Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from July, 2022

Street Fighter II: 30th anniversary

Thirty years ago Street Fighter II made the transition from arcade to living room on the Super NES. Although quickly eclipsed by its two successors, for one year it was the hotness. It would be hard to overstate how popular Street Fighter II was in the early 90's. Its predecessor was downright bad, but Street Fighter II invented the PVP fighting genre as we know it. Its roster of eight characters was a huge step-up from Street Fighter's two (Ken and Ryu, who returned for the sequel). The next iteration of the arcade game, Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, which hit arcades just as the SNES port arrived, let you play as the bosses as well, increasing the roster to twelve. A false rumor said a secret code would let you play them at home. While that wasn't true, there was a code (↓, R, ↑, L, Y, B) to let both players choose the same character for a mirror match. A prime strength of the game is how interesting each character is: the American airman Guile (think Top Gun); the

Stinger: More TwinBee

Stinger is the sequel to TwinBee , an early vertical shooter from Konami that was not released in the U.S. (until 2011). While the original TwinBee began life as an arcade game, this and several other TwinBee sequels were Famicom and Super Famicom games only. In Japan, Stinger was called Burning TwinBee: The Rescue of Dr. Cinnamon! I don't know what "Stinger" is supposed to mean. The main difference between TwinBee and Stinger is that the first, third, and seventh stages of the sequel are horizontal rather than vertical (no doubt due to the success of Gradius ). Like TwinBee, Stinger uses a strange power-up system: shooting clouds causes bells to appear. If you juggle these bells by shooting them, they change color every five bounces, with each color offering a different effect. On the vertical stages, you shoot bells with your normal attack (press B). On the horizontal stages, you use the A button to launch a heart-shaped projectile upward. This is used both to release a