Throughout the history of videogames, various consoles have served as one of the many pulpits for the gospel of film marketing. Videogame adaptations of movies are a strange breed. Motion Pixels will examine one such game each week, dissecting the basic gameplay, the graphics, and how faithfully it adapts the film on which it is based. Some are good, some are awful, and some are just down right weird, but they are all interesting experiments. We will also take a look at other cogs in a given film’s marketing machine. Grab some popcorn and a joystick and let the games begin!
Game/Movie: Street Fighter The Movie: The Game
System: Sega Saturn
Developer: Acclaim/Capcom
Year of Release: 1995
Trying to describe to people the concept behind Motion Pixels nets one of two results. The worst-case scenario is that the person hears me utter the word “videogame” and proceeds to feign interest with blank eyes while a chorus of white noise overtakes their brain. The second, and only slightly less favorable, reaction is that they rearrange my words into something that seems more rational…if equally painful. They assume I review movies based on videogames. They begin to shower me with recommendations tinted with ironic enthusiasm. “Have you seen Mortal Kombat?” “Have you seen Super Mario Brothers?”
This would be frustrating if not for the simple, horrifying fact that I have an unhealthy affinity for bad videogame movies. With very few exceptions, videogame movies are categorically awful. My enjoyment of these redheaded stepchildren of Hollywood is directly proportional to the amount of time I spent as a kid playing the game on which they were based. One of my absolute favorite bad videogame movies has to therefore be 1994’s Street Fighter. So when I heard Sega Saturn had released Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game, I dropped everything and ran to eBay.
My friends, we are approaching infinite marketing regression. Movie-licensed games exist to stretch the profitability of the film on which they are based much as movies based on videogames are created to stretch the profitability of said game. But when a videogame is created to further market a movie, which was itself an attempt to market a videogame, one wonders where the merchandising continuum ends; or if it does. So, at the risk of collapsing under the weight of our own paradox like Ron Silver in Timecop, we go full meta and examine Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game
…The Lunchbox.
Graphics and Mechanics
Remember how bad the movie was? How wretched and unbelievably inept it was? The game refuses to be outshined in this arena. If you saw the title of this week’s entry and thought to yourself, “why wouldn’t you just play any of the innumerable preexisting Street Fighter games,” you have already won. Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game: The Fruit Snack wastes little time in demonstrating the uselessness of its existence.
To begin, yes, it is on the Sega Saturn and, yes, technically this is the most advanced system we’ve heretofore discussed. But what that ultimately amounts to in this game is a clearer, more detailed presentation of its shortcomings. The game uses digitized versions of the actors from the film and simply recreates the general fighting styles and battlegrounds of some of the earlier games into which these flimsy substitutions are forced. Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game: The TV Series is incredibly proud of this technological advancement and slaps boastful declarations of its greatness all over the box.
But the overall effect is flat, unimpressive, and frankly quite chintzy. It looks as if your little sister made paper dolls of your favorite characters from the film adaptation, difficult to choose favorites as it might have been, out of production stills and set them against cheaply constructed dioramas of the film’s sets. So whereas the SNES was able to create depth and dimension with technically less sophisticated graphics in games like Toy Story, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game: The Workout Video is like watching a poorly constructed Youtube video of what someone thought a Street Fighter movie game might look like.
Speaking of Youtube, let’s talk about those interstitial cutaways. Every so often, the Sega Saturn, like Jean-Claude Van Damme, feels the need to flex its rippling muscles…technologically speaking. They do so by intermittently halting the gameplay so they may present entire scenes from the movie played out in low-res wonder right before your eyes.
As a kid, I never had a Sega Saturn and I’m sure if my videogame system had suddenly starting showing me a real live movie it would have knocked me right out of my BK Ratch Techs. But somehow in retrospect it just seems like smoke and mirrors to distract the player from the fact that the game itself is garbage.
As to mechanics, I will freely admit that I am a confirmed button-masher. Many would argue, with no small amount of validity, that this is the worst method by which to approach a fighting game and that it does little to foster full appreciation. But a lifetime of having my ass handed to me by kids much younger than me while I struggled to remember the intricate button combinations required to execute a signature move have made me a bit frantic with my controls. From a controller standpoint, this doesn’t prove to be much of a problem with the Saturn as there are two triggers and six whole buttons on which to wail. What is annoying with Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game: The Comic Book however is that if the combatants on screen attempt too many moves, the sound often drops out. It’s as if the game is struggling to keep up with the fight on screen, which seems counterintuitive…for a fighting game.
Playing Before Instructions
The game has essentially four modes of play. The first three are basic fighting modes that require little to no instruction. The versus mode is the most familiar and feels very arcade-y. While there was in fact a Street Fighter: The Movie arcade game, the Sega Saturn version wasn’t merely a port; changes occurred in both character rosters and special moves. Then there’s the street battle mode wherein your chosen player fights each of the other players in the game one by one; more of a single-player scenario. And even lonelier still is the trial mode wherein the gamer’s ultimate goal is to beat his own high score; thrilling if sad! Needless to say, after about five minutes of any of these modes, you’ll just wish you were playing any of the original Street Fighter games instead of Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game: The Ride: The Tee-Shirt.
