Spectrum 2.0

Surely the Spectrum could have done without Street Fighter II. Sure its nice to have it in the archive, but in truth the game was nothing short of a crisis.

It wasn't a bad start with the title screen and a nice rendition of Balrog's theme. Why Balrog's theme and not the classic theme for the title tune is beyond me, perhaps it was a personal peference. Now on to the character select screen and its then when we hear familiar music from the arcade though it appears to suffer some slowdown as it gets quicker as you select your character, but it a nice effort.

Now the problems begin...multiload! You spend 20 minutes or so loading your game for a five minute fight. A multi-load on a 128K game is telling something. Now to the game itself, okay so the characters are nicely drawn out despite the fact they are the same colour as the background. The game plays slow and sluggish and there are no music during the fights, well okay in fairness we didn't expect any, that was a bridge too far perhaps. But the main part of SFII's gameplay is the special moves, Ryu and Ken's Hadouken, Blanka's electricity, E.Honda's thousand slaps and Guile's Sonic Boom, on the Speccy however they are very hard, if not impossible to perform, leading some to wonder if they were even included.

So Street Fighter II on the ZX Spectrum, c'mon admit it, it was pretty much doomed from the start, perhaps one license the Spectrum could have done without.