World Warriors collecting mad money in this bundle
Let’s be frank and call Street Fighter Collection what it really is: A money grab of the finest order. Thankfully, it’s a good money grab for the time period it was released in but make no mistake that you’d have to be a hard-up Street Fighter devotee to grasp the inherent value of the contents from Capcom.
Street Fighter Collection features three games: Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold, Super Street Fighter II and Super Street Fighter II Turbo, two certified hits then and now and one that could have been left at home in comparison with the others.
Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold is a slightly more enhanced port of the custom combo classic, featuring Cammy as a secret character and the perennial second-best evil shotokan Evil Ryu. There isn’t much else different in this port, and Alpha 2 is what it is: a better version of Warrior’s Dreams. Take that for what it’s worth if it’s the deciding factor in purchasing.
The other side of the coin are the Super Street Fighter II games. Plain old New Challengers is here, and it’s instantly made irrelevant by including Super Turbo. Super Turbo is everything New Challengers hoped to be with super moves included, so the collection really didn’t need New Challengers. The only possible reason that both revisions were included in the collection is because it was a way to have the most recent Street Fighter II revisions in the latest generation at the time. Super Turbo wasn’t released for home consoles for obvious reasons — no one was spending $70 for another Street Fighter revision when New Challengers had just been released in 1993 for the dominant Super Nintendo. Capcom might have been foolish, but they weren’t trying to push their luck, either. Make no mistake, Super Turbo is the draw here, just by its existence alone.
Because this is a collection of already existing games, we’re not touching on the graphics, sights and sounds, because you’re already familiar with Street Fighter II and Street Fighter Alpha 2. None of that changed for these ports and that’s actually a good thing.
If you’re going to buy this collection, buy it because it’s arcade perfect for Super and Super Turbo. Sure, you can find other versions of these games these days and in faster, better formats, but this isn’t a bad collection if you remember what exactly they stood for: Accessible Super Street Fighter II revisions and an exercise in Capcom cash grab mechanics.