US Gold must have been mad to take this one on.
And they nearly got away with it.
You see the spectrum version of SF2 shows a great deal of promise - especially when you have a look at what our C64 playing friends had to deal with.
Sprites are well drawn, animation is serviceable but jerky, sound effects are sparse but functional and all the World Warrior characters are available looking and behaving as their arcade counterparts do.
So what the problem?
The problem is that you just spent 30 minutes of your life (that you're never going to get back) trying to load in what when shrunk down to the speccy is a fairly basic one-on-one fighter.
Every character had to be multiloaded in - and there wasn't even an option to repeat a fight you'd just spent ages loading.
Barely a fraction of the moves from the arcade parent have made it onto the spec and some are incomplete whilst most just don't work as they should. Some characters have moves that only work from the left side of the screen for example - suggesting that the game was released without being finished.
SF2 is one arcade that requires tactics and skill to master - but all of the games subtleties have been lost.
Even with speeded up .tap files on an emulator I'm not sure this is a good demo of what the speccy is capable of. Several games such as Shadow Warriors and HKM had used large sprites in a beat-em-up more succesfully years before this came out.
A daft title to take on for the spectrum then.
Not logged in [ log in | sign up | forgot password? ]