Game Boy Color

Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams

Overall, Street Fighter Alpha stands alone as the best fighting game to ever hit the Game Boy. The gameplay is almost as solid as the arcade version, the animation is superimpressive, and most importantly, it's still a whole lot of fun.

You'll just have to imagine how annoyed and disappointed I was when I popped in two copies of Street Fighter Alpha into two systems, connected the link cable between them, and waited for the Vs. option to appear. Darn near had a fit right in my cubicle. The single player game is good, and really shows off Crawfish's Game Boy Color expertise, but the link cable omission makes me actually rethink how good a programming team Crawfish actually is. If you're going to tackle Street Fighter Alpha on the Game Boy Color, the first thing on people's minds is going to be "How's the two player?" Sadly, it's non-existent. I salute Crawfish and Capcom for excellently shoehorning an ambitious game into the Nintendo portable, but I just can't look the other way when the link cable is left out.

If you can live without the ability to link up, save feature, and sound problems should be able to thoroughly enjoy this title. There's a decent challenge level here and enough characters to keep any gamer occupied on a long road trip. While it looks incredible and plays even better, it's still hard not to think about what a few extra features could've done for this one.

The replay in the game lies entirely in the fun factor. There is nothing to unlock, the ending's only consist of the dialogue of the endings from the console versions (whereas GB's Street Fighter II had fully-rendered versions of the endings, animated and all.) and there isn't really much fun to the game anyway. There are three secret characters (M. Bison, Akuma and the master of Saikyo-Ryu, Dan Hibiki!), but they are unlockable through codes that can be entered on the character select screen. In short, you'd be better off picking up an NGPC game. Any NGPC game.