Street Fighter Alpha Anthology Hands-On

LAS VEGAS--We've been anxious to see Capcom's Street Fighter Alpha Anthology since the game was announced last month. The upcoming compilation collects four entries in the Alpha branch of the Street Fighter family, as well as the ubercute Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix, a brawler featuring pint-sized, superdeformed versions of the Street Fighter cast. We had the opportunity to see the game at Capcom's recent press event in Las Vegas, where a work-in-progress version was on display.

Street Fighter Alpha Anthology features a simple main menu that lets you select one of the five games contained in the compilation. For those keeping score, you'll find the original Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold, Street Fighter Alpha 3, and Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix. Three of the Alpha games should be familiar to fans of the series, as each has appeared over the years on the Saturn, the PlayStation, and the Dreamcast. It should be noted that Street Fighter Alpha 3 has never appeared on the PlayStation 2, although a version of the game, Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max, has recently hit the PlayStation Portable. The fourth Alpha game in the compilation, Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold, was an arcade release that featured several tweaks, which included gameplay balancing and character colors. Finally, Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix took the superdeformed incarnations of the Street Fighter gang seen in Super Puzzle Fighter and dropped them into a proper fighting game that featured wacky animations, a host of zany combos, and crazy supers.

Each game will feature its own unique set of game modes, which reflect the three main game options across each title--these being arcade, versus, and training. Arcade mode is your standard tournament mode and pits you against CPU opponents around the world as you make your way to the final confrontation with perennial end-boss M. Bison. Versus mode is your standard one-on-one competition. Training mode lets you practice your special moves and combos against a customizable artificial intelligence opponent. Besides the trio of game modes, the four Alpha games will offer survival mode and dramatic battle mode. Survival mode is a simple test of your skill to see how many enemies you can take on consecutively before running out of health. Dramatic battle is a mode that lets you engage in two-on-one tag-team matches.

The presentation in each of the fighters stays true to their original counterparts, featuring slick animation and sharp audio. Control was as solid as you could want, although our standard complaint about the PS2 controller's D pad still holds. The comfortable and versatile controller doesn't offer us the responsiveness we'd like to see while playing the games. Thankfully, there are plenty of alternative controllers to import for anyone who longs for something a little tighter.

Street Fighter Alpha Anthology looks like a solid, albeit bare bones, compilation that will be worth picking up when it hits. The Alpha series has come a long way, and the compilation is looking like a fine chronicle of that evolution. Plus it's got Gem Fighter, so what's not to love? Alpha fans or fighting aficionados who may not have followed the series as closely as they should have will definitely want to keep an eye out for the game when it ships later this year.