Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams (Game Boy Color) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

Описание: A playthrough of Capcom's 2000 2D fighting game for the Nintendo Game Boy Color, Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams.

This video shows two separate playthroughs, both at the default difficulty level. I first play through the arcade mode as Ken. The second game, beginning at 14:00, is played using Akuma. Akuma is only selectable, like in the other versions of the game, via a code entered on the character select screen.

The ambitious 8-bit Game Boy Color conversion of Street Fighter Alpha seemed like a ridiculous idea back in the day. After the underwhelming 1995 version of Street Fighter II on the Game Boy, I think a lot of people were right to be skeptical about how modern-ish fighter would fare on such weak hardware. But the one thing that Street Fighter Alpha had going for it was a different developer - one with a whole lot more talent than Sun L, who had done the original GB SF2, in addition to other... classics (err...) like Mega Man Soccer and Kamen Rider on the SNES.

This time Capcom signed a development contract with Crawfish Interactive, a new studio that showed a lot of potential with the few games that they had under their belt.

Good choice, Capcom. I still haven't forgiven you for what you allowed Micronics to do to your NES games. But this helped. A bit.

Crawfish, who also did miraculous things with their SFA3 port for the GBA, were no less impressive in their first showing for Capcom on the 8-bit handheld. Clearly, the Game Boy Color did not have the resources to perfectly reproduce the original arcade game, but then again, neither did the PlayStation. That then begs the question - how close does it come?

Far more than you'd likely expect, that's for sure. All of the characters are present from the original, and all of them retain a great many of the moves and combos that they had in the coin-op. The controls are extremely responsive, and the simplified button layout, which bases the strength of the attacks on how long the button is pressed (think World Heroes on the Neo Geo), allows surprisingly easy access to a wide range of moves.

The smooth and responsive gameplay, if I had to guess, is in large part a result of the choice to prioritize sprite animation over size and detail. This allows the game to speed along at a steady, solid framerate that provides it the means to retain a lot of the timing characteristics of the original. It feels surprisingly faithful to the source material - within reason, of course. It is a Game Boy Color, after all. The sprites are small and hugely simplified, but they are well animated and immediately identifiable. The music fares about the same as the graphics - it'll never fool anybody into thinking the Game Boy can do Q-Sound, but the simplified tunes are familiar and catchy. Just don't expect any speech or digital effects - the game was smashed onto a 1 megabyte ROM, and I imagine the lion's share of that spent on character animation.

I can honestly say I don't recall playing any other 8-bit fighting game that compares to the quality and playability of SFA. In my opinion, it even manages to rise above the bar set by Takara's GB Neo Geo conversions.

If you absolutely must play a 2D fighter on the Game Boy Color, you really ought to stop here first. It's far better than anyone ever had the right to expect on such limited hardware, and it's damn fun.

Recorded using LCD shaders in Retroarch
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video beyond the code entered to unlock Akuma as a selectable character.

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