcade games that you saw, especially in Japan, stretching all the way back to, you know, space invaders, where publishers, manufacturers would make small tweaks and revisions to their games and reissue that, you know, kind of under a new label, you know, like, okay, now we've added actual color to space invaders, but it's still the same game. Or we've made, you know, some like refinements to Zevius, but you're still, it's still Zevius and you're still, you know,

doing the same stuff and the same places with the same enemies. It's just harder now. Or 1943 Kai, which is 1943, but like way the hell harder just because of some balancing changes. This was, this was very much, like this release was really heavily motivated by one. You know, Capcom wanted to keep the tills flowing and make sure that their infinite wealth remained infinite. But it was also motivated by the developers, like Nishitani and so forth, looking at all the flaws that they saw in their work. And he said in one of his interviews, like every time he was in an arcade and he saw someone, you know, get caught in a re-dizzy loop or pull an invincible throw or something, he just

like he felt his heartbreak. And he really wanted to go back and improve the game to make it better to fix all these things. And that's, you know, like, yes, obviously there's the public appeal of being able to play as the bosses or mirror matches or whatever. But fundamentally, like this game, this iteration was released because the creators were like, this could be better. Like there's so many things that we had to, you know, rush through because of memory limits. You know, there were ROM shortages at the time. So we really had to just like cut out animations, like characters. we had these introductions for all the characters and only Vega got to keep his

introductory, I guess, M. Bison in America, where he comes on a screen and throws aside his cloak. Like, everyone was supposed to have that. And there were supposed to be special animations depending on how you defeated a character. But they couldn't keep all those things because they were rushed for time. They were strapped for memory space. And this was an attempt to, you know, kind of write those wrongs and fix the revisions. And, you know, it took them a year, more than a to put this together. So it's not like it was just some quick cash in. You know, they let the game marinate for a while and they really paid attention to how people were playing and the experiences that people were having in arcades and where they were exploiting the game and, you know,

where it could be improved. And so this, this baked a lot of those changes into it. And it was, you know, fundamentally a pretty different experience. So much so that even though there was a highly successful super an ES cartridge, Capcom was like, let's test our look and sell another one of these based on Champion Edition. They call it Turbo. And, you know, that was actually a big deal. Like, I

couldn't see spending another 70, 80 bucks on a cartridge at the time. But, you know, people who were really into the game were very excited about the reissue. It was worth it. And, you know, the fact that as I think Sam put in the notes here, the game finally came to Sega Genesis

around the same time as Turbo for Super NES. And Sega was like, hang on, you're going to give Super NES turbo and you're going to give us like Champion Edition, just, you know, kind of watered down port? No, you need to. Not just Champion Edition. Special Champion Edition. Well, it was Street Fighter 2 Dash special champion edition. Don't forget the dash. It's tiny, but you have to voice it. It was the first game I ever bought with my own money. Wow. Nice. Yeah, Special Championship Edition was the first game. I earned money. I did the lawn mowing and laundry and all the random things to earn my dollars and

put them into a little tin. Did you earn enough money to buy the controller? Never did. So you had to hold down the start button to do stuff? You have to hit start to switch between punches and kicks. I played a lot of E-Honda, let me tell you. But it sucked to play with the three-button controller. However, I went to Macy's of all places because they had it on sale because you couldn't buy Special Championship anywhere. It was sold out at every store up and down, every electronic store. I mean, the fact that you can go to a department store to buy Street Fighter, that tells you how ubiquitous this was, right? But, yeah, trying to play it with the Genesis, with a three-button controller,

you can't map it, so it's either going to be punches or kicks. You know what, though? I learned a whole lot of how to do jumping punches into fireballs or how to do, I learned, I became really good with E-Honda, let me tell you. Special Champion Edition really played into the feeling at the time that Sega was cooler, than Nintendo because Street Fighter 2 comes out on the Super Nintendo and it's the first, it's first, and it's awesome, but also it's slow. It's also just normal Street Fighter 2.

Yeah, it's just regular Street Fighter 2, but here comes Special Champion Edition, which, by the way, it has turbo on it, so everything's moving at warp speed, and also it looks very good. Just ignore the fact that the music sounds like crap on the Sega Genesis version. It sounded fine, man. No, it really did not. It was so gritty and so bad. And I actually, I've really come around to the Sega Genesis soundship over the years.

It has a kind of a really distinct and kind of wonderful character to it. But I really cannot abide how Street Fighter 2 sounds like on that thing. The problem is when you've got such a direct comparison to compare it to, you know, it's not the same game, but it is the same game to compare it from Super NES to Genesis. It's like, hmm, yeah, we missed out there. And plus it totally played into the blast processing narrative. It's like, oh, yeah, it's like, it's faster than the Super Nintendo because it's a faster processor. The Super NES also got turbo around the same time.

So, and, you know, that did have the, I think, like seven selectable speeds or whatever. So they were, you know. Special Champion had 10 speeds. But Special Champion had more speed. That's the thing. I see, I see. There were 10 stars on there, man. But, yeah, it mattered.

You think the, the... It was unplayable, but it was awesome. You think the Genesis music would have been closer to the arcade because they both use the same technology like Yamaha FM synthesis but yeah Genesis the sound chip you just had to be a savant to really take advantage of it and in the right hands it was amazing and in the wrong hands uh you had you kind of scrambling to run over to the TV and turn down the volume I think we were just so excited to have Street Fighter that it just didn't dawn on the Genesis kids that the music was that bad it was just like look and besides who can hear it you're

yelling at your friends about the Dukins right like it doesn't matter yeah it's kind of cool. I didn't realize this, but in the notes, I think Sam added that the Genesis 6 button control pad was the SJ 6,000 in Japan, which is amazing because that means they were maintaining this lineage of product naming that started with the SG 1000 in 1983. Like their original joysticks, SJ is Sega joystick, and their original joysticks were like the SJ 100, the SJ 250, the SJ 25, yeah, So it's just really cool that they, like, kind of kept this thing going. That's an aside, but it's just... I always wanted to get that controller.

They released it specifically for Street Fighter. My parents were like, you're not buying a new, like $70 controller. That's not going to happen. Was it $70? It was a billion dollars. It might as well have been. The Wii era must have blown their minds. Dude, they were like, you're lucky we let you rent a game every three weeks, man.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. That six button controller, though, was really cool. It was really cool. People were really talking it up when it first came out. Well, yeah, having all the face buttons available for commands instead of having to do the super NES thing where you use the shoulder triggers. I always stuck like the attacks I didn't care about the most on the shoulders because it's just like it was so awkward to hit those shoulder buttons. But it also tells you just how obsessed we were with Street Fighter that we were willing to go through all these ridiculous hoops to make the game work. Like trying to play on those two controllers, which are the least fighting gaming controllers effort.

but i mean like when you watch like kids today playing street fighter in like evo with pads it blows my mind i'm like how are you playing like as fast as you are using four shoulder buttons like what i especially that left shoulder buttons the right ones are okay the left one i could never make it work it kind of bend your mind a bit because you've kind of got a pattern on the on the right and then you have to you bring a switch over to the left this which one's kick point i can't no i can't do it i need a stick man and then like five years later S&K would release a portable system for fighting games with only two face buttons. And it worked.

It was so weird. How did that happen? It works when the games are designed for it. Well, no. I mean, they managed to... Street Fighter 2 on the Game Boy. That was... That was not good.

I put Street Fighter 2 on the TurboGraphics, and it was just weird. The TurboGraphics one was super weird. I couldn't... Let's not talk about that. Yeah, so talking about all the speeds and how cool it was to crank it up to 10, even though it was unplayable, that factors very heavily into the next topic, which is the pirate hacks. Like after a while, this was also a grand arcade tradition. Where would Ms. Pac-Man be without pirate hacks?

It would not exist. But people working outside the bounds of property, intellectual property law to do cool things with cool games, that's what happened with Street Fighter. So people were releasing modifications for the original boards, or they were just copying the boards and sticking them out there and saying, what if we tweak some settings and made it wild and fun? and I think anyone who frequented arcades back at the time 1992 93 saw one of these

at least one of these hacks I think Rainbow Edition was the most popular the most you know the most widespread but that was not the only one and all of them you know

they would love to crank up the speed to ridiculous new levels to do things like give Chun Li a projectile so weird like just totally break the game what are you doing guys

I played Rainbow Edition when I was in Brazil some years ago And let me tell you It does feel like a ROM hack It's very messy The ROMI attack man It's so cool though Because like you would do things like

Okay Raiu does a hurricane kick And fireball starts shooting out of his feet And it's like what? There was a machine at my office That had like 38 street fighter hacks Back when we had offices And it was cool Because you could go and play like

Seven different versions of Rainbow edition and they're all very small tweaks of each other but it was there like red edition indigo edition yellow edition yeah no i think there are three distinctive sets if i remember right of rainbow edition there are there are there are more but there are as if you go and the three canonical ones yeah if you go and download you like isos or try and emulate these things through name there are officially in the community i believe there are free sets they're just known as rainbow one two three but there are free sets so sam you seem to have um a special interest in this particular topic.

