SUPER BIOMAN 1 (MASTER SYSTEM)

C’mon, you must know it. It’s the famous catchphrase of one of gaming’s most enduring icons, a jolly red chap who lives in a cartoon world of brick platforms and turtle-stomping. Why not shout it along with me? Ready? “It’s-a me, Bioman!”

Super Bioman 1, no less; an unlicensed Korean Master System game from 1992 that was (perhaps) developer by a company called Hello Soft. Not to be mistaken for a tie-in with the Super Sentai series Choudenshi Bioman, Super Bioman 1 is the story of what appears to be a pudgy alien child in a red babygrow who must travel the land to save a princess. At least, I assume princess-rescuing is the goal, what with Bioman being a complete rip-off of Super Mario.

A rip-off of the all-time NES classic Super Mario Bros. 3, to be precise. This is abundantly clear when you look at Bioman’s map screen, an image that makes you wonder how awkward it must have been for Bioman’s developers to draw on the tracing paper they’d tacked to their TV screens.
It’s got all the elements you’ll be familiar with if you’ve ever played SMB3 (and if you haven’t, go and play it right now, I guarantee you’ll have more fun than reading this article). Numbered stages in a mostly linear progression, bonus areas like the mushroom houses and a castle at the end – all terribly familiar, even when viewed through the extremely bootleg lens of Bioman’s graphics. But will the gameplay adhere to the same Super Mario formula?

Well, yes, obviously. As interesting as it would have been if Bioman’s Mario map screen had lead into a blood-drenched survival horror or something, what we’ve got here is Super Mario but on the Master System and not as good. Bioman can jump, smash blocks with his head, bounce on enemies, collect coins and all that jazz. Of course, Bioman has its own unique quirks, and we’ll get to those in due course.

For now, just take a good look at this off-brand Koopa Trooper. I know it looks like some mad scientist grafted a plucked chicken head onto an army helmet, but this is what passes for Koopa Troopers in Bioman and you can jump on them and kick their abandoned shells around the stage as you’d expect. That said, every time I kicked a turtle shell in Bioman it immediately ricocheted and killed me. I’ll let you decide whether that was down to karmic punishment or Bioman not controlling as nimbly as Mario does.

And so it goes, all the sights of SMB3 recreated in a copyright-infringing way that I honestly find rather charming. Question mark blocks are replaced by “Q” blocks, the coins are dollars rather than the gold-based economy of the Mushroom Kingdom and super mushrooms make Bioman big and cheerful. It all reminds me of a pound-shop toy line, the kind where sure, The Lion King is a Disney movie but there’s nothing to say that there can’t be a different and legally distinct Little King Lion who sings songs about looking forward to becoming a regent with his friends Tumbaa and Pimon. And hey, if you’re going to rip something of it might as well be the best, right?

Thus the first stage ends just as a stage in SMB3 does, with Bioman leaping up to collect one of the random icons in the end-of-stage box. Collect three for a bonus, collect three matching icons for a bigger bonus. I reckon you could make an interesting psychological survey of the split between SMB3 players that patiently try to match the icons and those (like me) who just run towards the goal as fast as possible. Okay, maybe “interesting” is too strong a word.

Here’s stage two, where Bioman has turned purple. It’s because he’s collected a fire flower, you see, and it’s not like they could make him more red. So now he looks grape-flavoured. I’m still at a loss as to what Bioman is supposed to be, honestly. There’s something... familiar about him. He reminds me of some half-remembered mascot character, although that might just be down to the cutesy, chubby style of a lot of Asian mascot characters. I feel like he should be advertising nappies or baby formula, not stomping on turtles.

The third stage is a bit different, because it’s a boss battle! It’s supposed to be the equivalent of the “fort” stages in SMB3 where you fight the mid boss Boom-Boom, but without the stage that precedes the actual fight. Instead you’re thrown straight into battle with this almost indecipherable thing. I once forgot about a bag of potatoes at the back of a cupboard for a couple of months, and it’s nice to see that bag of potatoes went on to get a job in the entertainment business.
With the power to throw fireballs from Bioman’s hands, I went into the battle feeling confident. Just waltz in, sling a few projectiles, claim the easy victory, bask in the cheers of the crowd and so forth. Except you can’t use fireballs in the boss battles. It’s not even that they don’t damage the enemy, either – you simply can’t throw fireballs at all. Let’s put it down to performance anxiety, and resort to jumping on the boss’ head. If that is a head.

