Genre: 2d Fighter
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Acclaim

Imagine the "Super Street Fighter II Turbo" engine, with all of the sprites swapped out for digitized ones, ala "Mortal Kombat"-- and you have "Street Fighter: The Movie". The characters are huge on screen, and it's fun seeing novel twists on characters which are otherwise so familiar. The backgrounds are technically scenes from the film, but are kind of boring-- such as Chun-Li fighting in a morgue, or Ryu doing combat in a medical tent. The menu system is kind of drab, but serviceable. The attract cycle has a montage of clips from the film-- this reviewer had forgotten how campy the movie was!

The game opens with the cool Graeme Revell "Showdown in Shadaloo" theme from the film, setting the mood. The actual fights feature very DSP-sounding, yet oddly pre-recorded, compositions from Yoko Iwai-- then Shimomura-- and they are fairly decent; the best ones include the themes for Chun-Li, Cammy, and especially Sagat. It's funny hearing Jean-Claude Van Damme announce the character names, with his thick accent. The fight songs should have been recorded to be longer, as they fade out and repeat usually part-way through the second round! The fight sound effects and character move shouts are very high quality.

Street Fighter: The Movie plays phenomenally! It's quite literally "Super Turbo", so it's absolutely water tight. But it also has some cool twists and added moves: for example, pressing all three punches or kicks for special moves, when the super move bar is full, activates what later became known as "Ex" versions of the moves-- and some of them are quite effective. The AI and damage levels all feel very finely tuned, and in a lot of ways the cat-and-mouse matches actually feel more interesting than "Super Turbo's".

The game features a traditional arcade mode, a versus mode, a fun "choose your own adventure"-style "movie mode"-- where you play as Guile, with branching fight paths depending on which text option the player picks after each battle-- and, most interestingly, a fantastic survival mode. This latter-most mode ranks your play according to a variety of rubrics. Absolutely everything gets saved to SRAM-- high scores for every mode, which is really neat. The only downside are the loading times, which are not very optimized and sort of mess with the arcade mode's pacing. Like the fellow spin-off "Street Fighter EX" games, this is a fun alternative for fans of the series to throw into their game rotation.