Review #503: Street Fighter Alpha(GBC)

 At least they didn't call it 'Street Fighter Color'.

I love it when Ken gets top-billing. He is my favorite Street Fighter character after all.

 Street Fighter Alpha and X-Men: Mutant Academy on the Gameboy Color have two things in common: They were both developed by Crawfish Interactive and they were both games I wished to own. However, while Mutant Academy was a bit of a trainwreck, Street Fighter Alpha is actually... rather good, for what it is.

 The good news is that the entire character roster has been preserved: Ken, Ryu, Chun-Li, Charlie, Rose, Sagat, Adon, Birdie, Guy, Sodom and the secret characters Dan, Akuma and Bison all are here and accounted for, with all their special and super moves. The bad news is that the game is Single Player only, and there're only two modes: Arcade Ladder and Training. Would it have been nice to have Multiplayer and other fluff like Survival? Yes, but does a Gameboy Color port really need them?

Considering it's a Gameboy Color game... it looks pretty spiffy and the animation is very smooth.

 X-Men: Mutant Academy's controls sucked, they were stiff and unresponsive. Well, being limited to two buttons and being developed by the same developer means that the game pretty much follows suit, depending on how you press the button, a light or a hard tap, changes your punches and kicks into their weak and strong versions. It doesn't work very well, but it's probably the only way they could make it work on the Gameboy Color. On the plus side, while normal attacks are still a bit cumbersome, the game registers inputs much more precisely, it's easy to perform Shoryukens and Hadokens. That said, while I could pull off Charlie's Sonic Boom with no problem, I couldn't manage to get the Sonic Kick for the life of me.

 Street Fighter Alpha con the Gameboy Color is a surprisingly fun game. You can't expect to have the same experience that you would on a home console, but it's rather fun for what it is and what it can do with the hardware it's limited to. The lack of multiplayer doesn't really hurt, since there's little in the way of depth that would make you want to become a competitive Street Fighter Alpha Color gamer.
 5.0 out of 10