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Retrospective: Street Fighter Article
Retro Article by Matt Edwards
Page 4
Street Fighter EX
Series:
(1996) Street Fighter EX (1997) Street Fighter EX Plus (1998) Street Fighter EX2 (1999) Street Fighter EX2 Plus (2000) Street Fighter EX3
EX Mechanics:
- Super Cancelling - the ability to cancel a Super into another Super up to three times
- Guard Break - breaks through an opponent's block, costs one Super level
- Excel Combo (EX2) - similar to Custom Combos, just go crazy
- Meteor Combo (EX2 Plus) - a level-three Super
- Surprise Blow (EX3) - replaces Guard Break
- Momentary Combo (EX3) - quickly links specials together
- Critical Parade (EX3) - virtually identical to a Variable Cross, costs two Super levels
- Meteor Tag Combo (EX3) - essentially a dual Meteor Combo, costs three Super levels
With all the anticipation surrounding the console release of Street Fighter IV, it's easy to forget there's already been a 3D Street Fighter series. Street Fighter EX was co-produced by Capcom and Arika, a company started by former Capcom employees including Akira Nishitani. Arika also developed the Everblue series on the PS2. The first Street Fighter EX made a big deal out of Super Cancelling, where virtually any move, including a Super, could be cancelled into another Super.
Street Fighter EX may have looked pretty rough with very blocky 3D characters, but when you consider its release was pre-Tekken 3, you can give it a bit of leeway. At least it kept the 2D fighter gameplay alive. Most of the included Street Fighter characters played in their classic styles - although Ryu and Ken's Hurricane Kicks now required multiple inputs in order to link the various hits.
Chun-Li's never looked so angular. And that's not in the good way.
As well as a few classic Street Fighters, EX also contained original characters designed by Arika. Many of these were given stories to try and link them better to the Street Fighter universe. D. Dark, for instance, used to serve under Guile in the military and had his unit attacked by Rolento. Supposedly he blamed Guile for the massacre and sought revenge. Oh yeah, he also used to be called Holger, went psycho under the name Doctrine Dark and fights with chains and booby-traps.
Shortly after EX, Akira released EX Plus, which unlocked all the secret characters, including Akuma, Blair and Allen, and also ported EX to the PS1 as Street Fighter EX Plus a. EX proved popular enough that fans were treated to a sequel in Street Fighter EX2. EX2 played pretty much the same as the last game, although the Custom Combo system that proved popular in Alpha 2 was added as the Excel Combo. New characters included the sword-wielding Hayate, and if that wasn't overdoing it enough, new girl Sharon showed up packing an assault rifle.
EX2, and its update EX2 Plus, didn't improve the graphics dramatically over the previous game. Ryu and friends just didn't have the same charm in 3D as they did in 2D - more down to the arcade technology than anything else. They just looked plain and uninspired - perhaps why Arika went so out of its way to "spice up" the new fighters. Still, compared to all the fighters on the Hyper Neo Geo 64, Street Fighter EX really wasn't half bad.
Capcom should never have let Vega through with that claw. You turn a blind eye once, and people start to take liberties.
As the first game here not to get an arcade release, Street Fighter EX3 was a PS2 exclusive, and, more tellingly, very close to the console's launch. Its biggest feature was the tag gameplay everybody seemed desperate to put in their game at the time. No amount of Meteor Tag Combos, with Ryu and Ken Dragon Punching someone at the same time, could stop EX3 feeling like a rush job. EX3 had virtually no new characters, Akuma was glaringly absent and ignoring the tag system it played virtually identical to EX2 Plus.
The Street Fighter EX series is fun enough to play today and chaining three Supers together is still a definite high. But they were never a patch on most of the other Street Fighter games. Still, they're better than Final Fight Revenge. Arika can at least be thankful for that.
Are you excited about Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition on Wii?
