Street Fighter II CPC

[Shaun M. Neary]

Personally as much as I love my CPC and I love Street Fighter II, it's never even registered to me as something that should be together even back then with all the hype.  Much of what I like about the game just doesn't translate as well to a CPC's technical specs and general set up.  So I was never that fussed about Amstrad Action wanting to review it as I felt it would have been lousy anyways.

I felt the same way until I saw the 128k versions of Final Fight and Double Dragon...

[Carnivius]

I felt the same way until I saw the 128k versions of Final Fight and Double Dragon...

Final Fight in particular is why I never thought SFII would be a good idea on CPC.  Especially back in it's commercial market.  It already alienated anyone who didn't have 128k and for those who did it was an admirable attempt but only really worth it if you didn't live near an arcade or couldn't afford a better version (to be fair the first SNES port was pretty loiusy in some ways) since it's really not all that fun. 
Street Fighter II is a more complex in-depth game than Final Fight with many more frames of animation for so many more moves.  Whereas Final Fight has scrolling and multiple enemies the combat is relatively basic, whereas Street Fighter II really requires a good sense of timing and learning all your character's advantages and disadvantages of every move they have. 

I still think the Spectrum port of SFII is a decent attempt to try and bring it to the machine so as a Spectrum fighting game it has some merit but I don't consider it a particularly good conversion of Street Fighter II at all and certainly no reason to play it other than some retro novelty value.

[roudoudou]

Yeah but cart is instant loading so it can load stuff into memory and delete it when no longer needed

A classic game in 64K need to share memory: video memory / game code / sprites / background / ...


With a cart, you do not have to load sprites or background into memory -> Just connect the ROM and copy straight to video memory


SFII could be done on GX4000, but back in the days (90's) developpers would not have done two (very differents) versions of the game cause that was too expensive

[Shaun M. Neary]

I still think the Spectrum port of SFII is a decent attempt to try and bring it to the machine so as a Spectrum fighting game it has some merit but I don't consider it a particularly good conversion of Street Fighter II at all and certainly no reason to play it other than some retro novelty value.

Having recently gotten into Speccy gaming, I still maintain that it's monochrome graphics are real off putter, especially coming from an Amstrad background. But the speed difference can really make up for it if you can put it behind you.

If there had been a CPC version, it would more than likely have been a lazy port of the Speccy version, so I'm kinda glad we didn't get it in the end, but I do honestly believe the CPC had the capability to produce it. But nobody wanted to put the effort in.

[Sykobee (Briggsy)]

Yeah, I keep forgetting that the GX4000 being only 64K, and Street Fighter would definitely not have run on such little RAM.

With 512KB of directly accessible ROM, and a game like SFII being mainly imagery with little mutable state, I think it would have been possible.

[andycadley]

The real problem with SFII, as can be seen from the Amiga and ST versions, is that a single fire button control method just does not cut it. And getting passed that obstacle was pretty much a killer for all the home computer versions, even the GX 2-button pads wouldn't have really been enough.


But had the Plus range come along a year earlier it might have been enough to have a little more impact, but even then the competition was the Amiga and an 8-bit machine was always going to face an uphill battle on that front.

[dragon]

Master system have sfii with two buttons, Z80, less ram that gx4000,But more hardware sprites.


And It run, so i don't view a reason the gx400 can't run sfii

[Shaun M. Neary]

With 512KB of directly accessible ROM, and a game like SFII being mainly imagery with little mutable state, I think it would have been possible.

The real problem with SFII, as can be seen from the Amiga and ST versions, is that a single fire button control method just does not cut it. And getting passed that obstacle was pretty much a killer for all the home computer versions, even the GX 2-button pads wouldn't have really been enough.


But had the Plus range come along a year earlier it might have been enough to have a little more impact, but even then the competition was the Amiga and an 8-bit machine was always going to face an uphill battle on that front.