Now we’re back to the regular stages, and you might have noticed a few things. One is that all the stages look the same, and yes, apart from the boss battles they all take place in this strange twilight version of the Mushroom Kingdom, where the only light that reaches the ground is the baleful glow of a distant nebula. Again, it’s a look that I do like, but over the course of a whole game a bit more variety would have been nice.
Another thing is that, for a Master System game, the graphics look a bit... crap. On a technical level, I mean. I don’t know much about the Master System hardware, but I believe Bioman is running on an SG-1000 graphics mode. I’m also fairly sure that Bioman was ported from the MSX. There are Bioman games available on the MSX, and as an extra piece of evidence:

I’m pretty sure the Master System doesn’t have a space bar to press. That said, there was a keyboard for the SG-1000, although that definitely wasn’t the intended control scheme for this game.
This is one of Toad’s bonus game houses by the way, now staffed by one of Toad’s distant cousins from the rural backwaters of the Mushroom Kingdom - the kind of place where they keep things in the family, if you get my drift. It’s a slot machine with items as rewards, but the true reward of this screen is that the phrase “god speed you” reminded me to listen to some Guitar Wolf.

At the end of the world is, of course, the castle. Just like the fort there’s no actual stage here, just a boss battle. Bioman replaces Bowser’s Koopa Kids with a grumpy tomato, and it’s definitely a distinct downgrade. Neither of the characters look like they want to be here. I don’t particularly want to be here. The inevitable stomping has taken on the grim air of duty. The tomato offers little resistance as it waddles back and forth along the ground. It yearns for this to end beneath the heel of Bioman’s bootees. In the end, there is only silence.

Holy shit, a talking chair!
I was actually quite surprised that this first world isn’t all there is to the game, but the princess (told you there’d be a princess) isn’t here so there must be more to it. I’m hoping there aren’t eight worlds. Bioman is running out of steam already, it surely cannot sustain itself for another forty-odd stages.  But the talking chair’s unwavering believe in Bioman’s strength gives me the confidence to forge ahead, so let’s see what else the game has to offer.

Well would you look at that, it’s more of the same. I think we all saw this coming.
Now that I’ve cleared the first world, I suppose I should talk a bit about how Super Bioman 1 actually plays. In a word: ehh. Wait, that’s not a word, that’s the noise you make when someone asks you to hang out with people you don’t really know that well. It’s a perfectly suitable noise for describing Bioman, though.

The game works, just about, but it doesn’t work well. There’s a lot of sprite flickering, to the point that it can be difficult to spot enemies sometimes. Bioman himself moves in a fairly slippery manner, often moving a step further than you’d expect when letting go of the directional buttons. Probably the worst aspect of the game is that the left-to-right scrolling is often choppy and sluggish, and not being able to move smoothly from left to right is a real killer for what is essentially a Super Mario game. Weirdly, it never seems to be an issue when moving from right to left, presumably because the game isn’t loading in new sprites and thus slowing things down.

As well as technical deficiencies, Bioman also has some strange quirks in its design. Unlike the set items of Mario games, the contents of each question block are random, which means that if you’re unlucky you can potentially go a long time without finding any power-ups. Then there are changes to enemy behaviour that throw a spanner in the works because I (and pretty much everyone else) am so used to how Mario games work. For instance, in Mario games, if you stand on a pipe that has a Piranha Plant popping out if it, the enemy won’t jump up and bite you on the arse while you’re standing there. Not so in Bioman, and the non-official bitey flowers will keep chomping from right underneath you. Or there are the Boos, which normally won’t move towards Mario while he’s looking at them – but in Bioman the ghosts have overcome their shyness and will move, seemingly at random, whenever they goddamn feel like. Perhaps the most baffling feature is that sometimes the corpses of stomped enemies can hurt you. That’s bad enough, but it gets worse: sometimes harmful enemy corpses will fall out of question boxes, resulting in almost unavoidable death.

