Description of game

First of all, don’t even bother trying to play this game with the default keyboard only key-mapping, this will only make you hate this game from the very beginning. Get yourself—at least—a gamepad or some other kind of controller and remap the controls to that device (but remember that before you get into the remapping itself you’ll first have to enable the joystick input for the game through MAME’s game list: right click on the game title in the list then navigate rhough Properties → Controllers and tick ‘Enable Joy Input’). You see, Street Fighter stands and falls on the joystick gesture recognition. There are—in fact—only three moves in the game, yet they are practically inexecutable on keyboard only. For example, to perform a so called Hadoken, or “Surge Fist”, you have to press and hold the punch button while moving the joystick down and then right (in a kind of quarter-circular motion) and—just before the joystick reaches far right—you have to release that punch button or else the game won’t register the move at all. See? Pretty much un-doable on keyboard, isn’t it? With proper hardware is Street Fighter a completele different experience. And one has to admire the ingenuine game design and programming—especially when considering the initial release date of August 1987. And though I’m not all that satisfied with the sounds, the graphics are pretty solid for the time as well, pretty much comparable to NinjaTurtles or Batman style. Unlike in the later Street Fighter installments, there are only two playble characters in the game: player one plays as Ryu and player two as Ken. There are four regions in total—plus a fifth unlockable one—where you can fight: Japan, US, UK, China and Thailand. Each region faces you with two fighters you have to defeat in order to win. Each battle has a unique background, stylized to the theme of the region where it takes place. Player controls their character with a 360° joystick and six or two pressure sensitive buttons, one for punch and the other one for performing a kick (in six button version, I presume, one row of three buttons serves for punching and the other row of three buttons for kicking, while each of the three buttons in both rows determines the strength of the attack; but since I’ve played the game only through emulation, where 32-bit MAME is supposed to use four buttons—yet only two of those seem to do anything at all, I can’t really confirm or deny it). The first Street Fighter cannot be really compared—both in terms of gameplay and complexity—with the later games in the series. Sure, it is the founding father of the whole franchise, but if it doesn’t get quite under your skin, if it quite doesn’t fit your taste, please, don’t give up on the whole series as a result. I was there, I was giving up on the franchise, but then I’ve tried EX2... and oh my…! God knows I liked it!