Virtually Overlooked: Street Combat
Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.
Once again, we're turning to a crappy game for our weekly recommendation, due to its historical (or hysterical, amirite) notability. We've proven that we kind of enjoy bad Street Fighter II-era fighting games; now that time has passed and the awful clones didn't lead us into another crash, we can enjoy them as bizarre and hilarious curiosities. Well, "enjoy" is a strong word.
Street Combat on the SNES is one of those curiosities, mostly because of its origins. Don't be fooled by the "IREM" on the label -- this game dates back from when good old IREM had enough money to publish other people's games. Don't take it as the mark of quality it usually is.
Street Combat was actually developed by NCS/Masaya, who are known for bizarre, but not necessarily great, shooters like Cho Aniki and the Langrisser strategy series. They made a Cho Aniki fighting game, Cho Aniki Bakuretsu Rantouden, but that's not exactly a wonderful fighting game pedigree.
Like Fighter's History, Street Combat has one of the words in the Street Fighter II title in its own title. Whether this tactic drove any confused or overenthusiastic sales remains to be seen, but we're going to go ahead and say "no." What makes the use of the very evocative title even less defensible is the fact that very little of the game's combat takes place on the street. Yes, Street Fighter II has the stage on top of the buildings, and wherever the thing with the elephants was, but also? Streets.
The reason for the weird non-street environments? Street Combat, in its original Japanese form, was a Ranma 1/2 game, Ranma 1/2: Chounai Gekitou-hen. Back in 1993, Americans didn't know what half a Ranma was, so it was apparently a better idea to replace the culturally unfamiliar characters with, uh, cyborg dudes. And robot dudes. And military dudes. The stuff of video games. You can still clearly see animeness in the characters and (especially) the backgrounds.
This means, however, that even as an "original" fighting game, Street Combat is a licensed fighting game at heart. And thus not very good. How not-very-good? Well, it's got a jump button. Also, like the first (awful) Street Fighter game, your character choice is limited in single-player, to Steven, the mulleted, visored guy. Wouldn't want people to have too much fun with the other characters!
[Screen via VGMuseum]