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sweetcheeks
15/02/09 @ 10:45
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ooohh ryu, where did you get those red slippers, they're just darling
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Another weekend another superb arcticle! I love EG.
The number of people I've met had good times with in arcades and homes over this game series is unbeleivable. The SF games are without a douby my best series ever. Just pure simple gaming fun which no one seems able to recreate even in the great beat 'em ups - NO ONE does it like Capcom. Some would say they milked the SF brand to death with so many games but I don't think they did, they gave us what we want - MORE!!! IF by any chance anyone from Capcom glances at this article please look at their god like catalogue of quality 2D fighting and please, please give every single one of your games the SSF2THDR touch. Darkstalkers, MSH, MvC2, Alpha, 3rd strike, my god I would lap it up and I'm sure many fans would. Top read Matt and kudos to you for acknowledging that 3rd Strike is king :)
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most recently on 15/02/09 @ 10:50
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freddiecarr
15/02/09 @ 11:08
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Happy memories :)
except streetfighter the movie, which I still bought though for the ps1 for my streetfighter fix ;) |
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sweetcheeks
15/02/09 @ 11:08
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Cao
^ good greif thats the dumbest shit i ever heard but its true, i just checked wiki. While we are at this SF love in, may i just ask- one winter night may years ago, while i was waiting for a doner in a grubby kebab shop. they had a streetfighter2 coinop machine called 'nightmare edition' the intro had ryu and ken fighting in a field during a thunder storm. The game had hadokens that went off at odd angles, and the onscreen charaters would float above the ground. no one at school at the time believed me, did this happen or had all that reject kebab meat affected my brains. ohh and yes this was a nice article matt /cyber pat on the back |
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superjag86
15/02/09 @ 11:26
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Great article Matt, and I agree, Third Strike is one of the best 2D fighters out there and definitely the best Street Fighter.
(I miss Elena!) SFIV has alot to live up to..
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most recently on 15/02/09 @ 11:30
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GrandpaUlrira
15/02/09 @ 11:31
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Nice retrospective. My main argument against Third Strike being the best SF is that most of the characters were terribly designed and completely unmemorable.
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LeonardMcCoy
15/02/09 @ 12:22
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Thanks for this well-written article that gives in-sight into the jungle of Street Fighter installments.
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Matt_Edwards
15/02/09 @ 12:32
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Got Street Fighter IV for 360 yesterday after being starved of any access to the arcade game for months. It's totally awesome!
Unfortunately I didn't do the SFIV review as Capcom supplied code that needed a debug console, which I don't have :( Looking forward to reading Simon Parkin's thoughts tomorrow though @ CaoSlayer Dan's dad eh? Guess you can never know too much SF Trivia :D |
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TommyUnderwear
15/02/09 @ 13:43
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Can't wait for the game to be honest. Half of my work mates are all gagging for this game to be released. There are gonna be some good online battles to be had over the coming months.
Matt - care to give an unofficial score?? |
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Hi Mat.. Great article. Might be worth mentioning that 'Mike' in Street Fighter evolved into 'M.Bison' in the Street Fighter 2 series. M.Bison being Balrog in the original japanese version before the oversees versions switched the bosses names up to avoid run ins with Mike Tyson's lawyers. This brings the total of characters to seven, ahead if the six mentioned in the article, who migrated over to the later games. Not trying to be too anal, but if your gonna include Eagle in his later incarnation, we might as well be completist about things 8)
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most recently on 15/02/09 @ 14:03
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electrolite
15/02/09 @ 14:46
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What a great article.
