Street Fighter 2 Hyper Fighting-Xbox360-

Street fighter Hyper Fighting-Xbox360-

Review by Pete

How can you take a 15 year old game and make a far far worse game? I don’t know, but somehow developer Sensory Sweep managed to pulled it off. Street Fighter 2 Hyper Fighting for the Xbox360 may be the biggest disappointment for me in all of gaming history. Here is my story.

The year was 1993, and I had just woke up Christmas morning. Santa has brought a Super Nintendo for me and my brother Matt. We screamed toward the heavens in elated joy. Our faces reflected such indescribable joy, that only few will ever see anything like it. Among other presents was a game called “Street Fighter 2”. I was confused a bit because I had never heard of a Street Fighter 1. Anyway, we spent the afternoon plugging away hour after hour into Super Mario World.

As the Christmas vacation wore on, I decided to give Street Fighter 2 a try. Needless to say, it blew away my mind and my soul. The precise controls, the amazing characters, the depth of gameplay. I had never played anything like it! Soon, all the kids in the neighborhood started playing the 2 player versus mode competitively. There weren’t any tournaments or anything, but pretty much your reputation was directly linked in how good you were at Street Fighter 2.

I was a God among men I tell you. Or at least in my own mind I was. I could pull off hadookens on queue. I knew all the combos, and I could beat the single player mode with every character. It was the best of times.

Fast forward to 2005. Street Fighter 2 Hyper Fighting is announced for the Xbox 360 and it is to feature full online matchmaking with full leader board support. Can you imagine how insanely excited I was? Can you? For the next year, I follow very closely the progress of the game. Screen shots are released to build up some buzz, but I watch as the games release date is pushed back further and further. There is even talk that the game will not come out.

Finally, there is a firm release date set Aug 2006, and eventually the game is available for download! I was so excited. After all these years, I was going to relive the glory days. My Street Fighter skills would be put to use again online. Think of all the anonymous faceless opponents that I could crush! I downloaded the game the day it was released, I got the internet all working optimally for low lag, then I booted the game up.

Somehow the graphics were worse than the Super Nintendo; a number of the faces of the characters were stretched and didn’t look right, the sound effects were off and oft times distracting? The game was called Hyper Fighting, but there was not option to slow the game down. Even Street Fighter 2 Turbo back on the Super Nintendo had an option to choose the levels of turbo. And the contact areas weren’t the same. I understand that its a new game, but the contact areas were fuzzy. That and the computer was really really hard. Unbelievably hard. Maybe I was just out of practice I thought.

So I decide to go online and play some live opponents. During the first match I noticed something was horribly horribly wrong. There was this crazy lag, like the timing was off by a half second. I would jump into someone but my character would not kick when I told him to. I lost the match. Optimistically, I just reasoned that the other player was just lagging hardcore, so I queued up for another match. But the same thing, My character is lagging a half second to a whole second behind. This match I go up against E Honda, and all he does the whole match is the 100 hand slap attack where you mash the punch button. For the life of me I couldn’t get the timing right with the horrid lag and my opponent actually won. All he did was mash one button! What the fudge?

After doing some research, I found out that the developers Sensory Sweep were complete amateurs and did a terrible job on the netcode for the online modes. The date had been pushed back so many times because the game didn’t pass the very lenient “game quality requirement” that Xbox had instated. Basically they just did a terrible job on the game.

I sent angry hate mail to the developers at Sensory Sweep every week for months. I seriously did, and I’m still angry about how this game turned out. They should have scrapped the whole project. Luckily for Street Fighter 2 fans, 2 years later in 2008, Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix would be released for download on the Xbox 360 and PS3 and it would redeem the name of Street Fighter 2.

And because of all of this, I give Street Fighter 2 Hyper Fighting the lowest possible score here at allgamesplayed.com, a 1/5. Not only was it an all out terrible and broken game, it deceptively used the Street Fighter name to peddle itself to the unaware public. I hope you like it in hell Sensory sweep developers, because that is exactly where you are going. -pete review April 16