An incredibly bad rendition of the arcade original 2D fighter.

Story

In order to put his fighting skills to the ultimate test, Ryu travels around the globe to combat all the best fighters in the world. Will he be able to beat them all and finally stand as the world champion?

The Game

Street Fighter is a 2D arcade style fighting game where you fight gritty no-rules fights against some of the best fighters in the world.

Street Fighter for the Commodore 64 comes in two distinct versions, namely the Tiertex developed European version and the Pacific Dataworks developed US version. The US version ended up being bundled with the European release of the game. Comparing the two, it’s obvious that this Tiertex version is the vastly inferior one. Both these games make an attempt to mimic the original Japanese arcade game – the one that started the now legendary Street Fighter game series.

With that said Street Fighter for the Commodore 64 is among the first home versions of Street Fighter you could possibly play back in the 80’s.

Controls

The controls are important to any fighting game. In Street Fighter you perform different attacks by pulling various directions and pressing the fire button. There aren’t many attacks you can perform, and walking back and forth is pretty slow, which encourages you to constantly jump back and forth instead. The jumping attacks are really awkward and hard to land on a moving opponent.

Since your attacks have so poor reach, you’ll find yourself blindly kick in the air, in hopes that your opponent happens come close enough for it to hit. Every single button press is also clearly delayed, which makes everything seem slow and choppy.

It should be noted that Ryu and Ken does not have their special moves in this game – no Hadoukens, Shoryukens or Tatsumakisenpuukyakus!

Content

The game features ten different opponents across five nations; Japan, USA, England, China and Thailand.

The fighters in this game are;

• Retsu, a Shorinji Kempo instructor.
• Geki, a shuriken expert ninja.
• Joe, an American street fighter.
• Mike, the hard-hitting boxer.
• Birdie, a gigantic bouncer.
• Eagle, a body-guard.
• Lee, an expert in Chinese martial arts.
• Gen, an elderly martial arts expert.
• Adon, a champion Muay Thai fighter.
• Sagat, the Emperor of Muay Thai.

In the single-player mode you’ll play as Ryu. If you play the two-player VS mode, you get to play as either Ryu or Ken, depending on what controller you’re playing with – the only thing that differs in these two is the name and the color of their clothes.

The player who wins the VS fight gets to continue on, playing the single-player mode.

Each fighter you face has its own special attacks, which brings some variety to the game. You’ll notice that the opponents you face later in the game will have very cheap attacks and can literally take you down in just two or three hits. Needless to say this makes the game very hard and even frustrating to play.

Fights are fought on a two round basis, and you’re given three credits to beat the entire game. There are no difficulty settings that you can adjust, so once you’ve lost your three credits the game is over and you’re taken back to the title screen.

The game is very hard, not because the CPU opponents are smart and challenging, but because the game is so very clunky. Ryu’s attacks are very much laughable – they have no reach to begin with, and it happens every so often that his kicks go right through an opponent without it counting as a hit. Both the character hit boxes and the invincibility frames seems to be vastly out-of-place, which makes for a very confusing and outright annoying fighting game.

What’s more, you can supposedly block attacks by pulling back on the joystick, and the character on-screen makes a blocking motion, but there’s no way you can get that so-called block to actually do anything.

The CPU can also be exploited to some extent by simply ducking and making crouching kicks. Other than that, there are no real tactics to speak of in this game. You can try to time your attacks and find openings on your opponent’s attack patterns but since the character animation is so choppy it makes it that much harder to actually see what’s going on.

Between matches you’ll get to play a bonus game. This is where you’ll try to smash a pile of bricks with your bare hands. The challenge lies in trying to press and release the fire button when the power gauge is at its max. The faster you can do it, the more points you’ll get. In all honesty, this bonus game is too simple and too easy, so it does nothing to uplift the game overall.

Graphics

The graphics in this game are terrible. The characters are very pixelated and have sub-par animation. The colors in the game seem to be clashing a whole lot, making the overall impression deterring. The whole game is really choppy and the characters often blend into the background graphics, making it even harder to distinguish what exactly you’re looking at.

At least some effort has been put into giving the five stages some detail and each stage allows scrolling.

Sound

The music in this game is also quite bad, but probably the best part of the whole presentation. There are two songs in the game along with a couple of jingles that play between rounds. The melodies are kind of catchy, but does not do much to uplift the rest of the game. There are no sound effects either, which could have helped.

Summary

The European Street Fighter developed by Teirtex is a horrible game. For the most part it’s ugly and it sounds like a broken toy music player. The fighting isn’t any better, and the stiff controls will only frustrate and anger.

If you want to look back at old school Street Fighter games, avoid this one because there’s an overwhelming risk that it’ll leave you humiliated!

Developed By: Tiertex
Published By: GO!
Version Reviewed: Commodore 64 (EU)
Genre: Fighting
Players: 1-2
Also Available On: Arcade, Amiga 500, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST
Released: 1988