Mission Accomplished?
And then there’s the final mode: story mode. As Colonel Guile, you follow a series of loosely constructed plot points that basically just set up your various fights. Your ultimate goal is to reach General Bison before time runs out and flatten him. Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game: The Breakfast Cereal is by no means the first fighting game to offer a story mode, but it is one of the goofiest.
The story mode operates like a “choose your own adventure” novel. Cammy barks out instructions and info over your video communicator and gives you several couplets of choices. Do you want to go to the harbor or head into town? The decision you make determines your next opponent. There really is no right or wrong choice, but the correct array of choices creates a path of least resistance to Bison. So, much like the first level of Krull for Atari, the game preaches the many merits of laziness.
Being that this is a game based on a movie based on an already classic fighting game franchise, I totally understand the impetus to inject some new element to justify its existence. The problem is that the game manages to employ an even more flawed system of logic than its cinematic counterpart; no small achievement. The text that flashes on the screen to explain why characters that had no reason to fight in the movie are now locked in combat suggests a world wherein everyone has a bad case of roid rage and all introductions are made with a tightly closed fist. My favorite was Balrog’s warning about Chun-Li’s conversational proclivities…
I am ashamed to say I was unable to beat Bison at the end, but getting there was half the fun. Well no, turning off the game was half the fun.
Faithful to its Source?
This section is actually twofold this time around as this game is beholden to two different sources. In regard to the movie, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game: The Audio Book is as faithful as it could possibly be. Almost all of the actors from the film reprise their roles in digitized form for the game. Sadly, Raul Julia was so sick just after the filming of the movie that his stunt double was used as the basis for Bison’s sprite; Via con Dios, Raul. Locations from the film are also featured as fighting arenas in the game; listen for the shamelessly stolen Star Trek sound effect in the Blanka stage.
Furthermore the game’s main theme is a section of the Street Fighter score; striving to make it somehow memorable by cramming it into your ear lobes ad infinitum. And again, we do get to see entire scenes from the movie in the game which is about as lazily faithful as you can get.
The plot of the film involves Bison giving the A.N. (a pseudo United Nations entity with its own military for some reason) a deadline to pay his ransom or he will kill several hostages. To incorporate this into the game, the story mode features a countdown and expects you to reach Bison before it reaches zero. All this ticking clock element succeeds in doing is further encouraging the gamer to opt for as few fights as possible. Because that’s what we all love in our story-based fighting games: someone shoving us through it as quickly as possible. Well, given the overall quality of this particular game, perhaps the developers were smart to rush us to the end.
But of course, the game must diverge from the film in order to not limit the pairings of combatants. If the only fights available to the player were those featured in the film, this game would be even more tedious than it already is. But the one change that still boggles me is the fact that your very first fight is with Bison.
The movie is not bookended with a Bison/Guile showdown, so why is the game? And if you beat Bison in your first meeting, doesn’t that effectively kill the rest of the story mode? Luckily, the game ensures your failure by making your health bar a leaky sieve and making Bison’s a glacier that moves only a millimeter per year.
But how faithful is it to the Street Fighter games? As with the movie, this game is based on an amalgam of almost all of the games that existed up to 1994. This is why characters like Dee Jay and Cammy make an appearance. As mentioned, the game features digitized versions of the actors from the film. Basically the actors were called in and recorded as they imitated the victory poses and signature movies of the characters in the game. And while it looks very similar in some instances…
There appear to be some unfortunate liberties taken as well…
The fact is that there’s something just plain off about seeing real people, people who are limited, by and large, to actual physics when fighting in the film are suddenly dropped into the game and given license to execute the same moves as our beloved fantasy characters of the game. Also, what the hell is up with Blanka? I know the movie had already completely shit the bed bringing that character to life, but he looks even worse in the subsequent game adaptation. He resembles a short, slightly-spray-tanned Shaun White. Or, perhaps more accurately, exactly like Carrot Top.
Overall the thing most lacking from this game is any of the original Street Fighter music. If we are going to be forced to fight within levels that are either exact duplicates of the film’s locales...
...or poorly reconstructed game levels desperately repopulated with elements from the film, can’t we at least have the original music? I mean honestly, would it have killed them to put in the Guile theme? It goes with everything!
Final Thoughts
I’ve tried approaching this game from every angle; divorcing myself from either of its source materials. But I can simply not glean from it anything worthwhile. Even as an admitted fan of the film, I was monumentally disappointed. Not even the promise of unlocking a music video from the film’s soundtrack could compel me to make more than a dozen attempts to defeat Bison.
Licensed to Sell
The one facet of the film’s merchandising we haven’t talked about is Street Fighter: The Movie: The Toys. Below is a combo pack that offers you a Guile that looks nothing like JCVD and is as awkwardly posed as he was in the game as well as a Bison who appears to be giving a friendly wave. I wonder how many other Van Damme films earned their own line of action figures. I bet the Sudden Death Hockey Attack figure is amazing!
PREVIOUS MOTION PIXELS
