The Final Word game review

Street Fighter Alpha -- Capcom

The world has never witnessed such a powerful collection of intense, brutal fighters until now. Capcom's Street Fighter Alpha for the PlayStation features twelve classic characters from the Street Fighter story line, each with new special attacks and super combos. Play in Arcade or Versus mode or choose to practice your skills in the all new training mode for perfection of your fiercest moves.

Ferrari Man
Capcom has come back with yet another Street Fighter re-incarnation. Alpha is the best SFII since SFIITurbo, but is a tired theme. The graphics are cartoony and smooth. The sound is clean, and appropriate. But any skilled SFII player can adapt to the few changed moves very quickly, and march right through the game. The AI engine seems to have gone through no major improvements, and the game just got old quick. The PlayStation version in particular suffers from constant CD loads which really distract from the action.

R.I.P.
This game was a real tough call for me. Graphically, this is more like the 2-D/cartoony style Darkstalkers game, although seemingly without the same amount of graphics depth. I must note though, that after playing for awhile, the lack of graphics depth bothered me less and less as I became more aware of the detailed character sprites (the background was still basically static though). All of the characters in this game are not only large (close to half the screen tall in height), but are composed of a large number of sprites, giving each of the characters a wide variety of expressions. The sound wasn't to bad in this game, although I think they should have beefed up the music more. Gameplay was decent, and I found the characters easy to control (I'm not to big on complicated fighters to begin with). In the end, I found myself actually enjoying the game... but only when playing it with a joystick controller. Gameplay with the standard PlayStation controller was a bear.

>>>>> 37.5/50 <<<<<		Ferrari Man	R.I.P.
Graphics		4.0	4.0
Sound		4.0	4.0
Gameplay/Control		4.0	4.5
Longevity/Playability		2.0	4.0
Overall		3.0	4.0
Total		17.0	20.5

(03/96)