If you ever lose sight of what makes the NES Mario games such genre-defining classics, I suggest you go and play a sub-par Mario bootleg. Then you’ll understand. It’s not like Bioman is awful, especially for a pirate game, but there’s enough wonkiness and technical problems to stop it being all that much fun. I do find the graphics quite pleasant in their simplicity and the music – recreations of famous SMB3 tracks, naturally – is quite good.

But by the time I’d reached the end of the second – and as it turns out, final – world, Super Bioman 1 had more than worn out its welcome. More variety would have gone a long way towards keeping things interesting, even if it was just some stages that didn’t take place during an eternal eclipse, but what you get is the same backgrounds, the same simple action and the exact same boss battle before the game limps unconvincingly over the finish line.

I’m glad I got to the ending, though. It’s hard not to be charmed by these thoroughly wrong versions of Mario and Peach. It was kind of the royal jeweller to find such a minuscule crown that wouldn’t draw attention to not-Peach’s tiny, tiny head and hang on, was Bioman supposed to be Mario all along? Or is the plumber just taking all the plaudits for Bioman’s hard work? I say let him have the applause. Judging by the unfortunate shape of his body, iI don't think he's long for this world.
And that’s Super Bioman 1, a Super Mario game on the Master System. It’s certainly something. I’m not the biggest fan of the Alex Kidd games but if you want to stick with those, that’d probably be a good decision.

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DRAGON FIGHTER (NES)

Today’s article is about Dragon Fighter, a 1990 NES adventure by Natsume starring a main character who can transform into a… what? We’re doing the other Dragon Fighter? Well, that seems like an extremely bad idea but okay, here we go – it’s Dragon Fighter, a mid-nineties NES / Famicom fighting game cobbled together from stolen parts and published by a company called Flying Star. If you’re upset because you thought you were going to be reading about Natsume’s Dragon Fighter, then all I can say is I’m definitely about to be punished for misleading you.

Disclaimer: you don’t fight any dragons in this game. Actually, I suppose that’s not technically true, but you certainly don’t get to clobber a giant fire-breathing lizard or anything like that. What you do get on the title screen is a picture of a dragon that’s probably been ripped from a different game, a logo that’s definitely ripped from Street Fighter II and a filthy lie in the phrase “Difficulty: Normal.” There ain’t nothing normal about this game’s difficulty level.

So the first thing you’re going to notice about Dragon Fighter is the character roster. There’s a lot of familiar faces here, to say the least. We’ll meet each of them in turn, but for now I need to pick a character. I’m going to go with the chap at the top-left, for two reasons. The main one is that he’s at the top-left of the character select screen, and the other is that his name is Dragon Lee and, well, this game is called Dragon Fighter. It seems appropriate.

With no other story or set-up it’s straight into the battle once you pick your character, and here’s the big reveal: Dragon Lee isn’t Dragon Lee, he’s Fei Long from Street Fighter. I have no idea why they bothered to change his name. Did they think Capcom were going to look at this game and say “well, we were going to sue for blatant copyright infringement but that guy’s actually called Dragon Lee, sorry about the mistake, please continue”? It’s especially strange because I’m fighting against Terry. Terry Bogard from SNK’s King of Fighters / Fatal Fury games, specifically, and they didn’t bother changing his name.

So yeah, this is one of those bootleg fighting game – a wonky combat engine packed with characters lifted from other games, their sprites crudely redrawn to accommodate the NES’s lower graphical power. At least they made some effort to keep the characters’ special moves intact: as you can see above, Terry can perform his Burn Knuckle dashing punch, as well as his Rising Tackle, although there are no super moves and he’s missing his Power Wave projectile. For Dragon Lee’s part, well, I think of all the characters he might have come out the worst when the special moves were being handed out. He’s got his rising dragon kick thing that he had in the Street Fighter games, except it’s much more vertical now and therefore much less useful, and it also doesn’t set his leg on fire when he performs it which makes it much less cool. As for his other special move, the developers took his forward-and-hard-kick attack, which makes Fei Long perform two kicks while stepping forward, and converted into a weird dashing kick thing where he prances across the screen waving his legs like a ballet dancer performing on a stage covered in upturned drawing pins. It’s kinda weird.