Do you want to walk us through like the actual history or story here as far as you know it? As far as I know, yeah, there's a guy called James Goddard who ran the first, apparently, he ran the first official Street Fighter 2 tournament. And back in a day, and that got him kind of in bed with Capcom and eventually they got a working relationship and he got a job with them. It was whilst he was working with them, he encountered a rainbow edition. And he played it and thought it was awful. He thought it was terrible. But he kept there and he played it.

And more out of like shock and disbelief, he just sat there playing it and playing it and playing it and was like, how have they done this? You know, this is stupid crazy, crazy, crazy. So then he went back and started playing like standard. Well, it would have been champion edition then. And he started playing it. And it was like, this is so slow.

What's going on? And it was like, the official quote was, it was like swimming in water or something, I think he said it was. And although Rainbow Edition was, you know, buggy and completely ridiculous, the speed aspect of things is what he pulled out of it. And that's what he took to the higher-ups at Capcom and was like, no, no, no, right. I want you to play this, but I want you to play this for a while and then play our latest version. So that's what they did. And eventually he won out, and he became one of, like, the main leads and concept guys on the proper turbo. Yeah, and the, the polygon retrospect of the oral history feature that we've referenced throughout the series,

that was evidently something the Japanese dev team hated, like the idea that this game should be faster. They were like, no, we, like, we have deliberately set this game to be the way we've created it. but the again the u.s arcade market really drove things and they had the steering wheel and the gas and the brakes and they were like we've got to do this so they really pushed and finally the japanese team was like okay fine yeah well this was one of the things they were also obviously because rainbow existed that meant there was piracy and you know copycats and things like that they were looking trying to find ways right we've got to circumvent this this copyright stuff going on we can't we can't survive like this you know the

this is not right. So they were looking for ways to implement new versions, new things to circumvent the copycats that were out there. And with the invent of the CPS2 system that came along with Turbo, they were able to implement, right, we've got a new streetfire two. It's faster. You're not going to be able to get a black market copy of it because it's on a new, semi-new modified hardware. Well, and also if you try to take it out of the board and remove the battery. It commits suicide and loses all the data. It was literally like the money die. Yeah. It would explode all over your PC being. No, I mean, no, like it's called the suicide battery. And this is a thing with the CPS. Like it self-destructs when you take the battery out, which is

a huge concern as batteries start to die. And people are like, how do we keep these from dying? I personally had a street fire, a free CPS battery die on me. And that was that was not good. yes that was and you can't you cannot repair them they're done once they're gone they're gone you just have to keep them charged and pray and so so yeah basically cps2 and turbo was their way of getting rid of the black market and saying right guys let's do this so new content meet the the needs of the market and also f you to anyone who tries to copy our stuff exactly all right man rainbow addition, just like, thinking about the fact that you could switch characters mid-battle was just so silly. Like, you would be doing a combo, hit start in the middle, and it would move to the next character down on the list, so you could go from, you know, Raiu to I Honda to Chun Li. And it was just, it got real silly.

Yeah, I've never seen anything like that in a Marvel, or a Marvel versus Capcom, too. It's insane. You know, switch characters mid-combat? It's wild. Yeah, how would you ever want such a thing? Like, Street Fighter is meant to be a slow and slow. state league game. Like, but the things that a rainbow edition brought, though, the ability to do fireballs in the air, which suddenly became a mainstay staple of the game series, the ability to do

air hurricanes and hurricanes that arc in different ways and, you know, Chun Li's moves that, like, what they did was they took her close fierce, which is just her two palms going forward, and then put this recolored yoga flame as a Chun Lee fireball. And then when a few months later, when you see the official turbo come out, and you can do half circle forward with Chun Lee, and suddenly she's got her palm coming out and there's a yoga flame half circle fireball and I'm like ah I see you also played the game I did yeah it's funny because so many of the things that you see in uh in the pirate boards uh things like homing fireballs and aerial fireballs and things like that like those really became maybe not the homing fireballs but but those things really became mainstream with the alpha

games but you started to see them in in some of the street fighter two iterations also and uh you know By Alpha 3, like, you can tweak the settings, so it's basically like, yeah, I'm just playing Rainbow Edition at this point, but with Rolinto instead of Chunli. It's pretty wacky. But, but yeah, Capcom did move very quickly to, you know, kind of meet the demands of the market and the pressure of these pirate boards. And, you know, there was, it was a month, a year and two months between Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition, but it was only eight months before.

hyperfighting, Street Fighter 2 hyperfighting came out in arcades. And it incorporated a lot of those elements that you saw in Rainbow Edition and other pirate hacks. The consensus for a long time was that Street Fighter 2 Turbo was the best Street Fighter, like, period. Most balanced, most interesting, had the right feel to it. A lot of, a lot of people seem to swear by it, especially when Super Street Fighter 2 came back, came out, we'll get to that in a bit and slow things down. Street Fighter 2, people are like, no, Street Fighter 2 Turbo, that's the one. But also, Street Fighter 2 turbo was when the whole notion of multiple iterations of Street Fighter 2 started to become a bit of an early meme in the game community. We're like, really, we're up to turbo now?

How far can they go? It makes sense in location-based gaming where you, the consumer, are not the one buying these new boards. It's like, oh, there's something different for me to try out. Even if it's not Street Fighter 3, like, okay, it's new, it's different. it's a change but you know when they bring it to cartridges yeah they kept releasing them on consoles the thing they're like okay buy another one buy another one that what got me the I don't understand why it was called like it's it's called hyperfighting officially why did we all call it turbo because that's the super NES port is super street fighter is street fighter two turbo

did that just become like the de facto name for that and then the arcade was eventually super streetfighter to turbo right well yeah I remember that but I feel like I always always called, it went, you know, normal championship turbo. No, we've, we've, we've, we've, we'rein-stained it. It's just like, I feel like it must have just been like in from magazines or something in my head. It's a manda- But yeah, like, but, but when hyperfighting slash herbo came out, first off, I was pissed because dark Ryu became pale blue Ryu, not okay, not okay at all

at Capcom, still hold it against you. However, this time, the game changed in fundamentally awesome ways. Raiu and Ken started to diversify their move sets. Ryu became more focused on fireballs, speedy fireballs, doing a lot more fireball tricks and combos. Ken became more about the dragon punches that we started to know him for. Like, there were still no super attacks at this point, but the characters played differently.

Ryu's hurricane kick could knock them down with one hit. Kent's hurricane kick did significantly less damage, but hit more times. And so that changed the way you played. You couldn't just pallet swap yourself into the games. I mean, the story in the, like, strategy guides or something was like, Ryu would practice on the beach until his hurricane was so powerful. He could fight through an actual hurricane while Ken was just trying to thwap people over and over again. But like you got things like, you know, at the end, the victory pose of Dawson where he's meditating and floating and yoga, yoga, yoga, they're like, well, what if we just let you do that?

And you could just do a teleport move. His teleport was slow, clunky, hard to do. But when you did, it felt rad. And then, you know, Zang, you've got a million more throws. And they changed the way that in the original street fighter two, when you did. a spinning pile driver, the person that you were grabbing would bounce right next to you so you could grab them again for another

one or for a different throw and just combo and kill them. This time, Zangi feels pity on the poor person. He bounces them and they land two clicks away so you actually have to move closer to grab them again for a fireball. That's like the canonical reason to do the game balance. But they changed it

and they, because by adding these air moves, air hurricanes, air throws, the balance of the game changed, the feel of the game change, and all of the muscle memory you had for the game suddenly had to be twisted and when you were a hardcore player when I was going to the arcade every day to play street fighter and I would be trying to do a combo when the timing changes it's both frustrating and incredibly interesting because you're like wow now I have to relearn something and we're young and our brains are plastic so you can

easily mold yourself to be like okay well ballrog at this one can combo his punch into a turn punch into it you know I don't know it's super fun it was super fun Hello, we're Hello, everyone. We're superhero stuff you should know. you know about superheroes and comic books think again we got romance we got action romance we got comedy we got everything you need man come on down to superhero stuff you should know for all your superhero needs i don't know about this romance what part are you talking about we've got all kinds of sketches and then deep dives on top of that come on down to superhero stuff you should know all right

so come on down to wait why did i say come on down to superhero stuff you should know part of the greenlit Podcast Network When it hasn't been your day, your week, your month or even your year, we'll be there for you. I'm Ryan, the line is always a dot to me. And I'm Mark. How are you doing? We're a podcast of two friends, watching Friends. We live in every episode of the TV show in all its glory,

delving behind the scenes and discussing all our favourite moments. Join us as we get reacquainted with some old friends and hopefully make some new ones along the way, only on the Greenlit Podcast Network. So all good things must come to an end. And eventually Capcom was like, we can only keep doing the Street Fighter thing for so long with these same 12 characters, the same basic skill, you know, like a sandbox. So in October, less than a year after hyperfighting came out.

