Alpha Anthology

Here's a brief rundown of the game so far. Don't be shocked to see some of this recycled in the review.

Street Fighter Alpha 1: Old as dirt, and obviously a rushed product. The sprites look as nice as in the other two games, but they're missing quite a bit of animation in some instances. Furthermore, while some of the background look real sharp (Sagat's is the best by far), most are poorly detailed and are obviously missing the finishing touches. If you ask me, they look worse than the ones in SF2. The roster is smal and the gameplay is slow and stiff in nature. Sound is tinny and muffled. Hell, they couldn't even fix the typos in the dialogue. The only nice thing I can say about it is that the slowness actually makes it very good as a training game. You can actually point out and see a character do a cross up, and you have a generous amount of time to punish someone who whiffs an anti-air attack. I might actually play this one even after beating it with all of the characters, simply in order to hone my skills for the better and faster paced games on this disc. As an overall package however, this is only interesting for historical purposes.

Alpha 2: Many people prefer this over the third game, and I can see why. The smaller, more fluid sprites are much nicer, and the higher res backgrounds are some of the best in the series. The gameplay is also much faster and more responsive than in Alpha, with a respectable roster this time around. I haven't played around much with the custom combo system that is oh so deadly in this iteration, though I'm glad that the CC's aren't the only option for supers (I thought they were for all these years). You can tell that this is what they really wanted to make with Alpha 1 (the menus are very, very similar, as is the style of play), only this time they actually nailed it. This looks to be the pinnacle of old school style Street Fighter gameplay, all polished up and tweaked out. Can't wait to sink my teeth even further.

Alpha 2 Gold: An improved Alpha 2. With Cammy! I like it as much as the original one!

Alpha 3: Ah yes, the game that brought me into the 2d fighter fold. I loved this to death on the Dreamcast for quite some time, until eventually my fighter library expanded and I found what I considered even better games (Mark of the Wolves, Third Strike). After that I started to look at Alpha 3 with some form of contempt due to its washed out graphics and what seemed to be a focus on sheer content over quality. I havent' played it since.

Doing research on the Anthology, I learned that the Dreamcast version, both visually and gameplay wise, was an upgraded version of the Playstation edition (and was a sloppy port to boot). That means smaller sprites, poorer scrolling, and pixellation that caused the game to look far uglier than it should have.

In order to verify that this is in fact true, all one needs to do is look at the arcade perfect Alpha 3 found in the Anthology. The sprites are bigger and move smoothly. Everything looks crisper and cleaner. If just feels so much better to play than I remember. I'm really excited about this one, even moreso than Alpha 2, for maybe now I can really dig deeper into the game that started it all for me.

Puzzle Fighter: Played it for 5 minutes. Chibi characters and silly moves means this is a simple, joke centered game. Might be decent as a distraction.

As you can probably tell, I'm a very pleased with this game. Capcom has finally made a complete and well produced Street Fighter compilation that gives fans just about everything they wanted (there's quite a lot more to the game than I have mentioned. Wait for the review).