As for the gameplay, at a basic level it’s just your standard one-on-one fighter. Hit the other guy more times than they hit you, best of three rounds, special moves are performed with the usual quarter-circle-and-button type controller inputs, no win quotes, no bonus rounds and nothing else that might make the game a bit more interesting. I put the years I’ve spent playing this type of game to good use by repeatedly kicking Terry in the toes once I’d managed to get him in the corner. He didn’t seem to have much of a response to that, so I kept kicking him in the toes over and over. Eventually it began to feel like a scientific study into just how many times you have to kick someone’s foot before they’re knocked unconscious. It felt like the answer was “about fifty thousand times, good lord this is taking forever.”

On to the next fight, a gruelling battle against Missingno except the infamous glitched Pokemon now has a sword. No, of course not, this random agglomeration of pixels and graphical errors is supposed to be Haohmaru from SNK’s Samurai Spirits games. Dragon Fighter offers a valuable lesson about the folly of trying to compress SNK’s huge, detailed fighting game sprites into a NES game without completely redrawing them like they did with Terry. A result of Haohmaru looking like sentient computer virus from nineties kid’s cartoon is that it’s difficult to tell what he’s doing. Knowing what your opponent is doing is pretty important in a fighting game, right?

Fortunately, this is less of a problem than it could have been because Haohmaru only does one thing anyway. He uses his dash-across-the-screen special move over and over again, a move that’s incredibly fast, does a lot of damage and hits multiple time so even if you manage to block it you’re still going to take a considerable amount of chip damage. Once again, my only recourse was to trap my opponent in the corner. This time I used Fei Long’s – sorry, Dragon Lee’s – charging kick special move as often as I could get the damned game to recognise my controller inputs, so about one out of every ten attempts.

It’s Mortal Kombat’s Sonya Blade next, adding a third visual style to Dragon Fighter’s character roster; after the “realistic” Dragon Lee and the more cartoony Terry, Sonya has a look that’s sort of a midpoint of the two. Presumably this is a result of the original game sprites that Flying Star cannibalised for Dragon Fighter being of wildly different visual styles to start with, what with Mortal Kombat having digitised sprites and all. This results in an ugly mish-mash of styles, where the characters are recognisable as their “inspirations” but that’s the best you can say about them.

Also, there’s some intense sprite flickering in this game, it’s like trying to play Street Fighter with your head jammed inside a bucket full of strobe lights.
But is the gameplay any good? Well, here’s something that’s illustrated by the screenshot above. In almost every 2D fighting game, if your opponent fires a projectile at you and you jump over it quickly enough, that gives you the chance to land a free blow on your opponent while they’re recovering from throwing the projectile, right? That is a basic, iron-clad concept in fighting games. However, that is not how things work in Dragon Fighter, because the CPU characters don’t have to recover from their attacks. They can simply do whatever they want, whenever they want, and jumping over a fireball is a sure-fire way to get hit by some anti-air special move with a ridiculously large hitbox, like Sonya’s extremely weird-looking move where she climbs into the air by pedalling an imaginary bicycle with holding her lower back.

Now it’s time to face Super Woman. I had a bit of trouble placing her, but thanks to the Bootleg Games Wiki I now know that she’s supposed to be Wonder Woman, having been ripped from the Megadrive fighting game Justice League Task Force. If you want to get deeply nerdy about it – and I assume you do, if you’re reading about bootleg NES fighting games – then you could pretend that this is Wonder Woman’s alternate-reality evil duplicate and Crime Syndicate of America member Superwoman. Either way, she loves throwing boomerangs at you and performing flying punches. It was around this time that I realised you can press B for kick or A for punch, but if you hold the button you do a more powerful punch or kick. This meant I suddenly had access to Dragon Lee’s jumping hard kick, a wide, spinning affair that must be murder on his hips and against which Superwoman seemingly had no defence. Holding the button down for more powerful attacks might not be the most elegant solution to the NES controller’s lack of buttons, but it’s still better than only having one strength of attack.

