Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
108A playthrough of Capcom's 1996 versus-fighting game for PCs running MS-DOS, Super Street Fighter II.
Played through on the hardest difficulty level with Ken. I finish with no losses and get the best ending.
Oh boy, Capcom. What were you thinking?
Development for this title, like many early Capcom PC ports, was handled by Rozner. You may recognize that name from the horrendous Mega Man and Mega Man 3 for Dos released in the early 90s (they were original creations, in no way resembling the NES titles), and the respectable 1995 Dos port of Mega Man X. So, with such a wildly varying track record, how does SSF2 fare? Well, I guess it depends on what you want out of it.
It's plays fine for what it is - a cheap and lazy port of the SNES version with the axed voices put back in and a new credit sequence. But, by 1996, this was a pretty sad effort. The graphics weren't scaled, but the game runs at the standard VGA resolution, so the life bars don't come anywhere near the edges of the screen, the characters are weirdly tall and thin, and the stages scroll less since more of the background is on display at once. This was horrible for my sense of space between the characters - it doesn't sound like a big change, but it really screws with your ability to judge attack and jump distance.
The sound follows in the footsteps of Capcom's Game Boy Mega Man 2. It's nowhere near as harsh, but it sounds like they just fed the SNES music through a (poor) autoconversion process to midi and never bothered touching the results. Instruments are out-of-tune in many songs (I'm guessing nobody thought to compensate for the detuned samples used in the SNES port), the instruments sound thin and weak - the Genesis FM soundtrack sounds MUCH better than what a badly battered SB16 card does in this port.
Finally, why did they even bother? Gametek released the newer SSF2T for the PC in 1995, and it was a phenomenal conversion. Despite this, Capcom self-published this a year later. An older, less sophisticated game with a shoddy port job - and if my memory serves me correctly, somehow it carried higher system requirements! WTF about this game could possibly require *at minimum* 486DX2 66mhz machine? An 80486-class CPU could run circles around the SNES hardware (even if you take into account the SNES's custom chips), so I can only guess that any attempts at optimizing were done with the same level of *cough* "care" as the rest of the package.
It controls quite well and feels much like the SNES version, so not all is bad. It's just SOOO disappointing. Did anyone really need a game that ran just fine on a (by 1996) $100 game console for PCs that (again, in 1996) would have been 10-15x the price of the SNES hardware just to hit the minimum required spec?
I guess the only question to seriously consider: why does this exist?
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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