Street Fighter Alpha 2

This was a shame. I played a tonne of SFA2 on the Saturn back in the day - suffice to say it's the entry that got me into fighting games in the first place. I've still got it - and a working Saturn(!) - and of course there are multiple ways to play the arcade version anyway. I wanted to pick this up as a curiosity really. A relic of a bygone age of ports - but it's just too frustrating to get running properly on a modern Windows system. Disappointing - because it looks like it was a relatively well done port for the time (albeit from the PSX version). I just couldn't get it to run at a decent frame rate. Just stick to the 30th Anniversary Collection.

As strange as it might sound for a game released in 1998, Street Fighter Alpha 2 does not play well with older hardware. The first machine I installed it on was an older computer running Windows XP machine with Intel integrated graphics. I want to stress that that despite the machine's age, it actually exceeded the game's minimum system requirements by a significant margin. The game was almost completely unplayable, as it tended to crash whenever the screen faded to black. I thought installing a dedicated GPU would improve matters, but it actually made things worse--the game always crashed on the black screen right after launching. The good news is that the game seems to function reasonably well on Windows 8 and 8.1 machines. I was also finally able to get it running on the original machine's Linux partition (Lubuntu 15.04) by using WINE to mimic Windows 8. The trick there is to ignore the default GOG launcher and use WINE to launch the file ALPHA2.EXE directly. As for the game itself . . . Well, it's been almost 10 years since I last played any Street Fighter and it's hard for me to evaluate the gameplay when I'm so rusty. Ken seems to play as intended, for what that's worth. The game runs in 640x480--which I suppose is to be expected from an older game. The character art is heavily pixelated, but not bad otherwise. The backgrounds, unfortunately, look washed-out and dreary. I can't be certain, but I think that Street Fighter Alpha 3 on the GameBoy Advance may have actually been prettier than this. Finally, I have been playing with a Logitech F310 in Xinput mode. It works fairly well but does not recognize the Start button, so I use the Enter key instead.

I don't think it works well with modern Windows platforms.

It's just another Street Fighter with new characters and moves added so nothing ground breaking to report but it is a much desperately needed fighting game for a platform that is horribly lacking in Fighters. I never realized this ever existed for PC but glad to see GOG make it available.

Pros: PC port of a time-tested classic 2D fighting game. Modest hardware requirements. Controls auto-map to any Direct Input (logitech and most generic) USB gamepads.* Supports 2 player "Vs" mode. Cons: Framerate can get a tad choppy. Xinput (360) gamepads may require some tweaking.* 2 player "Vs" mode only works locally; no online component...yet. *Logitech's F series gamepads feature both Xinput and Direct Input via a switch on the bottom. F310, F510 and F710 are choice simply for their versatility.