Next up is Mortal Kombat’s Liu Kang, and what is it about Mortal Kombat characters and invisible bicycles? Liu Kang wants to ride his bicycle, he wants to ride his bike, and he will – all over your face, draining your health with a near-constant barrage of flying kicks.
Here’s the thing about Dragon Fighter: fighting against the AI is hard. Extremely hard. Painfully, spirit-sappingly, miserably hard, so hard that it makes playing the game in single player almost entirely pointless. The sheer cheapness of this game’s AI cannot be overstated. They spam their special moves over and over again and are entirely invincible while doing so. They completely ignore any recovery times on said special moves. Unlike the player, they don’t have to struggle with muddy, inaccurate controller inputs so if you do manage to avoid one of their special moves they’ll just do another one immediately afterwards with perfect accuracy. The hitboxes on their attacks are all over the place, stretching a ridiculous distance from their bodies. You could put this down to their aura of fighting spirit extending from their attacks, if you were a fan of creating bullshit excuses for god-awful fighting games. Aside from Superwoman, every battle I fought in this hellish arena of death consisted of me save-stating every time I landed a blow and then loading it a thousand times as I made a slight error in position or timing as was consequently beaten to death in one combo. Did I try playing the game on Easy mode? Of course I did, but as far as I can tell there is absolutely no difference between the difficulty levels. In short, you’d have more fun using your forehead to hammer red-hot steel into a large spike and then inserting said spike into the bodily orifice of your choosing than you would playing Dragon Fighter on your own.

Okay, what else have we got? Well, here’s a mirror-match against Dragon Lee. Thank god he doesn’t have a projectile, and he seemed much more inclined to walk into my crouching punch than all the other characters. That meant I spent this entire fight punching myself in the crotch, which is an excellent metaphor for playing Dragon Fighter.
It’s kinda weird that they went with Fei Long, though, isn’t it? There’s only one Street Fighter character in the game and they went with Fei Long, nobody’s favourite Street Fighter character? Don’t get me wrong, I like Fei Long because sometimes it’s fun to play as Bruce Lee, but including him over Ryu or Chun Li is a baffling decision. Perhaps Flying Star were based in Hong Kong and they picked Fei Long as a local pride thing.

Now I’m fighting Kitana, again from Mortal Kombat. She appears to be preparing to throw a rock at Dragon Lee’s head and frankly I would welcome such a straightforward method of attack, but I assume it’s supposed to be a fan. At least she's not riding an invisible pedalo at me. There’s not much else to say about Kitana, really. She’s got the same “projectile and flying attack” moveset as most of the other characters. At least the stage you fight her on doesn’t look too bad. It’s certainly a lot easier on the eye than whatever the hell was going on with Liu Kang’s stage and its enormous golden demon head.

Now I must face Flash Man, so I’ll use the Metal Blade or the Crash Bombs and this fight should be a piece of cake. Okay, so it’s actually DC Comic’s speed-based superhero The Flash, which is a goddamn shame because I would much rather be fighting a Mega Man villain. If you’re going to steal character from other games, you might as well go the whole hog and have Super Mario versus the Ghost of Richard Nixon or something.
Anyway, the most notable thing about The Flash is that he isn’t any faster than the other characters. If he doesn’t have super-speed, The Flash is just a bloke in a red spandex jumpsuit, so it’s hard to get excited about kicking him in the head. Also, Flash Man has a projectile attack where he throws a lump of… something at you. I don’t know what it’s supposed to be. A chunk of the Speed Force? Relatedly, if you want to learn about The Flash, don’t try to read a wiki article about the “Speed Force” that acts as the source of his powers. Trust me, I’m trying to protect you from headaches and a general feeling of confusion.

We’re getting towards the end of the game now, and your penultimate opponent is Mortal Kombat’s thunder god and inconsistent-name-speller Rayden (or Raiden, if you like). In the original games he was played by Carlos Pesina, in the Mortal Kombat movie he was played by Christopher Lambert and in this game Rayden is portrayed by the pure, unadulterated concept of malicious spite. You know all the problems with the game’s AI that I mentioned earlier? Rayden has all of those. However, on top of that he also has a move that lets him teleport across the screen, which he can perform at will and with no set-up, making simply getting close enough to Rayden to hit him an agonisingly frustrating ordeal. Sounds pretty bad, yeah? It is, it’s very, very bad, but it gets worse because you know Rayden’s famous human torpedo move? The one where he flies across the screen with his arms outstretched, sort of like M. Bison’s Psycho Crusher? He can do that move too, and he can block while he’s doing it. Even in the murky, quarter-arsed world of bootleg NES games I have rarely come across such complete and utter bullshit.

