Street Fighter Alpha 2

Decompression Chip

Together with Star Ocean and Tengai Makyō Zero, this was the only game for the SNES to include the S-DD1 chip. This chip allowed sprite data to be decompressed in real time, and is only one of the various chips that allowed SNES games to stay ahead in the 16-bit console market for a while. It was also one of the latest obstacles that hindered SNES emulation: before the chip was completely emulated, "graphic packs" with the uncompressed graphics were necessary in order to play the game.

PlayStation Omissions

Missing from the Playstation version of the game are the characters Evil Ryu, Classic Dhalsim and Classic Zangief. Plus the number of color palettes available for each character has been reduced to 2.

References

There are several in-jokes and messages hidden in the game, for instance on Ken's stage you can find lots of Capcom characters, among them you may find a Strider Hiryu holding a Teddy Bear. This was sort of a "get well soon" message left for a fellow Capcom member who worked under tremendous stress on a Neo-geo pocket version of Strider, and when that version was ultimately canned, had a nervous breakdown, and had to be hospitalized.

SNES Version

Despite an admirable effort, Capcom's port of Alpha 2 to the SNES took some serious sacrifices, namely in graphics (characters aren't as detailed, and frames were removed from animations) and sound. There was also a small but annoying load time (?!) at the start of each round, and even then the game was slow, even when the speed was cranked to its highest setting. Also, in another move in Nintendo's infamous censoring activities, the character 'Sodom' was renamed 'Katana', since 'Sodom' was too close the word 'Sodomy' (taken from an actual city in the Bible called Sodom, where people committed immoral sex acts). Even though Sodom's name (the character) is pronounced 'So-dum', not 'Saw-dum' (the place in the Bible).

Awards

• Electronic Gaming Monthly
  • December 1996 (Issue 89) - Game of the Month (Saturn version) (shared with Tomb Raider)
  • March 1997 (Issue 92) - Saturn Game of the Year runner-up + Arcade Game of the Year + Fighting Game of the Year runner-up (Saturn version) + Saturn Game of the Year runner-up (Readers' Choice) + Arcade Game of the Year (Readers' Choice)
  • November 1997 (Issue 100) - ranked #36 (Best 100 Games of All Time) (Saturn version)