Finally, some new challengers have arrived with Super Street Fighter 2, the new challengers, adding four characters and totally revamping all the existing characters. Yeah. It was wild. They changed the portraits. They changed the faces of the game.

Suddenly, Rai, who's got this scrubby little beard growing on. Yeah, everyone is much more angular all of a sudden. Yeah, and it just, like, Dalsam's face changed from like this kind of old Manish thing to looking more like bones and skull. It was meat. It was so different.

I remember the EGM issue. That was the first EGM issue I ever got number 50, which had Super Street Fighter on the cover of it. And when you're looking at this thing and you're like, there's new characters that are not bosses. Are completely different. All the stages are different. The music is way better.

And Ryu had a red fireball. What? What? It blew my mind. It was quite controversial. because there are many things like, for example, they airbrushed the art

and they changed the announcer and so he sounded much worse. People were, people were a little mixed on the new characters. I think immediately Cammy was definitely

the most popular out of all of them. How could that be? And then maybe second was Faye Long. I mean, aside from the butt shots, she is a really cool character. She's so hard to play though.

She's hard to play, though. She's hard to play, but she has a really cool move set that is like, you know, like no one else's aside from M. Bisons, which, you know, eventually they turned into the storyline. But she just, she has abilities that are just really, really different from what you expect. The flying Frankensteiner throw thing was just so hard to pull off.

This was also one of the first, well, the first street fight, but I'm racking my brain to see if it's the first fighting game of merit that, legitimized combos because it actually brought them up on screen as you perform them and said, oh, yes, you did this thing. Well done. Here's some.

And you got points for them. Yeah, and you got points for it. So it's, I can't remember. Didn't Mortal Kombat do that? No. No, Mortal Kombat, free did, I think. But that was after, I'm pretty sure that was after this. Yeah, this was before King of Fighters.

So it would have been like Art of Fighting or Fatal Fury on S&K's side. And either one of those did that. No, neither of those did that. know so this was like people knew what combos were and they knew they were doing them but this was like the final like legitimization like yes we were right all along yeah we meant to do that uh-huh the thing that's wild though is that street fighters combos were never meant to be like lengthy number chains in the old days there were more like two or three hits you chained together like you know ducking groundhouse into or like a ducking short kick into a fireballs your two and one

that's why killer instinct was so good man because you could do like 128 comments Man killer instinct you hit three buttons and it goes oh mega combo and then you wait 12 and half minutes for the thing to finish yeah and um they had the pinning arcade bit where they were like they would go off and get a soda and come back he's like yeah so combo still going that basically what it felt like but yeah but the new characters were awesome though like pha long who was basically bruce lee with a different name and his recacans were so fast and so fun to do his you know dragon kick thing teahawk became like my main later just because i loved his version of the pile driver and also his eagle

dashes that he could do. But then you would see like DJ and he's just hitting you in Maracas and I don't understand. But you know, it was wild. The stages were cool. I forgot to mention during Rainbow Edition, one of the things about pumping the speed up all the way is that all the animation in the game would speed up. So you would see the guy in the

background of Chunli's just strangling the hell out of that chicken. Just like, okay dog, that thing is dead. It has died a long time ago. Please put it down. But when Super came out, it was slow compared to Turbo. It was like practically back to the original Street Fighter 2

and a lot of people complained about it. So in many ways, a lot of people felt that, or at least the conversation that I remember at this time was that Super Street Fighter 2 was a step back compared to Turbo. Yeah, but one thing, though. The arcade that I went to in East Street's Mall, Aladdin's Castle, had this thing around the corner, you could go there and they had eight machines linked together.

Did you actually see that in the? wild? I didn't just see that. I played it. I played in tournament. Tell us all about it, Shevham. That's not. They had eight machines linked up together and then they had one on the big projector

like the way a cat mentioned and you could go there and you could play a super street fighter two tournament where we all sat and there was a bracket and we all picked our characters you went through and we, I remember once my friends and I, we got together and we like, I guess someone's dad or something rented out that link of eight machines for like an hour or something so that we could set up a tournament and have an all Raiu battle. And because every punch button, kick button start and holding down the buttons had a different color. So you got eight colors out of that.

I got to be the awesome Christmas Raiu with the dark green ghee and the redhead map. Christmas Rai, Merry Christmas, here's a Hadukin. Yeah, but that's what I got you. It was cool because it showed you this big bracket thing that would come up and it would rematch you and say like, go to console two. It's like your turn. It was wild.

It was hell of fun. I was going to say, before you mentioned it, I was going to say this must have been something that was like a purely Japan phenomenon. Like, we'd never going to get... Oh, yeah, that or like a, you know, but we're in the Bay Area where, like, you know, Capcom is, so... Yeah, lucky boy.

I have a question for Alia. Did, when Super Street Fighter 2 came out, did you pick any of the new characters or did you stick to your classic characters? Because I adopted DJ, interestingly enough, because I liked any character who could slide, which meant that I played Dalsam, I played Vega, and DJ could slide, and he also had a fireball, and he had the three-time kick, and his moves were very easy to do. compared to many of the other characters because a lot of them were just back in charge type kicks so I was like, I can actually do his moves is great, I'm going to be DJs.

So I'm curious, did any of you adopt the new characters? Oh yeah, I love playing Phelong. He was super fast, it moves all chained into each other. When he did the ducking, fierce punch, it was like, you know, he sticks his hand out in a little claw.

I mean, I loved all four of the new characters. Well, no, I loved three of the new characters and then there was Cammy. But I couldn't play as Cammy, and she was so hard to play. And, like, her moves were, like, you know, do, like, a quarter circle and then jump forward. And it's like, what?

I don't understand how I'm supposed to do this. No, this is not for me. I started maining Cammy in Street Fighter 4, interestingly, you know. Yeah, like, that's when she actually became playable for me. But I loved how all the characters played so differently. Like, I changed, I started playing with Balrog more. I started playing with Geithmore. I started playing with Tehawk.

But, yeah, I mean, every character was cool. Super Street Fighter 2. Well, I wanted to win. So I knew how to do a few moves with Ryu, so that's the way I stay. I pretty much checked out of Street Fighter at this point, aside from like renting, you know, Super Street Fighter 2 for Super Neas to watch Phelong fight without my controlling it. But yeah, I couldn't really connect with any of the characters. I liked Phelong and Camion Principle because I like small, like physically small characters,

probably because of a Napoleon complex or something. But, yeah, like T. Hawk and DJ were just like, oh, it's big bulky dudes. I don't care about them. But I couldn't really wrap my head around either Faylong or Kami. So I just kind of said, maybe this is it for me in Street Fighter. That's okay. I had some good times. But, you know, I liked the aesthetics of this game.

Like watching it in the arcade, seeing, you know, the new challengers with the attract mode. And Kami's like slapping her hand against her wrist and sticking her. tongue out, like, I'm going to kick your ass and, you know, everyone's gearing up and getting ready to beat the crap out of you. Like, that was very cool, very appealing. But I just, I couldn't really connect with this version. And that's okay, because a mere five months later, we didn't, we didn't have to play this game anymore because Capcom released another iteration, Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. The single greatest fighting game of all time. Yeah. Interesting. I just read an article. That's a consensus best one.

Well, I was just reading, like, an article or something a few days ago about how there is a definitely like a mindset that Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo is the greatest fighting game of all time, but also a lot of people in the fighting game scene are like, could you just let it drop? Like, people keep making new games and they're really, really good, okay? Like, don't hold on to the past. It's the best Street Fighter 2. But Akuma was broken in this one. Straight up broken. That was the problem. Completely busted. Well, I mean, Akuma even existed in this one, which was, what was that all about? That was new. That was different. Okay, so let me set this up.

First off, Akuma, right? Like, you see the silhouette of Akuma in the attract mode, and he's showing up. And I think he was a playable, I think he'll play against him in the original Super Street Fighter 2. I don't remember. I read about this. I looked this up and was reading, you know, before this episode. It was CPU control, wasn't it? Apparently, this is the first time Akima showed up in the games, period.

Like, this was where he made his debut. He would show up, you know, if you met certain ridiculous conditions and made it to the end, he would show up as a replacement for the final boss. Yeah, and he just thrashed you. And he had, like, teleportation, and he had his supermoot. So here's a thing that Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo did. First thing you do, you turn it on. When you pick your character, there's a bar at the bottom that wasn't there before.

and that bar was like world-changing, right? Suddenly, you do a fireball twice and hit the punch button, and Ryan shoots out a super fireball. What? It does a ton more damage? And, you know, dragon punch, you had the shin churikin, and all of these moves, this whole idea of having a super special move was so cool.