Your final opponent is the mighty Fire Devil, and it’s a bloody good job I already knew that some of this game’s character are taken from Justice League Task Force because otherwise I’d have had no idea who this was. Turns out it’s Despero, one of the Martian Manhunter’s foes. Yeah, me neither. Apparently he has a magic third eye that gives him a load of mind-powers, but none of that is included in this game. He fights the same way as all the other characters: relentlessly, with constant special moves and projectiles that you have no way of countering without cheating. Oh, and Despero can taunt the player with a couple of different animations, just in case you’d reached this point without developing a complete loathing for the game.

However, the golden light of hope unexpectedly pierced the gloom, and the fight against the Fire Devil ended up being the easiest in the game. What happened was that I managed to hit the Fire Devil for a little damage while he was in the corner. Then I stood there and tapped kick for the minute or two it took for the round timer to run out. Unable to figure out a way to escape from Dragon Lee’s repeated light kicks and resolutely unwilling to take any damage, the Fire Devil crouched in the corner and blocked until I won by a time out. That’s brains over brawn, that is.

To my considerable shock, Dragon Fighter has an ending beyond the misspelled “congratulations” message I was expecting. You get a brief scene of each character performing their special moves, complete with the button commands you use to perform those moves. You might think that this is pretty useless considering you’ve already finished the game, but you’d be wrong. Because you’re shown it for completing the single-player mode, it might as well not even exist, which is a step down from useless.

The thing is, I’ve played fighting games, both legit and bootleg, that were worse than Dragon Fighter. The basic mechanics aren’t great but neither are they too awful, falling somewhere in the middle of the pirate fighting game spectrum in terms of speed and the responsiveness of the controls. Sure, the graphics are an ugly sludge of mismatched elements and sprite errors, but you could have ten minutes of fun playing it in two-player mode and the weird roster of characters is good for another ten minutes of entertainment. But then there’s that single player mode, which is so hatefully unfair and completely un-fun to play that it ruins the entire game. I’m getting angry just thinking about it. So, if you’re going to play Dragon Fighter, for the love of god make sure you do it two-player, or alternatively play a good fighting game. I hear those can be fun.

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STREET FIGHTER EX PLUS ALPHA (SNES)

By the mid-nineties videogaming's polygon revolution was in full swing, with companies falling over themselves to replace outdated 2D graphics with the latest Gourad-shaded, texture-mapped blocks of the future. Capcom were not immune to this, and in 1996 they teamed up with Arika to produce Street Fighter EX, the first game in the venerable fighting series to feature fully 3D models. It reviewed well, (and I'm rather fond of it,) but in my personal experience at the time most people seemed to think of it as something of a poor relation to the sprite-based Street Fighters. This combination of cutting-edge 3D graphics and perhaps a slightly luke-warm reception made Street Fighter EX the perfect candidate for bootleg SNES port, as long as you're from a different universe where the laws of logic run backwards. Unluckily for us, one enterprising group of pirates managed to break through into our reality and make this madman's dream a reality.

That's right, it's Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha - "Plus Alpha" originally referring to the enhanced Playstation port of Street Fighter EX - brought to the SNES, possibly by a company called DVS Electronic. Wisely, the developers decided not to include their name on the final product.

As you'd imagine, Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha: Baffling SNES Edition Turbo is pretty light on content, with only the standard arcade and versus modes available to choose from and a couple of options to fiddle with. There's an option to change the difficulty of your CPU opponents. I'm fairly certain it doesn't actually change anything.