To address both of these, but pretty much nail on the head. Had the GX come out a year earlier and developers had more time and interest to devote to it and really learn how to make it tick, it could have been easily doable, but again, by 1991, the writing was on the wall for the 8bit computers. Now if the GX4000 had been more of a success, there may have been interest to develop for it, but by 91, the console was seen as nothing more than a paper weight, and developers were eager to move on to the NES, Master System and Megadrive. They were done with the classics. It was the end of an era really. Biggest arcade game for that period of time, and it wasn't deemed worthy to convert to the 8bit systems. Said it all.

[dlfrsilver]

I don't think it was so much anti-CPC, from the software houses, just that a lot of developers found the CPC quite difficult to work with and found it easier to port over from the Spectrum or something else.

I do not agree. Here is why : after doing some research, it appeared that since when they made a game most of the time the assets were shared between the C64, speccy and CPC.


The problem was that companies always did the CPC versions is 1 or 2 months when they did the same game in many months on C64 and Speccy.


that's the reason why : "we want all the versions before date XX/XX/XX" "holy fuck, we spent too much time on the speccy and C64, only 1 month remains to do the CPC version !".


And you get the picture !

It's a real shame when we had people like Dave Perry & Nick Bruty, as well as Richard Aplin who really knew how to get the best out of the machine once they made a little effort.

this doesn't need efforts, it takes TIME ! you need TIME to make quality products, that's the awful truth. Look the games done by ocean on CPC, they took enough time to make good games, and it paid.


Most ocean games are always better on the CPC than on the C64 and speccy !

"Geoff (Brown) would get the licence and then it was a fait accompli and it was over to you then to turn it into something. Really it was a question of who was the cheapest ad who could do it the quickest. It was cash that talked, or timing. It didn't matter about the quality back then. For example, on Street Fighter II there were certain teams who could be used - Creative Materials, Tiertex, Probe - and you'd say we've got to start this and finish it in four weeks. Have you got a team that can do this?

You see, it's not about the CPC, it's about professionalism, doing things the right way and so on. They were talking about deadline time only, never about quality or getting the source code in order to gain time in the porting.

[tjohnson]

 Definitely an earlier release of the plus range / gx would have stood it in better stead.  It probably wasn't sufficient an enhancement to excite developers and I remember lots of noise about the megadrive and SNES at the time, even though they weren't yet available in UK, so it was seen as old tech with some extra bells and whistles.

Why did Amstrad leave it so long?  Perhaps they misjudged the speed of change, they did a fantastic job to recognise an opportunity in the first place and got the original designed and built in record time.  Did Alan take his eye off the ball or a little complacency set in? 

We will never know what could have happened but looking now it is almost inconceivable that Amstrad could have remained a big player in the long run anyway and would probably have gone later anyway like Commodore did and later Atari and Sega.

As for why SFII never hit the CPC I suspect it was a simple business decision, the risk of investing in it outweighed any potential return.

[jason9]

Any news or update about this version?

[felow]

Quite impressive how much it resembles the Mega System and Mega Drive versions (the former mostly)...

[Shaun M. Neary]

Definitely an earlier release of the plus range / gx would have stood it in better stead.  It probably wasn't sufficient an enhancement to excite developers and I remember lots of noise about the megadrive and SNES at the time, even though they weren't yet available in UK, so it was seen as old tech with some extra bells and whistles.

Why did Amstrad leave it so long?  Perhaps they misjudged the speed of change, they did a fantastic job to recognise an opportunity in the first place and got the original designed and built in record time.  Did Alan take his eye off the ball or a little complacency set in? 

We will never know what could have happened but looking now it is almost inconceivable that Amstrad could have remained a big player in the long run anyway and would probably have gone later anyway like Commodore did and later Atari and Sega.

As for why SFII never hit the CPC I suspect it was a simple business decision, the risk of investing in it outweighed any potential return.