And you got this shadow effect behind him, this extra animation. It just, it was wild. It was really, really wild. and that unto itself was awesome and different and changed the game but then when you started figuring out that you could do you guys

know that you can pull the original Street Fighter 2 character versions of the game the original old version of Super Street Fighter two characters for each character in this so you could play as O Sagitt versus normal Sagitt and play the Super Street Fighter version of it without a Super Bar but with balance changes

so the damage is different for normals and for specials and it changed the way each character played so instead of just having your 24 characters or 16 characters, whatever it was, you had 16 characters plus the original versions of those 16 characters, which was wild. So reading about that this morning,

I was led to believe that you could play as like the original Super Street Fighter 2 versions, not the turbo versions. Yes, that's what I meant. So it's not like playing like Street Fighter 2, the World Warrior, where, you know, Gile has handcuffs or whatever. Yes.

So just to clarify that. Yeah, I mean, the original super version versus super turbo version. versions. Sorry, let's get the little, like, musky in there. Yeah, the combo gauge was something that very quickly found its way into competing games. King

of Fighters made its debut a few months later, like six months later after Super Turbo 2, Super, yeah, turbo. And, you know, that had the power gauge at the bottom that worked very much like the Super combo gauge. And that just became like, that's, you know...

That's just fighting games. That's just expected for fighting games now, yeah. it's yeah this is where it came in and it's again an iteration of an iteration that was very quickly released because they were like well we put some new stuff in but it wasn't enough new stuff so let's let's fine tune this but at the same time you lost the bonus rounds no more cars and barrels to beat up very sad i p i've just seen here that the um the conditions for reach in akuma were no losses and reach m bison within 25 minutes super hard to do

my god yeah real hot but if you want to select Akuma from the character screen it was super like complicated leave the cursor on Ryu or Ken for three minutes switch to Tihawk Gail and Kamia and back to Raiu

you have to hang on for three seconds on each and then hit all three PPPs and start wow and then and it's like how do you find this that's you know a few months later they would get that information to magazines and bring people back into arcades to get another you know a refreshing

the quarter drops. It was a legit strategy, you're right. It was tactical. But the whole idea behind Akima is that you weren't going to see him normally. There was like this shadowy character on the attract mode, but you had no idea who that was. And if you were an average player, you know, or just doing like one-on-one fights, you would never find him. And it was only once you got really good at this game and it could just, you know, power your

way through and we're basically an expert, then all of a sudden this was your reward. like you don't fight im bison he's dead now im bisin imbison is dust in the wind kumma comes out and does the shingogusatu and just obliterates em bison and you're like what what's going on who is this guy so I'm that had to have been so mind-blowing the first time someone pulled it off in the wild can you imagine can you imagine what they were like what the hell it just and I just died what is going on I thought it was so good at this game and they're not going to be able to record it for posterity or anything What are you going to have the camp? Who would believe them? Whip out your iPhone quick in nighty fool? Who would believe them? You're a liar. You did not see like...

The first time I saw Akuma in the wild. Evil Ryu, what? The first time I saw Akuma in the wild, at Oak Ridge Mall, I remember this every day. I mean, not every day, but I will remember this for the rest of my life. I saw a guy who was basically schooling the game. He was playing guile. He was flying through.

He gets to M. Bison. M. Bison obliterated by Shangokuasatu. Akuma shows up. We're like, what the hell just happened? And then this guy jumps up into the air, throws air, air fireballs twice. Two air fireballs comes down and then grabs him and does this obliterated

thing. The animation comes up. The screen goes black and my dude is dead and we're like what what just happened? That's exactly how I imagined it and it's beautiful to hear that's how it worked. Yeah, that's great. We're just sitting there holding our sodas just going like what the hell

does happen? You just got too good and you hit the kill screen. Sorry. And nobody believed it because it's like you know with the Mortal Kombat like oh yeah man I fell into the pit and fought against reptile. And everybody said, yeah, you did, buddy. Okay, whatever you're saying. And nobody believed it.

The amazing thing is that Akama was almost definitely inspired by all the rumors about Street Fighter 2, just, you know, caused by mistranslations for years. There were magazine, like, you know, fake secrets and stuff, April Fool's joke and EGM. Like, you can fight Shen Long, who is Ryu's master by, you know, by doing all these super crazy conditions and people could never get it to work. And so, you know, the ultimate April Fool's joke is that Capcom was like, guess what's in the game? The April Fool's joke is here and it's going to destroy you. But the worst part is you would go to school and you try to

talk about it and every be like, yeah, uh-huh. And did you also get to play against Bubonic the Blowfrog like they said in the other April Fool's show? Did your uncle at Nintendo tell you about this? Exactly. They're like, yeah, dude, I know how good you are a street fighter and you ain't that good. So that ain't ever happening to you. It was heartbreaking until like, you know, EGM finally leaked the code and we all got to see it. But Akuma is not so. It's just like that is, that's a kind of old school arcade boss that you expected to see from single player games. And that's why when they were like, the second you could try to play as Akuma, the first time we did it, everybody was

like, yeah, you can't do that anymore. That's just, that guy cheats. Like air fireballs, that's not okay. Sorry. The thing is, I grew up in Minnesota, and I never saw a super turbo cabinet in the wild. Like, the arcades that I frequented just never ordered it. We only ever had Super Street Fighter 2. That was as far as we actually went. And I was not aware for a long time that Super Turbo actually existed as a thing until Super Street Fighter 2 HD Turbo Remix was announced years and years later.

And, yeah, like I was not aware that this thing was, a thing until then. So that's how rare Super Turbo was, for me, at least, as somebody who grew up in the Upper Midwest. I mean, at this point, there was genuine Street Fighter 2 fatigue. People were like, okay, really, like the number three exists. And so this would be the last arcade iteration of Street Fighter 2, aside from like some weird kind of like, hey, remember this thing, variants years later. But at this point, Capcom, I think finally was like, okay, this cow, she's dry. We've got to move on over to some other alt in the pasture.

If you're an arcade operator in 1994, and you've already purchased Street Fighter 2, Turbo, and Super, are you going to buy another freaking arcade cabinet? I mean, if it's still bringing in money. For a game, that's probably drying up a little bit. Well, this is the time where, you know, the 3D races and things started coming in, you know, virtual racing, Sega, Raleigh, Daytona, you know,

things like that were starting to, clean up in the arcades. And Street Fighter 3 was announced in, what, 95, 96 thereabouts? It feels like there was a bigger gap between two and three. Yeah, I mean, before... Did I know the Alpha started coming out? Yeah, I think I was like 14 when I saw Street Fighter 3 at an amusement park. And so there was, you know, it was a couple years later. So maybe a lot of arcade operators were holding out for 3. Yeah, I think it was 93, or 96, sorry, when 3 showed up. But in any case, yeah, you did have Alpha before that. And that was more than a year after, uh, okay, so that was actually Street Fighter 3 debuted in February 97, which was almost exactly three years

after Super Turbo, which was March 94. And in between that, you had Alpha, and I think you had Alpha 2 actually. Yeah, you did. I never saw Alpha or Alpha 2 in the arcades. I never saw Alpha, but I did see Alpha 2. And that was like, whoa, this is cool. I like Street Fighter again. I definitely remember going to like the basement of an anime con and seeing a guy with imported Sega Saturn with a street fighter alpha and be like what these characters are so big what's going on so anime and gorgeous yeah oh my god dude but but yeah like super street fighter two would be kind of the end of this this game's evolution and it evolved a lot what a way to go out i mean uh by coincidence the day that we're recording this uh for the uh the cps2 core of the mr f pGA device uh jote

just announced a street fighter or super street fighter to turbo core so this game is being like properly released in a

basically arcade perfect version that you'll be able to play at home without you know emulation or anything like that so that's

I feel like that's going to make Mr. very popular at tournaments like I can see people who want to play super turbo

saying like we got to get ourselves a mister and some good joysticks to plug into it and we are going to have ourselves

a proper you know, arcade face-off. That's kind of having to have actual arcade boards. Wow. I mean, the thing is just Super Turbo was such a good game. Like when you do things like, so Dalcim's had his torpedoes and his spears since like the first one. But in Turbo, they gave you a whole bunch of different like angles he could shoot at so you jump up and come either immediately down to where he was or go all the way across the screen.

