Street Fighter: Anniversary Collection is a misleading title. It implies an anniversary of all the
Street Fighter games, but in reality it only contains a single untouched arcade port of
Street Fighter III: Third Strike. The other
Street Fighter II games aren’t really pure
SF2. Five iterations of the old arcade game have been lumped together in a single playable experience called
Street Fighter II: Hyper. This may serve to please the casual
Street Fighter fans, but purists will definitely feel they have been cheated.
The good news first: Street Fighter III: Third Strike is a great port, and probably the best rendition of the Street Fighter III arcade game. Capcom wanted something new and fresh with the third installment of their classic fighter, so they scrapped most of the old recognizable characters and added a whole slew of new fighters for players to master. Though the old characters will be sorely missed, the game offers some very interesting people to fight with, and it still retains classics like Ryu, Ken, Akuma, and Chun-Li.
Third Strike isn’t just a template reconstruction of the old SF2 games. It has new features like selectable super moves for each character, which must be chosen before each match. Learning what super move to use on which character adds some good depth to the strategy of this 2D fighter. There is also a new parrying system that, when mastered, dramatically changes the game.
Now for the bad news. At first, it may seem like the Anniversary Collection comes packed with five different versions of SF2. But in reality, the original SF2 and four of its variants are squashed together to make, in essence, one more Street Fighter II variation. Though you are able to pit characters from different SF2 games against each other, it would have been nice to have been given each of the games separately so they could be enjoyed in all their original glory.
There is even more bad news. There is no sign of the original Street Fighter. With a name like Anniversary Collection, you’d think that there would be lots of nostalgia shoved into the box. Instead, you get a quickly assembled array of games that won’t introduce the new player to the SF series properly, and may even turn away the hardcore fan. The one redeeming quality of all this is that both games can be played online, and since the Japanese version has been out for a while, there’s no shortage in online players.