18-02 Street Fighter: Real Battle on Film (SAT)
A week or so ago I became thoroughly absorbed by
the spectacular story behind the development of Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game.
After messing around with the original arcade version in MAME and having a good old laugh with it, I decided to splurge on an 11 Euro copy of the Japanese Saturn version on eBay. It felt like the right price for a simple curiosity for a life long Street Fighter fan.
You've got to love that title of the Japanese version of the game. That's some sale. This is no longer a mere video game we're playing, it's a REAL BATTLE, captured on film!!!
For those in the know, the console version is a completely different game from its arcade counterpart. Where that game was developed by Incredible Technologies of Time Killers and Blood Storm fame, out of Chicago (as detailed in the story linked above), Capcom themselves handled the console 'ports'.
What you get is basically a version of Super Street Fighter II Turbo with a few different characters, replaced backgrounds and the iconic sprites replaced with crappy JPEGS with stilted animation. And with the body proportion differences with the original sprites, I'm sure you can imagine the effect on the game's visual clarity and hit detection logic. Other than that, it plays well, though.
The arcade version might be a bit of a joke, with a broken juggle system and nutty infinite combos aplenty, but 'objectively' it oozed production value as IT had access to the real movie sets and access to most of the actors, to capture their movement. It has much more elaborate frames of animation and even lighting that changes depending on where the characters are on the stage, not to mention some in the rough, forward thinking mechanics.
Real Battle on Film is a salvaging project after poor feedback on Street Fighter: The Movie in arcades. It's much more apparent, from frame to frame when you see the original actors and when you see a stand in, and clumsy corrections are made by the developers drawing over the digitised images. Also, the backgrounds are kind of cobbled together, though the Shadaloo base ones are actually quite nice and detailed and evoke the silly sets of the movie quite well.
I played through the arcade mode with Ken, played by Damien Chapa a.k.a. Miklo from Blood In, Blood Out, because I find it hilarious how much he doesn't look like the video game character and much more like an average Joe in a red pyjama. It was smooth sailing, until I reached Jean-Claude van Damme, who took a round off of me (typical).
Afterwards, Zangief and Bison (who in this version doesn't seem to retain a single digitised frame of Raul Julia) gave me some grief as well, with massive damaging hits and I had to hit Continue a few times.
All in all, a good laugh and it doesn't play half bad. Plus it has some decent music as well. A nice little piece for the collection.