I remember the original SFII surfacing through the pages of CVG and EGM and the hype was incredible. Luckily it lived up to the hype, which then started again on the release of the incredible SNES conversion. I remember seeing it running for the first time in a games shop in Manchester near the old Corn Exchange. Think that shop got destroyed in the bomb. I'm not a huge fan of fighters but the original and the Turbo edition still stand up well today IMHO |
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Matt_Edwards
15/02/09 @ 15:01
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@ TommyUnderwear
"Matt - care to give an unofficial score??" Well I can't say anything from a Eurogamer perspective, but when I reviewed the SFIV arcade for gamesTM magazine last year, I gave it a 9. And from what I've played of the 360 version so far, the online is very tight ;) @ Telemikus I see your point about Mike evolving into Balrog but it was confirmed that they were definitely different characters in the "All About Capcom" book. This article was originally only supposed to be 2000 words long, the one I submitted before editing was over 7000. I couldn't include everything :s |
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CunningLinguist
15/02/09 @ 16:58
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Pitty 3rd strike never had a PAL release on the PS2, have to play it on MAME.
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Good stuff, Matt, would be cool if you could hop over to the forum and give us your thoughts on some of the console-specific aspects of SFIV. :)
"Third Strike was simply classic 2D fighting perfection. It didn't get bogged down with 50 characters" No, they settled for three. ;) Also, I think an auto spellchecker didn't like "Daigo" too much. ^^; |
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Good article there, and a fine example of how you can explain the more complex SF game mechanics without just using the strange names Capcom come up with for them - this article effectively had a glossary with the "Mechanics" sections, but actually didn't need one as it was written clearly enough anyway, whereas recent SF4 previews that could really have done with a glossary to make sense didn't have one.
Anyway, I entirely understand why you'd go with SF3 as the best of the series to date as it's clearly as honed and balanced a game as you'll see anywhere. However, as someone who's never been prepared to really learn the strengths of weaknesses of every character, I pick Marvel vs Capcom 2 every time. It's for exactly the reasons you give in the article - despite all the complex stuff in there it's incredibly easy to pick up and have a laugh, and even if you don't know what you're doing the game will still reward you with over-the-top effect after over-the-top effect. Plus, it's hard to dislike a game where I can repeatedly beat my actually-quite-good-at-beat-em-ups friend by picking cactus man Amingo who, for some reason, he finds so irritating that he loses his composure and makes it easier for me to hit him. |
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patchbox360
15/02/09 @ 18:57
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great read, thanks
reading about these street fighters brings back alot of good memories, i hope street fighter4 encapsulates the whole SF experience into one package. Can't wait. |
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Emilia'sHorse
15/02/09 @ 20:26
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I bought a SNES just to play SF2Turbo..happy days. I was shit, but I still loved it.
Excellent read thanks. |
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CHAZBIGPOTATO
15/02/09 @ 21:48
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Matt - that was a great read, thanks. I'm getting very hyped for SF4 now.
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quantumsheep
16/02/09 @ 06:20
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A real labour of love, Matt - nice one! :)
I've got progressively worse at Street Fighter as I've got older, so for me nothing beats SFII Turbo on the SNES (though I've enjoyed HD and I'm looking forward to IV!) Again, great article. Great to see the retro section being used to give context to new releases of older titles :) |
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Very nice article, makes me lament for my student days (91-95) when I essentially lived in my local arcade. (LA in edinburgh)
The joys of using guile to reset the cabinet on the 5th credit from a pound so we could moan that it had turned off again and get another 5 creds ;) .. or getting someone in the handcuffs and leaving the cabinet to go grab some lunch so the creds were still there when we got back. /wonders why arcades dwindled away... I also have fond memories of waiting outside the arcade for it to open at 10am on the day CE arrived... The first weekend I had my first car I drove from Edinburgh to London with a mate to take place in an alpha 2 comp in namco(soho) I was so tired after the 7 hour drive i couldn't play for shit and ended up 3rd (with chun-li) anyone else an ex-regular of a.g.sf2 ?
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most recently on 16/02/09 @ 09:20
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retr0gamer
16/02/09 @ 10:40
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I'm nit sure about the SF2 combos being the result of a bug. I've heard this a lot and it seemed to be just a rumour with no merit until some publications got wind of the idea and ran with it (like Games TM). Any source or reference for this?
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