Pitching this idea was a mistake. I’d recently seen some talk online about Street Fighter 2 for the ZX Spectrum and I thought, “Wow! I never heard of that! It must be crazy! What a treat!” So, I wrote to the fine owners of this very website and asked if they’d be interested in me putting some words to screen. I mean, it’s a win-win situation, right? I earn a little extra walking around money and I get to play Street Fighter 2 and pretend it’s work. This was going to make my weekend, I just knew it. Because, after all, how bad could Street Fighter 2 for the ZX Spectrum really be?
Terrible. It turns out it can be so terrible. I wasted a weekend on this thing, and I swear to God, it made me want to die more than any humiliation I’ve been through. In middle school, two girls once pantsed me and laughed at my underwear. That memory is now easier to handle because I’ve experienced something far more painful: The Europe-only port of a classic arcade game for a British computer that had long been obsolete by the time this game came out. Street Fighter 2 for the ZX Spectrum might be the worst game I’ve ever played, and I’ve played a lot of bad games. I own a lot of bad games. They’re nothing compared to this.
Hell, emulating this nightmare was hard on its own. Because this port came out later in the ZX Spectrum’s lifespan, it uses some fancy technical tricks to still look awful (more on that in a second). Thus, it took a lot of experimenting with different emulators and settings to get the game to load at all. It came on a cassette tape, after all. I’m sure a British person twelve years older than me would’ve been able to get all the settings right away. Then, once the game did load, it took more experimenting to get it to stop freezing on the character select screen. But here’s the fun part: Everything runs so fucking slow no matter what that sometimes I wasn’t sure if the game was frozen or just taking a very long time to work. Sometimes it was! This is the most effort I’ve ever put into punishing myself.
Once you get the game to start and then run without crashing, oh baby, you’re in for an entire haunted amusement park of fun. First of all, the graphics are what I’d call fascinating. The ZX Spectrum port of Street Fighter 2 makes the Game Boy version look like fine art. Each stage in the game only uses a couple colors – all of which are also applied to the fighters themselves. And because some stages feature characters in the background doing nothing, it’s often hard to tell the difference between fighters and the rest of the level. Imagine if you were doing a coloring book and you only chose bright red and bright blue for everything. It’s like it was planned as a cruel prank by someone who hates colorblind people. My vision is now worse after playing this game. I need new glasses.
As a side note, I’ll say that – inexplicably – the best part of the game is the “Vs.” screen. Because the game can’t handle putting them side-by-side, we get full screen pixel art replicas of their character portrait. I’ll be honest… these go pretty hard and look awesome. If this was the entire game, I’d be a much happier man. Honestly, one of the few things that kept me going was enjoying this completely useless, non-playable part of the experience.
But terrible loading times and terrible graphics aside, the game itself is surprisingly good. No, I’m just kidding, it plays like shit. If there is a Hell, this would be the game available at a kiosk in the waiting room. Let’s start with what you already know: You choose a fighter. That fighter faces another fighter. You can move forward, back, jump, and block. Theoretically you can also duck, although I found that hard to do because the game responds to key presses with a relatively casual attitude. It’s like an intern who won’t get coffee because their dad is the CEO for a major company. Why are you even here if you’re not going to work? Sometimes when you press a button, it’ll do it. Sometimes not! That’s part of the fun: Will the game actually respond to button presses? The Brits sure do love their mysteries!
As for the actual fighting… good luck! The computer opponent knows all the moves and will just spam them again and again and again. You, however, are slightly more limited in your abilities, because this game was designed to destroy your self-esteem and willingness to try new things. Depending on which iteration of the computer you have, there’s either one attack button or two. At least, that’s what I can gather from menus or the world’s most confusing manual text. The two button configuration provides the advanced ability to kick and punch. The one button configuration still allows those moves, but you need to hold back or forward to change up what you’re doing. If that sounds confusing, it’s only because it really, really is!
As I said, the computer cheeses every single special move. When I finally got to Vega – and yes, I did actually put real time into this – he simply did the wall climb and jump again and again and again and again until I died. And, because of technical limitations, when he does said wall climb, your character may or may not be able to move. I’m not kidding. I don’t know why. I don’t know the reason. But sometimes I was only able to stand there and block and other times the game let me move in another direction. Fortunately, the game doesn’t even pretend there’s a button combination happening behind the scenes and allows Vega to instantly follow up with another power move.
After sucking for a while, I thought I’d choose Blanka and see if I could just rely on his electric attack to get some cheap victories. That’s the easiest one to do, right? Just keep tapping punch and you’ve got a nice little shell of lightning. Nope! No matter how much or at what rate I tapped punch, there was no electricity. It did randomly happen when I wasn’t entering the correct button combination, though! That’s something! The other fighter walked straight into it and was not hurt in the least. It was more or less character decoration.
That’s another wonderful element of this game: Whether or not you do damage is kind of random. In most versions of Street Fighter 2, throwing the other fighter delivers a nice little chunk of pain. Here, sometimes you chip a little off the life bar, but sometimes the character just bounces off the ground and stands back up without any change in their health. Even when a character is wide open and not blocking, a move that clearly hits the character might do absolutely zero damage.
After suffering loss after loss, I eventually chose Dhalsim because I figured his reach could counter-cheese the AI. And I was delighted to learn I was correct. In fact, I think Dhalsim’s regular punch does more damage than any other move in the game? I’m not joking. His regular punch takes off about one third of the other character’s lifebar. Zangief’s piledriver usually does massive damage, right? Here, the move is just him jumping straight up and down and it cuts off a tiny sliver of health. But that Dhalsim punch? Devastating. When I was lucky enough to connect it with an opponent – and the computer admitting it worked – I could win a match in seconds. Although, to be fair, the match timer also runs extremely slow so it might’ve been hours.
I can’t emphasize how bad this game plays. The Game Boy version at least delivered a good-college-try interpretation of the game. The Tiger Electronics versions at least had a consistent form of gameplay that understood pressing a button meant you wanted it to do what the button was designed for. Street Fighter 2 for the ZX Spectrum feels like it was made as a joke or as a last-place demake for an indie game competition. But this was sold in stores. I’m assuming real human beings bought it. Probably because, in my brief research, it appears that almost none of the ads for this version included screenshots. And before the internet, you just had to take a company’s word for it when they said something was “fun” or “enjoyable” or even “playable.”
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Street Fighter 2 for the ZX Spectrum is a wise deconstruction of the fighting genre, revealing the weakness in those who’d look to fictional martial artists for strength. Or maybe this was a port made for a narrow audience that loved having an old computer and hated having fun. Either way, the damage this game has done to my brain means this will possibly be the last thing I ever write. Goodbye, world. Goodbye, mother.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Victor Malevankin who was the champion of the Dhalsim punch meta back in ’92.
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