Street Fighter Alpha Anthology -- All in One.

Street Fighter Alpha Anthology is a collection of four arcade titles from Capcom. Well, depending on your point of view, it might be a collection of five titles, but I'm saying four. The game offers Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold, Street Fighter Alpha 3, and Super Gem Fighter Mini-Mix. In 1995 Capcom found interest in its numerous variations of Street Fighter 2 waning and it wasn't quite ready to count to three so it introduced the Alpha series. The Street Fighter Alpha series is known as Street Fighter Zero in Japan because the series is a prequel to Street Fighter and Street Fighter 2. The most easily noticeable change made to the series was in its new art style. The Street Fighter Alpha series featured a more stylized anime art style than the rest of the series to date. In the gameplay it offered up far more substantial changes. It introduced meters that would fill up from your use of normal and special moves. When the meters were full you could attempt to unleash a super move. They also added what they called alpha counters which allowed you to parry and auto-counter certain moves with a well timed button sequence. They also upped the story aspect of the game with final matches in the games taking place against character specific rivals instead of an end boss. With it being Capcom, that's either a good or bad thing depending on your opinion of Capcom's eternally cheesy sense of story. The super move meters and alpha counters added seriously needed depth to the Street Fighter series. The art design gave it a higher sense of style. The story added some level of character to the characters. Having another huge hit on their hands Capcom released the sequel in early 1996. It followed the same route as the updates to Street Fighter 2 before it in added some gameplay tweaks and the offering of a larger character roster. The substantial gameplay update came in the form of what's called a custom combo. Build up the meter just like before but when successfully launched you have a certain amount of time to just mash away and connect with as many hits as possible in trying to get the highest possible amount of hits in the combo. Now that Capcom had counted to two with the series it looked as if it would follow suite with the Street Fighter series and not be able to count to three with the release of Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold later in 1996. It featured a rebalancing of the characters and overall adjustments to the combat based on the recorded player data. The usual arcade fighter standard version update. Capcom would count to three with Street Fighter Alpha 3 in 1998. It offered a substantial update in allowing you to choose the mode of play between three selections they called ISMs. A-ISM allows you to play with one super combo. Essentially reverting the game back to Street Fighter Alpha. X-ISM allows for you to play the game with multiple super combos. Essentially allowing you to play the game with the most amount of depth offered in Street Fighter Alpha Gold. V-ISM allows for you to play the game using custom combos. Essentially allowing you to play the game as Street Fighter Alpha 2. It's a cool system that allows fans to play in their preferred modes. Street Fighter Alpha 3 also introduced a bunch of the Street Fighter 2 character holdouts to the Alpha series as well as introducing a few entirely new characters. Included in Street Fighter Alpha Anthology is Super Gem Fighter Mini-Mix which is otherwise known as Pocket Fighter. It was released in the arcades of Japan in 1997. It's a totally whacked out fighter played entirely for laughs. In it you use fighting moves to knock gems from your opponents. Gems allow you to build up your meters and allow for special and super moves. So while you're having to deal with fighting your enemy, you also need to contend with the collecting of the gems. The characters are all super-deformed to help with the comic nature. The moves are all insane and again are all for laughs. The game features characters from the Darkstalkers series of titles mixed in with those of Street Fighter. All of the games featured in this collection are the arcade versions for the first time. They are replicated perfectly. Every frame, every animation, every sound effect, and music track are all arcade perfect. If you have the Capcom Street Fighter arcade sticks for the PlayStation 2, then you truly have the arcade games at home. The controls actually work great with the standard PlayStation 2 Dual Shock 2 controller. There is an option to load the entire disc onto the PlayStation 2 HDD. This would allow for you to load the initial games faster. That's really the only place where there is any load time in the PlayStation 2s without HHDs. The loading up of the system interface and main menu are lightning fast. The loading of the selected game takes a few seconds varying of course between the faster Street Fighter Alpha and the longer Street Fighter Alpha 3. Once you're in the actual games themselves there is zero loading time. It's just like the arcade games for all of the titles represented. The emulation level is awesome. There are no extras like histories or art or movies or developer commentary as in other collections. Once you play the games to meet certain conditions you'll be able to unlock a mode that will allow you to essentially create any type of match against any character on the disc. It will also allow for a new ISM that allows you to play the Alpha series reverting back to Street Fighter 2. It's a one-stop option that allows you to create any type of match up you could possibly think up. That's a pretty decent bonus in my opinion. I'm impressed with Street Fighter Alpha Anthology and I'm giving it a 9.