And the game balance shifts in Super Turbo made all of these. characters suddenly, incredibly, like they changed the tiering first off. They made a bunch of characters that were bad, good, and a bunch of good characters, kind of medium to mediocre, but the depth and the sheer amount of combos and playstiles that were now available in this game, it really was the apotheosis of street fighter design. I think that's a reason why it's managed to survive for 30 years as a playable game that today people are still discovering strategies for that people are still, you know, perfecting

the art of playing Super Turbo. Like, it's just a magical game that got incredible, just, variety. And watching it is fun. Watching Super Turbo in the hands of people who are, like, you know, Daigo level, John Cho level, people is just art. It is watching art. This game is just like, it's beautiful. Shiva, correct me if I'm wrong.

So, Gile was very strong in the first couple street fighters, right? Because I remember he was winning a lot of champion. He was winning a lot of tournaments. but he wasn't so strong by Super Turbo and that was kind of the end of Guile, right? Yeah, Guile sucks. He will always love his theme.

Well, his music is the best, right? Like, that's just undeniable. But yeah, Giles, his skills in the early games were a lot of fast normals, a lot of really good throws. He had a lot of, like, variety to his character and a lot of ability to do things like combo into flash gigs,

you know, hold the charge back, do hits, and then, you know, like, you'd be holding down back, do a punching, like, the medium punch up forward into a, you know, flash kick and be able to do combos like that or hold sonic boom charges and stuff. They nerfed a lot of his strength. They made his charges still work as well, but they didn't do nearly as much damage. His throws didn't do nearly as much damage.

So he just kind of got like, I think I guess, Street Fighter just got tired of Gile being so good all the time. All right. So that was the end of Street Fighter 2 in arcades, as I mentioned. But this was not the end of Street Fighter 2 adaptations and iterations in other aspects. So there have been a few console-specific releases of Street Fighter 2 that have, you know, continued to rebalance, continue to add new things, tweak things, beginning actually in like 1999-ish on Dreamcast with Super Street Fighter 2X for matching service, which is very hard to come by because it was a Super Street Fighter 2 turbo release that was sold only through Sega's online store in Japan. But to my knowledge,

it was the first Street Fighter game with online head-to-head play. Unless, like, you could do it with Sega Meganet, maybe? I wouldn't want to. Yeah. I can't imagine that it would have worked, but, you know, this had, you know, made use of Sega's Dreamcast network. And as with any Dreamcast fighting game from Capcom, it was basically arcade perfect. You know, no slowdown, no lag, no dropped animations, all the things carried over,

crispy pixel perfect graphics, just everything, like, beautiful. beautiful, especially, you know, you play it through the VGA adapter and you're just like, who needs an arcade game? The Dreamcast is such a perfect Capcom machine, shall we say, that a big thing that's happening now is people are taking Sega Naomi, Sega NetC, cabinet, sticking, if they can keep them, they're keeping the TRTs in there, but sticking flat screens in there, hooking up a Dreamcast and rejigging the controller inputs so that they, You buy two Dreamcast arcade sticks and basically take them apart and then remount them in from the front of the machine.

So instead of having all this old, very, you know, vulnerable arcade hardware in your cabinet, basically you've just got a little Dreamcast sat in the back of there. Which is also old, but... Well, yeah, but they're a bit cheaper than a CPS2 board. Well, and also they don't have the same amount of mileage on them as an arcade machine. No. And all you do is you, well, I would say you, you... You buy your copy of the various street fighters for Dreamcast, but, you know,

the Dreamcast is pretty piratable. And, yeah, they are basically arcade perfect. I mean, there is every Street Fighter Free version on there. There's the Alphas, there's the Malvis Capcom 1 and 2, Dead Are Alive 2. Jojo. Jojo. There's vampire games, yeah.

There's Power Stone, you know, it just keeps going and going and going. It's basically the perfect turn of the millennial. arcade machine is a Dreamcast in a Sega cabinet it's perfect especially since as of like last year they've started hacking Naomi games to run on Dreamcast so you are able to play

the arcade versions of these games on a Dreamcast system so it just becomes this like an Aruboros basically of Dreamcast eating itself yeah it's that sounds awesome the Dreamcast it's it basically is a Naomi it's so weird

like even when you boot up crazy taxi they kind of forgot to knock off the Naomi BIOS loading at the beginning of it I mean you can see it loading the first time I saw that I was like what wait and then it disappears and it's oh no no it's a Dreamcast version isn't it's no it's not

it's just but yeah so that's kind of like the in the thing at the minute on the arcade scene to do is to mod a Sega cabinet with a Dreamcast which now means that Dreamcast Arcade sticks instead of being like 2530 bucks are now like 150, 160

I love the retro bubble. It's so cool. It's, uh, but then the problem is if you really do want an arcade stick, they're going to get even harder and harder to find because people are buying them and then ripping them to pieces. So it's like, oh, but there are like, um, uh, I.O converter boards now you can get for Naomi wiring looms that will convert into like the Dreamcast interface. So hopefully that will stop, but we, we will see. Okay. I do feel like I need to correct myself from earlier. because I don't want people to get mad at this. But Gile in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo

was not actually bottom tier. He was probably like A rank, kind of a, about mid to upper high tier. He was not as good. He was bad in Super Turbo, but they in Super, not in Super Turbo. They rebalance him in Super Turbo and made him better. The bottom crap tier in Super Turbo

with folks like Zangiev, Tehawk. The characters I like to play, the big old grapplers really suck in Super Turbo. But it's like the consensus best characters are people like Old Saget, Dalcim, and, like, you know, boxer and claw, kind of. Those are like the top tier right there. And obviously Akuma, but you're not allowed to play them.

All right. So that was one release. Super Street Fighter 2X or maybe Cross. I don't know. It's Japanese. Who can say without the Katakana, the Ruby over it? Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo Revival came out for Game Boy Advance. And it's a weird one.

I did not play this. reading about it and watching videos, I'm like, what the hell did it? Were they thinking? It's such a strange choice. How did they even do this is what I want to know? Dude, have any of you played this game? No. No.

No. Okay. So, I remember when it came out and thinking, there's no way I'm going to play this. The GBA has freaking two buttons. Come on. Four. I can't see it. Four, yeah.

But yeah, this is like a weird hybrid of the Super NES game, which makes sense because so many Super NES ports showed up on GBA. But there's also. stuff from the arcade version in there. So, like, the characters, you know, when they used animations that there were no super NES animations for, they would switch over to arcade sprites. So they'd, like, switch size and resolution and design. And it, you know, it did kind of innovate by making use of the Neo GeoPocket Color style

simplified combat mechanics. You could customize your buttons and you could set up, like, basically, combo macros, essentially. which is something that would become popular in later fighting games. That's wild. But, yeah, it's, it's like just, there's a list of programming glitches and weird errors that were in this game. Like, it's definitely the least essential street fighter. The one thing I do remember about Super Turbo Revival was that it had the best-looking character select screen of any Street Fighter Turbo. Because they redid all the artwork for it, so they made these awesome shadow kind of, like, they look very much like comic books.

Like, they're just this really bold. clean-looking character portraits that I'm really like sad they never used anywhere else they were just really cool looking the game itself you know I didn't even have a GBA so I never played it

but I just remember that box art looked real sick I feel like there's an entire retronauts in all the weirdo ports that Street Fighter and Marvel have seen over the years from the Neo Geo Pocket Color to the Game Boy to the Marvel versus Capcom

turbo duo there was one on the Nintendo Street Fighter 4 coming out on the Nintendo 3D Yes, yes, crazy. Oh, God. Oh, yeah. I have that. It's not good. Nope.

I love Street Fighter 4. I love Street Fighter 4. Oh, it's very good. And it's retro now. Hey. Oh, no, don't tell me that. Thankfully, not all ports are bad. Hyper Street Fighter 2 Anniversary Edition came out on PS2 and was actually pretty interesting.

