Usability of Street Fighter 2 for DOS
This week I will be talking about the (lack of) usability in Street Fighter 2 for DOS. The game can be played here, if you want to see it for yourself:
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Street_Fighter_II_1992
First of all, let's talk about the sound. The background music is terrible. If you were expecting the delightful sounds of the arcade game, you won't find them here. The game only uses two different background music tracks for the entire game during actual gameplay. One plays in round 1 and the other plays in round 2. If you die and lose a match, when you return to the character select screen, the music from round 2 bleeds onto the title screen, a result of some lazy programming to not tell the music to stop after the match ends. PCGamer does the best job of describing the sound: "There’s the music, which sounds like a doomed robot armpit farting the funeral march on a sinking cruise vessel".
Source:
http://www.pcgamer.com/the-worst-pc-ports-ever/
(Page 7 of 12)
This version also has loading screens that are long and very noticeable. The game suffers from heavy lag. This makes the game virtually unplayable as it is supposed to be a fast-paced fighting game. It also makes it impossible to get a perfect on the bonus stage with the falling barrels because the timer ticks down so fast that you only get to hit about 6 barrels before you run out of time. The game is also horribly unbalanced due to the fact that the CPU always moves faster than you, even Zangief, who is known to be one of the slowest moving characters in the Street Fighter series. Also, the enemy does tons of damage and can easily stun you, making it extremely difficult to even land a single move on the opponent. Jumping mechanics are also crazy and you jump ridiculously high and backflips in the air are extremely laggy. The physics that the game uses for jumping makes you feel like your character is on the moon- the lag makes you fall very slowly, making you vulnerable to attacks. And by the way, this lag is part of the game, not a result of the emulator.
The worst part of the mechanics is the controls. There is literally one button used to attack- the spacebar. This completely destroys the fundamentals of every fighting game. There is no punch button or kick button. The developers had all those keys on the keyboard, so why did they only use the arrow keys and the space bar? I also noticed that the enter key does not pause the game but instead does the same thing as the spacebar- attack. Normally the attack button kicks. In order to punch, you have to rapidly press the spacebar. This makes it extremely difficult to punch as you will tend to accidentally kick and also makes it extremely difficult to fire a hadouken without a dedicated punch button. The only exception to this control scheme is the uppercut, which is the only punch I've found that doesn't require you to rapidly mash the spacebar.
Overall, if you bought this game expecting the experience of the arcade version on your pc, you were sorely mistaken. This port felt nothing like the original. The similarity between the two games is the graphics. The game is clearly not a fighting game as it lacks the fundamental controls of a punch button and a kick button. It doesn't even sound much like a fighting game. It's not a fighting game. It's a game that was made to break the spacebar on your keyboard and make you go deaf from its terrible soundtrack.
This game was posted on archive.org. You can read about them here:
https://archive.org/about/
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