With Amstrad and the Plus machines timing, it was a bad judgment call and they spent hoards of money pushing the Spectrum the Christmas beforehand. When the sales for it didn't boost as much as their lightgun action pack didnt rise as much as they'd hoped, they went back to focusing on their primary machine but the ship was pulling out of the harbour at tha point.


With little to no time to write a version from scratch and the Speccy version too poor to port over, it wasn't worth US Golds effort. I'm not even sure the C64 saw a release either but I'm open to correction on that.

[andycadley]

With little to no time to write a version from scratch and the Speccy version too poor to port over, it wasn't worth US Golds effort. I'm not even sure the C64 saw a release either but I'm open to correction on that.

It did and it's atrocious.

[dragon]

Definitely an earlier release of the plus range / gx would have stood it in better stead.  It probably wasn't sufficient an enhancement to excite developers and I remember lots of noise about the megadrive and SNES at the time, even though they weren't yet available in UK, so it was seen as old tech with some extra bells and whistles.

Why did Amstrad leave it so long?  Perhaps they misjudged the speed of change, they did a fantastic job to recognise an opportunity in the first place and got the original designed and built in record time.  Did Alan take his eye off the ball or a little complacency set in? 

We will never know what could have happened but looking now it is almost inconceivable that Amstrad could have remained a big player in the long run anyway and would probably have gone later anyway like Commodore did and later Atari and Sega.

As for why SFII never hit the CPC I suspect it was a simple business decision, the risk of investing in it outweighed any potential return.

I think the form off Alan bussisnes is the cause of the dead plataform. Alan always make have a 30% a  of profit in every computer selled. So the components should be cheap.


Sony and sega and Nintendo, Drop money with each console sold. And they make money with royality in the games.
So they can have best hardware.


I think at finish the open source form of the microcoomputers kill the  CPC indirectly  in form of z80 outdated, because is cheap.

[Carnivius]

Sony and sega and Nintendo, Drop money with each console sold. And they make money with royality in the games.
So they can have best hardware

Dunno how true that was with the Wii.  It was painfully out of date in specs when released since it's not much more than a Gamecube repackaged with a gimmicky motion controller.   When emulating on PC you don't even need two seperate emulators as Dolphin does both Gamecube and Wii.   Even selling the machine cheaper than the xbox360 and ps3, Nintendo either didn't lose much money or perhaps even profitted from sales of it.   That cheap underpowered console did mean third party support dropped pretty quickly as AAA developers making multi-platform games could produce X360 and PS3 versions to be pretty similar but Wii often needed so much downgrading or (in the case of some games like Ghostbusters where the Wii couldn't do the movie-accurate realistic character models so went with an over-stylised cartoony look) restyling to be workable on it's specs it just wasn't worth the effort.


And yeah that C64 SFII is horrendous.  Ugly as heck, boring looking 3 colour sprites (like most C64 games) and why does that awful rendition of the the very short character select music just keep on going and going and going....?

Oh and speaking of Nintendo and Street Fighter II, my friend just sold his Switch cos he was hoping that new release of Ultra Street Fighter II would be worth it but it's mostly junk (expensive junk cos he had to purchase those overpriced Pro controllers just to play the game properly cos the regular Switch controllers are trash for most things, but especially for SFII).  And Capcom are con-artists these days anyways.  They still make some good games (and good Street Fighter games such as IV and V despite the initial release version of V missing a lot) but they really like to try squeeze all the pennies out of their fans with silly prices, season passes and overpriced DLC.  A cheap, PC with MAME installed and a couple of controllers of your own choosing connected it the best/cheapest/most-practical way to play SFII anyways.

[Shaun M. Neary]

Dunno how true that was with the Wii.  It was painfully out of date in specs when released since it's not much more than a Gamecube repackaged with a gimmicky motion controller.

To be fair it was the gimmicky controller that caused it to do as well as it did and caused Microsoft and Sony to follow suit with the Kinect and Playstation Move. But otherwise I'm in complete agreement here. 576p resolution for a 2007 console was laughable. The Wii U was what the Wii should have been, and that also was out of date by the time it surfaced in 2012. That said, I lost two and a half stone with the help of Wii Fit U, so I won't hear a bad word said about it.