Sam, this seems like your Ballywick since you host a PS2 podcast. Yeah. This is a copy of Street Fight 2 that I actually do own. apart from all the arcade versions that I've had over the years this is one that I do own again based on Super Turbo basically it's

it's a shame it's not available to play more of like a like a competition sort of set up because it is kind of like the ultimate version of Street Fighter 2 kind of

it's generally regarded as pretty arcade perfect and things like that it's it was done for the 15th year anniversary, which I always thought it was a really weird anniversary to pay. Sometimes you just want to, like, come up with an excuse to

republish a game. That's all. Maybe you're right. There may have been a better. Just like a flimsy pretext to make more money. Yeah, it also had like each particular version of the character with all the moves and animation frames. Yeah, there's what, like six versions of characters, you know, the main source from the original? And even down to like the voice samples and everything that represent

them in the different versions of the game it's kind of crazy which is probably why it's not used in like tournament settings and things like right do the uh do the original like world warrior versions of characters do they have like geysers of vomit when you punch them like but so it's something they kind of took out of the series because it's gross oh wait was this the one that let you pick which version of street fighter you were playing not just like the character like super oh i love this version yeah oh my god it's like superman it's like superman modified almost to the nth degree like it's bleeding you can

see it like stretching at the seams like but it I say it's such a shame that more people don't have this version and it's it's kind of stuck on the PS2 almost I mean this would be a great candidate for a for a re-release I'm amazed it didn't get put

in the in the 30th anniversary right as sort of like a maybe an unlock or a modified version to say all right we've got all of these versions of this game in this collection but here's a version where you can play all of the different kinds of characters against each other, you know, it would have been a

really interesting concept. And I think actually it's funny because that was released for the 30th and this was done for the 15th. So they did like the ultimate street fighter to 15 years before this huge collection that we got, which was great. But it's interesting if you can get it. I'm not

quite sure how expensive it is now, but I don't think it's too pricing. I think it's pretty good. So the we had a hacked arcade machine at our office that we rented from, like, some arcade distributor. And this is one of the games on it. And we used to play tournaments at work with, like, you know, all the different kinds of characters. And it really is wild because it shows you just how clearly

they balance shifted, like, the characters over the years. Because, like, in the original street fighter, normal is in, like, a throw does a quarter of your life in damage versus, like, much later where it's doing, like, smaller, smaller fractions. And it's wild. Like, do you pick the one that's got the super move? Or do you pick the one that's just going to hit people like a try? and it was real cool it's like the character select screen pictures are different

based on the games the the sprites have the various differences and the color differences yeah the palettes are different it feels like the kind of rumored hack that you would have done as a kid like oh yeah man I found this room of street find that had all of them mixed together yeah it did

get an arcade release it was released on a CPS 2 board it did actually get released in the arcade well that must have been what they had the port of it was fun I don't think it was very widespread at all even if it may have been region specific

I'm I would bet a lot of money that it didn't come here but I need to get this man yeah it's it did it did release in the arcades but like the main version is a PS2 version I do believe it was designed for like

the PS2 if you know and the arcade release was like sort of just like a celebratory release but it's it's wild and to think they did all of this uh work and it actually still worked on original hardware you know they didn't actually go out of the bounds of what the cps2 could do you know if this could have been made back in 93 94 when the cps 2 board came out it would have worked then you know they're not stretching the the abilities of the technology it's a really cool uh showcase of the street fighter 2 engine should we say

yeah i'm trying to look up to see which cps board this ran on in arcades do you up in a no sam a cps2 i'm sure it isn't in my note yeah this is the last one to use cps2 yeah it was it was like i don't know where they got the cps 2's from because they'd been out of so so potentially potentially this could show up on mr at some point since cps2 is within the balance of mr that's that's kind of why i got so excited when you said there was a mr uh cork coming out i was like, ah, yeah, Street Fighter 2 would be

pretty interesting. This all of a sudden legitimizes this concept. You know, you can have the, well, kind of. You could have the ultimate,

I'd rather just sit and watch it because I love Street Fighter a lot. I'm terrible at it. I can't do it. Fair enough. I just, I just, I sympathizes. Yeah.

I am too old for that. Being a street fighter fan is like being a sports fan where you just, maybe you play some soccer, you enjoy watching it you love watching it at a high level but you're never going to be an actual professional and Dyko is messy

I could kick that I could kick that ball I could head that in I could do those things and then you play against an actual professional and go oh god oh my god dude I got to play against Justin Wong once in a game of street fighter at a show

there was like a PACs or something like that and he was doing demonstrations I'm sitting there and I'm like oh my God I'm going to play against one of the best of all time and he's like seriously having a conversation with another dude literally played one-handed on the stick with his like thumb and pinky on like the buttons

and ruinates my entire existence obliterates me from life you know turns my ashes into stardust and I'm just like he's not even looking at this and he would just periodically like oh okay I'd have been like yes that's what I expected

it's a street fighter equivalent of going to Central Park or something and seeing the grandmaster who's playing Penn Chessu Games at once. Hurt me, Street Fighter, Daddy. The thing is, Shevon, we've played a lot of Street Fighter over the years, and it's always fun to go to one of your parties and be able to play with people who are actually your skill level and that kind of thing.

Because, like, you know that you're not playing at the absolute highest level, but it does recapture a little bit of the amateur level of it. We played a lot of Street Fighter at my birthday parties, man. Oh, God, it's so good. I miss those days. Damn you, Corona. Damn you. But, God, man.

Street Fighter is such a... I get emotional talking about Street Fighter. It's a classic. It's one of the greatest games ever made, for sure. So we are running low on time. So there are two more versions of Street Fighter 2 to touch on briefly. Oh, but the rebalance. The rebalance? Yeah, Super Street Fighter's Turbo HD Remix.

The one which was the longest spaghetti string acronym of all time, right? I hate that this is retro now because I remember all the jokes about the name. I remember downloading it because I just brought HD TV and I thought, wow, this would look good. Oh, I mean, when the PSR, the first time I saw the art for Super Street Fighter 2, Turbo HD remix, I thought, oh, my God, this is incredible. This is what HD actually looks like. This is astonishing. What blew my mind was that the Hedukin had the sprites of their fists inside. And I never saw that before in the old one because, you know, you just see a blue thing.

But when you look at the old Hadoquan thing, it's his hands. It's his hands are in there doing the thing and they're going forward. And I was like, holy crap, what? But, okay, so, Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix, which came out on, like, the Xbox Live and the PSN, was basically a remake of Super Turbo, but it had been rebalanced. And the art had been redone by Udon, which is doing all the art books and comic books and stuff. So it looked super stylized, super comicky. Some people didn't like it. Some people really did.

But they had the ability that you could switch in the middle of gameplay back and forth between original and the modified art. art so that it wouldn't give you any balance. It wouldn't give you any advantages to using the new artwork versus the old one. The frames all hit the same place. The hits are all in the same place. So it never got like the art didn't give you an advantage or disadvantage. It was just preference. But what they did with this one that was different was they gave David Sirlin, who is like one of the great theorists of video games and of Street Fighter in general.

He has some opinions for sure. He's definitely a polarizing figure, let's say. And he was a phenomenal street fighter. one of the things is he used to do videos where he would teach people theory on how to play Street Fighter and like teach you how to move your hands over the controllers so that you could do this and they gave him

the right to go and take one of the greatest games of all time and rebalance it and it was super controversial super super super controversial because he made changes that were wild like one of them so Chun Lee's got her spinning bird kick right

you charge down you hold up she does a spinning bird in the Super Turbo HD remake Her spinning bird kicks does this little hop arc instead of going all the way across the screen. It completely changes the game. And they did things with every single character. He was like, I want to make bad character better, good characters, a little bit worse.

And that basically rebuilt the game from scratch. And one of the wild things is like he went to the best players of each character in Japan and America and asked for their inputs on how do we rebalance this. And he went to like the great Ryu players and they're like, don't touch it. Absolutely nothing at all. They're like, well, what if I gave him the fake

fireball from Alpha? It's like, do that. And that was the only change they made for Ryu is that if you do a Hadook in motion and hit kick instead of punch, Ryu shoves his head out as if he's doing a fireball, but nothing comes out. It pulls back and does a really quick recovery so that you can fake people out. Really cool.

But the rest of the balance changes were just like unbelievably weird. And like, I couldn't get behind it. Like, I tried. But I'm so glad they left the original port in there so that you could still. still play old school in an HD version, but this game was just like, the cherry on top was that Akuma wasn't even fixed, and people were like,

if you're going to rebalance the game, could you at least fix Akuma? Seriously. Yeah, and it was just like, man, you don't go and paint over the Mona Lisa. Like, that, like, why would you do that? Nobody asked for this. It was 2007, right? 2008. I thought it came out in 2009 or thereabouts, because I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure I was living in the Bay Area when it came out. It was November 2008, like

Thanksgiving-ish. I just remember the really cool background that you could download onto your PS3. Yes. And that was my background for a long time. I think I've still cut it too. It's still my PS3 background, yes. But Udon's art was great. The music was great. They had like DJ Pretzel and O.C. Remix do all the new version of the themes. It was really cool. I mean, everything about this was like a love letter to Street Fighter and

then David Serlin. And it was like, oh, man, dog, why'd you do this? It was also one of the big, like, first PSN kind of exclusive. Well, not exclusive. No, it was on XBLA and PSN. Yeah, it wasn't exclusive, but it was one, I remember it being, I think it was pretty much the first game I downloaded off PSN. Because, like, Xbox Live arcade at that point was absolutely killing it.

