Street Fighter 2 for the Master System will always stand as one of the worst ports of all time along with Pac man for th
The graphics have taken a serve hit in the process of shrinking down the cutting edge genesis graphics for a system that was only half as powerful. Colours are muted and run together slightly and frames are missing all over the place from ChunLi’s winning animation where she seems to float in the air to the slow-motion falling of a KO’ed enemy, which looks awful with the enemy basally flashing between animations to the totally ugly and stripped back backgrounds. SF2 for the Master System just looks awful and unprofessional. Characters are done with far less colours and are a lot jaggier with really minimum details. Chunli stands out as being one of the worst with her obstinately cute face being reduced to little more than a brown circle. Ken fares almost as bad with pretty much the entirety of him being a washed out brown. Backgrounds are really bad with glaring errors such as the sky being the wrong colour in Ken’s stage and the boat being on the wrong side. The sky in Ryu’s stage is a horrid mass of yellowish-white and purple and the temple is missing. Chun Lis background is completely different instead of being on a crowded street with lots of animations its in a genetic deserted room devoid of any animation and the list goes on, its just nowhere near the same.
Characters also move very slowly with an unbelievably choppy and slow frame rate and constant slowdown. The frame rate is probably about 10FPS and it really shows. Moves look awkward and tend to come out of nowhere with the lack of animation frames and jumping is horribly imprecise due to the unpredictable slowness. Some moves are wrong or changed for no reason with Ken and Ryu’s fireballs being always orange instead of blue and sometimes orange and what’s worse a heck of a lot of moves are missing. Amazingly, Ryu and kens dragon punch are missing, even though they are indispensable for stopping jump kicks and are iconic representations of those characters. Chun Li’s Ki fireball, her only distance move is also gone as is her spinning bird kick. It just totally changes the game and is really a travesty.
The sound is also absolutely butchered. While not as horribly maimed as the graphics it is still astoundingly bad. The main problem is that bouts are virtually silent since there’s only one “getting hit” sound in the entire game and it’s a little “pok” sort of sound with absolutely no impact or feeling to it. Characters don’t call their moves with speech like on the genesis version and the announcer sounds totally different to the genesis version. The music isn’t quite as bad since I usually like the sound and cuteness of Master system music but it’s nowhere near genesis quality and is missing entire layers of sound.
The control too is pretty horrible and unsuited with it being very hard to pull off moves with the imprecise Dpad and lack of buttons. Special moves don’t seem to work even if you input the commands perfectly multiple times. The unsplit SMS pad just isn’t designed for such control styles. Whats even worse is the fact that since the controler only has two buttons there is only one punch and one kick attack which are fierce punch and medium kick. Throws dont exist either. Surely the lack of buttons clued capcom in that porting the game just wasn't a good idea from the start.
Street Fighter 2 for the Master System will always stand as one of the worst ports of all time along with Pac man for the 2600. It’s completely shallow and incapable of running on the hardware without changing it so much it isn't the same game It is a creation of pure greed on Capcom’s part.
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