[felow]

Found something strange and interesting at the same time: the english wiki page of the original game list the Amstrad CPC version as it was effectively coded by Creative Materials and relased along with the other home-computers portings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Fighter_II:_The_World_Warrior#Ports
then the "home-computers" paragraph doesn't cite it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Fighter_II:_The_World_Warrior#Home_computers

[Carnivius]

To be fair it was the gimmicky controller that caused it to do as well as it did and caused Microsoft and Sony to follow suit with the Kinect and Playstation Move. But otherwise I'm in complete agreement here. 576p resolution for a 2007 console was laughable. The Wii U was what the Wii should have been, and that also was out of date by the time it surfaced in 2012. That said, I lost two and a half stone with the help of Wii Fit U, so I won't hear a bad word said about it.

It's weird how the least initially successful of the motion controller stuff (the PS Move) is the only one to have found new life since it's now an often necessary peripheral for the recent PSVR (although Nintendo gets the credit for popularising motion control at the time, the Wii did seem to be basically an extension of the PS2's Eyetoy gimmick which had come out before it).   And yeah the Wii itself was a gimmick cos as successful as it was, Nintendo didn't really have a clue to keep all those non-traditional-gamer customers it had convinced to buy the Wii when it came to the Wii U and Switch.  Customers like my mum.

But then Nintendo does so some odd things.   And since this is a Street Fighter II thread it brings to my mind how that the SNES port was a killer app for that system, yet the N64 never even got a single Street Fighter game at all.  One of many reasons I found very little to enjoy about my damn idiotically overpriced early Japanese import N64 I had bought purely cos of how much I had loved my NES, SNES and to a lesser extent Gameboy, SFII being a huge part of the SNES love and regular after-school tournaments with my friends.

[Shaun M. Neary]

Found something strange and interesting at the same time: the english wiki page of the original game list the Amstrad CPC version as it was effectively coded by Creative Materials and relased along with the other home-computers portings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Fighter_II:_The_World_Warrior#Ports
then the "home-computers" paragraph doesn't cite it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Fighter_II:_The_World_Warrior#Home_computers

Never believe *everything* you read on wikipedia. Any idiot can set up an account and write and edit *any* article.

If anyone was more likely to code it for the CPC, it probably would have been Tiertex, they did the vast majority of US Gold's Capcom releases. On top of that, Tiertex were responsible for the Speccy version, which more than likely would have been ported to the CPC at a push, especially with the lack of time given to knock it out.

[dragon]

It was definitely covered. Page 93.

It appear u.s gold have many games terminated and, not released. Recently in interview with factor 5 guys. The team tell that they made a 1:1 port of snes indianajones trilogy to megadrive. But was unreleased thanks to u.s gold XD.


So  not discard street fighter 2 is coded.

[tjohnson]

There is a lot of interest in a game that was promised but never released, I guess we may never know if it got written or not, maybe one day some old code may surface.  In the spanning years and all the interest I'm surprised a version has never actually been written.

[dragon]

There is a strange history here un Spain back to the 92/93. In these epoque one of the shops that sell sending games across mail called telejuegos. Published street fighter 2 to buy un diferente plataforms.




The history is strange, because the people that buy the spectrum or amstrad versión, recieve the amiga version. And then one or two week later the shop dissappears from the map. Not responding telephone.


This is a picture of the announce:

[||C|-|E||]

The game of the century, they said!   

[6128]

There is a strange history here un Spain back to the 92/93. In these epoque one of the shops that sell sending games across mail called telejuegos. Published street fighter 2 to buy un diferente plataforms.




The history is strange, because the people that buy the spectrum or amstrad versión, recieve the amiga version. And then one or two week later the shop dissappears from the map. Not responding telephone.


This is a picture of the announce:

I bought the game, received the Amiga version, returned the game and lost my money.