And now there was something, you know, comparable to what was coming out on there. And it was, it was pretty cool. You know, it finally came out on the piece. see this year, last year in March. So if you were missing it, you can finally play it on Steam or something. I've still got to install. That's good. All right. So that was meant to be the

definitive version of Street Fighter. And yet, Capcom like five years later said, what if we did another? And Yoshinori Ono, bless his heart, came in and said, here we go. Here is a full-price

retail game. Street Fighter 2, Ultra Street Fighter 2, Ultra Street Fighter 2, the final challengers for Nintendo Switch. This is a launch game. You have to pay 40 bucks to play it, even though it is a, you know, nearly 30-year-old fighting game. Very brave of him.

And it was a huge, huge success. I have to credit this game. Like, its popularity and success made basically everyone in the industry sit up and say, whoa, this Switch is going to be a money-making machine. And this audience loves old games. And now Switch is the system.

to buy if you like old games and, you know, arcade conversions and ports and things like that. It is like, where would that have happened without Capcom putting out a $40 game and selling, like, what, like a million copies of it? It was just ridiculous. Like, this game should not have been a success. It was, I think it was like $7,000 or $800,000. It was a lot of games. Yeah, there's only one problem. That's wild.

The only problem with this version is there, in my view, there is no good controller to play it. with it's not fun to play on the switch i don't know how it sold so many i've never used one of those hoary pads people hadn't tried to use a switch controller to play a fighting game at that point i have the capcom arcade collection and i have i think all of the street fighters on it and playing trying to play those games with the switch controllers just absolutely impossible i cannot get any of the inputs right and i don't know what the heck is wrong i will say the vertically oriented games work better if you use the flip grip. When I get my Tate Street Fighter, I'll give you a call.

But the thing is, like, this game, it was basically a remake of Super Turbo. They added two characters that did not really add anything to the game. Violent Ken and Evil Raiu. Evil Raiu, of course, we all know he's just Raiu with Akuma's move set and some other balance changes. Violet Ken, you know, I don't think I've literally ever seen him in play. I think that's Violence Jack's brother, right? Yeah, he's from, whatever, man.

This guy is just, he's got Purple Hadookens. That's all I remember about him. This game existed. It sold a billion because people like Streetfighters still, right? Like, people like Street Fighter. Street Fighter is a great game. Even a bad Street Fighter is a good Street Fighter. You sure they don't like the motion-based shooting gallery that came with it, no?

No, no. I will say, though, the art gallery is a thing of wonder. it's like a thousand images. It is, it might be the definitive street fighter art gallery. Like, maybe not the definitive

Street Fighter game, but in terms of concept art and character art and just like a museum that you can just pour over. Yes. Yeah, I think they copied like the,

they copied like the entire art of Street Fighter into that game as one of the bonus modes. It's just really cool. I mean, I'm glad that Capcom has not fully abandoned their history and that they keep giving.

I mean, yes, People are like, oh, man, they just keep giving us a portion of Street Fighter 2 over and over. But you know what? That's okay. Street Fighter 2 is great. I will keep buying it as long as I keep doing it because I love Street Fighter 2. Like I, the other day, I was playing with my son, Street Fighter 2 on the PS3.

We have like the old, or is it PS4, whatever. There was a Street Fighter collection that came out. And we pulled it up and we're just sitting there and having a blast hitting each other with like, you know, dalzims and jumping around with Vegas and all these things. And I just remember this game. is fun. It is always fun. It doesn't matter which street fighter you're playing. That energy comes back where you're just so excited to be just here, hitting things, jumping at each other, trying to beat each other. Next time I'm going to get you, Dad. You know, it's just like

that vibe is so good. And this game just every iteration brings that back. And I think it's just one of the perfect games. What can I say? All right. So that's probably enough to say, actually. So my question is do any of you have to jump off immediately or is there time for a mailbag? Let's do a mailbag. We get letters and ridd letters in the mail.

We're going to read them to you now. All right. So the first letter from Andrew Olivera, Street Rider 2 holds a lot of fond memories for me. Flipping through the Genesis Manual was how I first learned of Japan's obsession with blood types, completely annihilating a school chum who was a compulsive liar and claimed he could beat the CPU on max difficulty. The strangest memory I have is going over to my buddy's house and seeing his

copy of Super Street Fighter 2 on the Super NES. Somehow, whether an error in manufacture or someone swapping out the insides, the cartridge shell was US but the board was Japanese. I was so confused by the name swapping, Vega Bison Ballrog, and in a pre-internet age, there was no easy way to search out the justification for it. Nowadays, the only mystery left to be solved as how much chun leeway is enough that's how much man the name swapping

that's why we just call them boxer dictator and claw you know it's just like it's just easier that way but that's a great until Dudley comes into the picture yeah well he throws a rose at you and that's just the end of that story Dudley's great

okay Kat this question is from Fyquinox No, it's not a question. It's just comments. Like most people, Street Fighter 2 had a significant impact on me as a kid. It's hard to imagine a time when fighting games, as defined by Street Fighter, weren't abundant, but back then it was Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, and I found the latter stiff and gimmicky.

So naturally, I leapted every iteration of Street Fighter 2 I could. This one is faster, and you can play as the bosses. This one has four new characters in a tournament mode. This one is on a console I will never own. I wasn't cynical and savvy to commercialism back then So I didn't see it as lazy I just saw it as more Street Fighter And what kid in the 90s could argue with that

At least until the movie came out And instantly made Street Rider Irrelevant for the second half of the decade I beg your pardon, sir Are you talking about the Probably the movie, not the anime? Yeah, yeah Street Fighter 2

Street Fighter the movie was Jean-Claude von Dam which I remember getting a very glowing spread in game pro and the writer behind Diehard was talking about how they weren't going to just do a $8 million movie with a tournament underground fighting tournament and some drugs they were going to have a big fat like tons of UN based people invading huge fights and everything and I watched that movie for the first time in 2010

and was like how did this movie even get made this is amazing for me it was Tuesday It's a brilliant film for all the wrong reasons. Oh, it's one of the most entertaining films I've ever watched. All right, Sam. So, Scott Bin, I was too young to appreciate Street Fighter 2 in the arcade, so I grew up on the home ports, but not only on rentals. Oh, but only on rentals. That meant I didn't get burnt out by the $80 upgrades.

My cousin did have the U.S. gold DOS version. Oh, God, I remember that. Alert, which I remember by trying to play through one play. player only with the keyboard two players one keyboard that's nice okay uh the one funny thing is that since i never saw a streetfighter two arcade machine past championship edition i always thought that the latter s nests genesis ports were home exclusives i could never figure out why i couldn't do the super moves that i read about online i appreciate alpha and streetfire free but i'd never been able to get into them as much as street fighter two well you need to try third strike my friend

I had the DOS version. It was bad. Have you ever cried with these arrow keys to do it? Why? Why did you have it? You know what, man? I had a computer, so we played what we had. On the floppy disc, yeah.

It was wild. It was really cool. It was not really cool, but, you know, you made you feel cool. I've played it on Amiga, by the way. I'll stick up for the UK, guys. I've played it on Amiga, and that's pretty bad. Yeah, but when you see, like, you know, like the EGA version of Street Fighter

where he goes down to 16 colors. That is magic. Purple and blue reuse. Oh, God. So then Nick and Kalamazoo writes, Growing up a Sega Genesis kid, Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition was fantastic. I went out and bought two six-button controllers

just to play his game. Look at you, rich guy. Being able to have this great fighting game at home led to hours of fighting goodness with my friends. The crunchy sounds of the Genesis made the game all the better. Thank you. Thank you.

Street Fighter 2 would push me to play other fighters like Mortal Kombat and my favorite Soul Caliber. I have many fond memories of Street Fighter 2 and that great soundtrack. Yeah. I You speak to me, man. You're speaking from my heart. As a Genesis kid, I fully am there with you. I didn't have a six-button controller.

Still don't have a six-button controller. But crunchy Genesis sounds are my Street Fighter. What do you want? It's a sound of your bones crunching as you try to play on a three-button controller. Arturo from Puerto Rico says, as a kid, I was exposed to Street Fighter 2, not through the arcade, but with the Super Nintendo port. It was a fun,

but somewhat bewildering game for me, as I had little to no experience with fighting games at the time and did not understand the mechanics or idea of combos. This became all the more apparent when I played a versus match against my older cousins than boyfriend, who was probably about five years older than me, and I got absolutely destroyed. My opponent's skill boggled my young mind, and I could barely land a single blow. After multiple defeats, I threw in the towel. This was a sobering experience, and one that I've always remembered is the first time somebody wiped the floor with me at a fighting game.

It also inspired me to get better at SF, though I did not have the Super NES version myself, so I cut my teeth on the Game Boy port. That one's rough. That one's really rough. It was slower and stripped down, lacking the electric audiovisual presentation of the Super NES port, but it was my cartridge,

damn it, and I played it religiously and loved it. Okay, I can relate. I can sympathize. It was also the start of my commitment to playing as offbeat characters I barely understood how to use, but was too intrigued by not to pick. Here's to you, Blanca. Oh, bless. All right.

