...a nice little collection, albeit a little bare bones.
What you have here is a collection of all the Street Fighter Alpha games (Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold, Street Fighter Alpha 3) and Gems Fighter (aka. Pocket Fighter) in all their arcade perfect glory. The games are all beautiful, they control nice, and the animation is still outstanding to this day. 2D fighters have held up much better than the original Tekken or Virtua Fighter. They look better and play just as well as they did when they were first released. This compilation preserves all the games in arcade 2D fighter perfection. If you are too young to remember how we all used to pump our quarters into these games, you might want to consider picking this up as a history lesson in gaming. It's a great price at only $29.99 and it has five games to play. If you're old school you'll want this game just to relive those memories all over again. Again, these games are all arcade perfect!
But being arcade perfect, while it gives players all the games in their pure and untouched forms, hurts one game in this collection: Street Fighter Alpha 3. Street Fighter Alpha 3 was released on the PS1 and the Dreamcast back in the day and has since been released on the GBA and PSP. The PSP version of the game is the most all inclusive version, meaning everything and every character in all the previous versions is included plus a few extra characters that never made appearances in the Street Fighter Alpha series before. Also, with the exception of the GBA version, all other versions included the World Tour Mode. This mode gave you the option to essentially raise your fighter to make him/her more powerful and add moves to really stomp the arcade or your friends as they'd play against you. This added a great deal of depth and replay value to an already great game which brings us to the problem. This mode was offered on the PS1 version back in 1998 and every subsequent version since, sans the GBA. Why is it missing from this collection? The only answer I can come up with is that Capcom wanted to release this game in arcade perfect glory. There really is no other explanation.
If I had to choose, I would have skipped Street Fighter Alpha 2 altogether, kept Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold (which is the only version of that game you will play) and I would have included the World Tour Mode and all the characters in the PSP version of Street Fighter Alpha 3. I also would have included a version of Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo as that is what Gems Fighters is based on; but that's just me.
All in all, this is a good collection to have. For fanboys like me, there is no excuse to not have this collection in your game library. I have the PS1 and Dreamcast versions of Street Fighter Alpha 3, so I still have the World Tour Mode. It just would have been nice to see here for the PS2. That omission is the only thing that hurts Street Fighter Alpha Anthology. Other than that, it is an excellent compilation to own and all the games in it are arcade perfect. I love the Street Fighter Alpha series. If you're like me, $29.99 isn't too bad of a price to relive the glory days at the arcade.