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Fighting Street (TurboGrafx-16 CD) Reviews:
Fighting Street is so bad that it's hard to believe it's actually related to the stellar Street Fighter II series. The game is good as a historical showpiece; you can pull it out and proclaim to your friends, "This is where it all started!" But as an actual game, it's miserable.

As one of the first one-on-one fighting games, Fighting Street set the standard for awful game controls. In theory, the amount of time you hold down an attack button determines the corresponding attack's strength. This is counterintuitive way to control fighting game characters, as every second you spend holding down a button is a second you can't attack. In practice, it really doesn't matter since hold-down length doesn't really determine attack strength. If you press an attack button something may or may not happen, and attack strength seems completely random. Pulling off consistent attacks is difficult, but pulling off your character's special techniques is impossible. If one does appear, it'll be by pure chance.

Even when you're able to pull off an attack, the game's terrible collision detection means that it may or may not actually hit. And even if you do hit, you'll only scrape off a little bit of your opponents health. Your big guns are your special techniques, and since you can't perform them with any sort of consistency, you're basically screwed. The damage differential between special techniques and regular techniques is disturbingly harsh. If you manage to advance to the game's final stage, you could scratch at the boss all day only to be wiped out with two specials since the CPU doesn't have to deal with shoddy controls.

The background graphics have a decent amount of detail to them, and some are drawn fairly well. One stage in particular uses the simple but effective technique of a vanishing point to give you the impression that you're looking into a street instead of a flat background picture. The backgrounds are the best part of the visuals, though. The game's use of color ranges from mediocre to truly poor. Most of the stages and virtually all the characters look bland, like they've been drenched in bleach. The characters are drawn with little more than the minimum amount of detail necessary to make them look like humans. They're also sloppily animated; most movements look jerky and stilted, while others look uneven because of poor transitional poses.

The game's sound effects are a real mess. Regular sound effects are of poor quality, and barely manage to synch up with their visual cues. But they seem great when compared with the completely unacceptable voice clips. They're garbled so badly that only a very few of them are intelligible at all. The music has problems of its own. The songs are harshly distorted and aren't particularly well written in the first place.

Fighting Street is useful for three purposes. Historians can keep the game for its historical significance as the precursor of Street Fighter II. Developers can use it as an example of what not to do. And everyone else can use it as a coaster. Kyle Knight, All Game Guide

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