And finally, Kat. Ryan Shapiro says, the largest impact Street Fighter 2 made for me was how it changed the social aspect of arcade gaming. I used to play at our local bowling alleys and shopping malls, honing my skills daily. It wasn't long before I was winning matches with one hand, glitching the machine into and out of guile's handcuffs and ultimately looking for more experienced challengers. I recall one time making the trip into NYC to visit larger arcades and cautiously playing my quarter up on the glass to indicate I got next.

Shocking these older, more experienced players with my gameplay with such a great feeling of accomplishment. I've met several lifelong friends through Street Fighter 2 and its many follow-ups and even have a pick of us playing against each other in the local arcade back when we were in high school. Were you going to Chinatown Fair, Ryan? It's one of the most famous. I wouldn't be surprised.

I have played a fighting game there, and people looked at me with contempt. It was fine. I deserved it. So, yeah, that's Street Fighter 2. many iterations thereof. There was really a lot more to say about this than I honestly expected. I thought this would be like an hour-long podcast, but no. Sorry.

No, no, no, no, no. The enthusiasm and experience that everyone brought here was great. And really, I think, speaks to the impact and the influence and just the appeal of Street Fighter 2. And really, I think, underscores why Capcom was right to continue iterating on it, to continue trying to perfect this game because they did create something almost as naive art. The first time out of the gate, they created Street Fighter 2 with this team that didn't even really have a lot of experience playing the original Street Fighter. They weren't involved with it.

They didn't really like it. And they didn't really know what they were creating. They just, you know, wanted to create like a game where you could be a bunch of different characters and every character would be unique and different and memorable. And they just threw instinct. and, you know, through a little bit of luck. They created something phenomenal. And then, you know, it was their quest over the following years to just keep going back to that.

And instead of throwing everything out as is so often done with sequels to, you know, to really refine it and improve on it. And, you know, I think that's really paid off because, again, as was discussed here, many people venerate Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo as, you know, the ultimate expression. of Street Fighter or even of fighting games in general. So, you know, that took like six iterations for them to get it right, but they did. And they landed at that point. And I think that, you know, speaks highly to Capcom's developers, but I think it also speaks to the importance of sticking with it and not just saying, well, let's throw this out. It didn't quite work.

You know, let's do a quick sequel or just, you know, start over from the beginning. So, yeah, it's a pretty unique game in a lot of ways. And there's still a lot to be said about Street Fighter. We will have more Street Fighter podcasts throughout this year and into Next, I'm sure. But I think we're done talking about Street Fighter to itself for now. We've said plenty. But there's Alpha, there's 3, there's EX, there's 4, 5, there's even the movie. And so we'll...

Alpha next. Yay! Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. I think we might need to talk about, you know, some of the spin-off media, like the anime and this was there a Saturday morning cartoon there was definitely a comic book there was there was a Street Fighter Saturday morning cartoon so you know exploring the anime's OIVs the socioculture phenomenon of Street Fighter 2 that's worth exploring at some point we'll see what's next I don't know but in any case it has been a pleasure having all of you here to talk for quite a long

time about Street Fighter 2 and to you know we've our total discussion in time of Street Fighter 2 now comes to about four hours I'm going to say It's dark here now. Yeah. What happened? And it's summertime. Well, you know, it wouldn't be a street fighter discussion if we didn't have to go like, you know, 16 iterations of two, right?

Yeah. Yeah. It really gets the point across. But anyway, that's it for this episode of Retronauts. Thanks everyone for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, the good news is that Retronauts publishes weekly on the internet. And you can find it by looking for Retronauts. Amazing.

If you really enjoyed this show and thought, well, you know, it'd be cool if I could have heard this episode a week earlier. The good news is that you can do that by going to patreon.com slash retronauts for three bucks a month. You get every episode a week early and you get it at a higher bitrate quality than you're hearing here with no advertisements and cross promotions. So that's cool. You could do that. Or you could pay an extra two bucks for five bucks a month. You also get an additional two patron exclusive bonus episodes. plus every weekend there's a column in mini podcast by Diamond Fight

and occasionally some other little goodies that we throw out there for the cost of like a really good like shake shack milkshake. I think that's, you know, definitely retronauts is better for your hips and for your belly than milkshake. So please consider that next time you've got a hanker in. Anyway, that's my pitch. Let's go with Sam first. You're the newcomer here.

Thank you very much. Well, it's been a pleasure. Guys, I've listened to Retronauts from the very, very beginning. I've listened to every single show. From 2006? Yeah, the amount of Retronauts I've consumed, Jeremy, I can tell you, it's not too great for you. And, no, not a single calorie, not a single gram of cholesterol. That is our promise to you, the Retronauts promise.

Talk to my doctor, yeah. There is some salt, though. So high sodium because of the salt. No, I'm part of the Polygon Symphony's podcast with my buddy, Dillard. Cornelius, who's been on here before on a Sega-related topic. We focus on PlayStation stuff in general, but at a minute, for our first seasons, we're talking about PlayStation 2 stuff. So if you want to come along and join us, just search for Podigone symphonies anywhere.

You get your podcast. And, yeah, join us there. All right. Sheevam, you weren't here last time, so let's promote you a bit. So I host a podcast about Magic the Gathering that comes out every Tuesday called Casual Magic. you can find an anywhere podcast are sold or at the Greenland Podcast Network

and also on like a handful of Retronauts episodes that have come out over the years about things that are in my opinion of the greatest game of all time and my favorite game of all time depending on what episode I'm on yeah so if you enjoy listening to me tell stories

you should go back and check out the Civilization and Magic episode of Retronaut from like last year which was super good and the Final Fantasy Tactics one which was awesome man Yeah the tactics episode When you were flipping through the strategy guide and just talking about all the insane builds that you were doing in that game. Oh, God, I love tactics so much.

Or, you know, the Suikodan episode or, I don't know. I've been on, like, retroactive episodes for like 15 years now. So you can find me. We need to get you on Blood God so we can talk about Suikin or Final Fantasy Tactics or something. You know I will forever all day. We're doing Pantheon episodes. And when tactics happens, you're coming on the show. It's just going to happen.

I'm there. All right. So, Kat, what about yourself? I hear you have some new life circumstances. Yes, I am the host of Acts of the Bloodout. Actually, right after this podcast, we're going to go record our special $5 episode, which is our look into the Fellowship of the Ring, because we're doing Summer of the Rings at the moment.

And, of course, you can get access to our weekly episodes on the free feed, or you can pay five bucks a month to get access ad-free and early to that as well. So, there you go. And also, I'm at IGN now. Yeah, there you go. And finally, I, Jeremy Parrish. You can find me doing stuff with limited run games. You can find me here on Retronauts.

And you can find me on my YouTube channel, chronicling the history of old video games, currently focused very much on 8-bit Sega and Famicom games. But that won't be forever. Eventually, I'll work through those and get back to NES and a Game Boy and that sort of thing. And, you know, that's also Patreon-supported. Patreon.com slash GameSpite, which is also my Twitter handle. kind of the same deal as Retronauts. If you want to watch the episodes a little early, a couple of weeks early, they're up there.

And also for patrons, they get, you know, PDFs of books and even physical books that they are at the right tier. And a little monthly collections of video game box art photography. And I am doing a monthly little podcast that's very, very specific and way too granular for Retronauts. it would have, you know, it would have caused problems here, but just called phama conversations where I've been going through kind of in parallel to the games that I've covered there and talking about the chronology of game systems

from the very beginning, the beginning being the launch of Japanese consoles in 1983. We don't care about that stuff in America before that. Who cares about America? Anyway. I enjoyed your stream about RIGAR the other day, by the way. RIGAR is a great game. Yeah.

I do enjoy Ryeger. Rigar. Good times. Someone just, I don't know if I'm supposed to talk about this. Someone just, like, published a book about it. I think, I think I can talk about that now because it's been published. But there's like a complete history book of Rigar that they're sending me a copy of it to check out. So I'm looking forward to that because apparently it has developer interviews and stuff. I want to see what developers say about Riger. I haven't been able to find any information about that game from the developer's own perspectives. So anyway, that's a tangent. We should stop being on tangents and stop doing this podcast because it's been going on for a long time. It's very streetfighter, two of you. Yes, I know, right? This is the bonus round. Bonus round. This little tangent was Akima. I just destroyed the sign-off that was imbisoned.

Yeah. Anyway, thanks everyone for listening. We'll be back again in a week with a podcast because that is our guarantee to you. A podcast every week and no calories. Swear to God. Get ready to start. Wake up your burning soul again.

Don't forget. Try to do your best whatever will happen Chance to walka chikani So going out of the sky Where to find you get ready, get set go Oh Oh Thank you.