11/6/2007 - Street Blaster V Turbo 20

We saw what happened when Double Dragon was ported over to the Atari 2600. Despite its, um, primitive nature, it still looked playable and somewhat faithful to its source material. Now what happens when you try to go from a 32-bit game to an 8-bit system? And not just any 32-bit game... it's Street Fighter II, baby. To my knowledge, the only official 8-bit port of Street Fighter II by Capcom is the one for the original Game Boy. The rest, including this little gem, are pirated games.



Let's try to review this, AVGN-style (without the swear-words, of course). First of all, what's with the name change? Street Blaster V Turbo 20? I know they were trying to avoid lawsuits by Capcom, but how did they come up with "Street Blaster"? Is there a construction worker character in the game that blasts streets or something? And is this the fifth Street Blaster game, or the 20th? Or it could be a cumulative title, making it the 20th version of Street Blaster V Turbo, which itself is the faster version of Street Blaster V, which is the fifth version of Street Blaster, making it the overall 26th version of Street Blaster (unless there were Championship Editions in between).

Now look at the character select screen:

I can recognize the first 10 fighters... they look like most of the Street Fighter gang. But what about the next 10? Is that Evil Ryu? Is Blanka in a hockey mask? These look like the Bizarro versions of the Street Fighter characters? Why was this even necessary? I mean, in the original Street Fighter II, you could only choose from eight World Warriors. It's like the makers of this piece of junk were trying to give you a bonus by allowing you to choose alternate versions of the characters.

Then, when Guile and Chun-Li are chosen, the VS screen shows Blanka and Dhalsim. What the heck happened? Did they not even test this game before releasing it? Then we get to the game. Okay, it looks decent enough. But why is Chun-Li just doing her Spinning Bird Kick? All Guile has to do is Sonic Booms and she's down for the count. Speaking of which, why does her body bounce three times when falling to the ground? Boy does that get annoying fast.

So after Guile wins, Blanka says "Ha Ha, Nice Fight, Go Next Fight!" It may not be as bad as "All Your Base Belong to Us", but it's close. Then you have a Guile vs. Zangief screen, where it's Blanka instead of Guile again, and Zangief is having some kind of complexion problem:

Now that's just disturbing.

After the Guile/Zangief fight, the next opponent is Ryu, but the VS. screen shows E. Honda. Whatever. The thing is, the music for Ryu's stage is E. Honda's music as well. Oh well, they're both from Japan. After Ryu is Chun-Li again? Oh wait, it's the Bizarro Chun-Li, and the name on the HUD says Maki. Oh boy is this game crap, or what?

I do have to say that after looking at this game, I think that Capcom could have made an NES port of Street Fighter II and it probably would have been decent. I mean, the NES was certainly capable of displaying the fighter sprites in a recognizable way, and it had enough horsepower to emulate the fighting gameplay engine to a degree. Surely, if they could churn out mediocre Mega Man sequels at the end of the NES's lifecycle, they could have made room for a guaranteed success of a SF2 translation. And they could have save the rest of the world from this awful piece of garbage.