MAMEmania: Street Fighter: The Movie

In this series retro game expert Zac Bentz picks his top ten MAME games. If you’re a casual gaming fanboy MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator and is a software emulator that allows you to play ancient arcade games on modern hardware.

Street Fighter: The Movie – 1995 – Capcom

For many a geeky gamer, the 1990’s were the ear of the fighter. You were either a Mortal Kombat fan or a Street Fighter supporter. There could be only one.

Both games spawned equally heinous films, but fanboy being fanboys, they have both gone on to find their respective cult followings. In 1995, Capcom released their game based on the film based on the game, appropriately titled Street Fighter: The Movie. The game replaced the usual cartoony character models with the real-world actors from the film. Such luminaries as Ming-Na, Kylis Minogue, Raul Julia and star Jean-Claude Van Damme were digitized and placed into the roles of fan favorites.

The game did it’s best to emulate the Mortal Kombat template, with similar move patterns and over-the-top blood and macho posing. There’s plenty of fire and strange dungeon environments full of spikes and people chained to the walls. It’s a far cry from the more family friendly Street Fighters games of years past, but Mortal Kombat was quickly setting the bar for all future fighting games, so Capcom had to do something.

It’s obvious that the game was just a simple cash-in. It’s flat and rather uninspired. The characters move a bit like re-animated cardboard cut-outs, and the music is bland in the extreme. The novelty of playing as real world “actors,” not to mention beef-cakes like Jean-Claude and models like Minogue is certainly appealing, but the silly fun wears thin quickly. The game play just doesn’t live up to the potential. It’s strange to say, but it lacks the sort of depth and discovery that Mortal Kombat has to offer.

Overall it’s a fun game for a few minutes, but once you play a couple of your favorite characters, the fun factor drops into a spike-filled pit full of screaming skulls.

Zac Bentz is a regular contributor to the Japanese culture blog Japanator, runs his own Japanese music review blog ZB’s A-Z of J-Music and plays crazy electro-rock in The Surfactants. He lives in Duluth, MN with his wife, pets and a closet full of adventure.