Okay, that's a fairly faithful recreation of SFEXPA's painfully gaudy character select screen, or it least it would be if it wasn't missing half the characters. Despite being based on SFEX, this "port" only includes two of the fighters introduced in the SFEX series. One of them is Skullomania, thankfully, while the other is Hokuto. Already this is a worrying sign, because why bother porting SFEX if you're going to remove all the characters that made it unique instead of just making, I dunno, Street Fighter Zero 6: Rainbow New Challengers Edition or something? Well, the reason for the lack of SFEX characters will become clear once we get into the game. I'll be playing as Ryu for the purposes of this article. Yes, it was quite the emotional struggle not to pick my beloved Skullomania, but I chose Ryu for a reason. After twenty-five years of Street Fighter, I've spent more time moving Ryu around that I have moving my own physical body, so he offers a good baseline for deciding how accurate a copy of Street Fighter this game really is.

Ryu vs. Ken: the eternal struggle. Ryu has a finely-honed mastery of karate and the invincible soul of a true warrior on his side. Ken is a millionaire with a loving family. In a lot of ways, the winner here is already decided.
I'm sure you're all excited to see how the developers of this game managed to cram the polygonal graphics of the original into a SNES cart, and the simple answer is...

...they didn't. The main thing that set SFEX apart from its forebears is completely absent from this version, replaced with familiar 2D sprites. I suspect most of these sprites are based on sprites from the Street Fighter Alpha series - Ryu having a white headband is something of a giveaway - but they're definitely not straight rips of the Alpha graphics, either. Did someone sit down and edit the sprites or draw over them to produce these unconvincing, blobby clones? Probably. They did a bloody awful job, mind you. Just look at Ken's right knee. That's not where knees are in relation to the rest of the leg, not unless his femur is about three inches long.

So, I set to playing SFEXPA and immediately noticed some problems. For starters, there're only one button each for punch and kick. I tried to do a jumping kick but Ryu point-blank refused, jumping into Ken's Dragon Punch instead. Normally this would be a minor setback, but for some reason Ken's Dragon Punch - his regular, unadorned Dragon Punch - hit Ryu about fifteen times and drained nearly two-thirds of his health. I retaliated by throwing a fireball, and to the games credit it actually worked first-time. The ability to perform special moves with any degree of reliability was not something I expected to be included, so there's that. However, everything else about the fighting engine is utterly woeful, a heinous juddering mess of missing frames and unfathomable hit detection. I think in this case, showing is better than telling, so here you go:

I don't know which is my favourite part: when Ryu is tripped and briefly goes completely upside-down, or when Dragon Punches are being traded and the game just decides "fuck it" and pops the characters into random positions. They're both pretty wonderful.
After grappling with the controls for a while, particularly when it came to not pressing the shoulder buttons for heavy attacks because surprise, they don't do anything, I managed to avoid Ken's ridiculously lethal uppercuts long enough to win the fight. Naturally you don't get a victory screen or a win quote or anything like that, but to be fair those things weren't in the original SFEXPA either.

The next battle is against Ryu's deadliest foe: himself! Okay, second deadliest after "this game's shocking amount of input lag." Further proof that these graphics aren't just ripped straight from Street Fighter Alpha is offered here: in the SFEX games Ryu's usual Hurricane Kick is replaced by a jumping triple-kick move which you can see above, so the developers must have drawn new sprites (or at least heavily edited existing ones) for these new moves.

If I wrote a sentence describing every weird bug I ran across during this game, this article would end up longer than War and Peace but with considerably more anguished swearing, but some things cannot be allowed to pass without comment: things like my Ryu refusing to face his opponent while he performs his super Hurricane Kick. Shouting out "HE'S BEHIND YOU!" is something that really should be limited to children's pantomimes or watching horror movies while drunk. Oh, and yes, this game does include super moves, which was a surprise. You can see the super bar just below the health bar at the top of the screen, although how and why said bar fills up is a mystery to me and the CPU often seems to able to summon up a string of uninterrupted super combos one after the other. This is a problem, and the problem is exacerbated by blocking not working properly. You hold back to block as usual, but any multi-hit attack can and will ignore your defences whenever it bloody well feels like it. If Ryu catches you with his super Hurricane Kick and you're blocking, you'll take at least three or four hits out of the fifteen or so it throws out.

Next up is the strongest woman in the world: Chun Li, with her massive legs and teeny-tiny arms and her famous pink dress. Chun Li has reached such an advanced level of martial arts prowess that she is able to to become utterly intangible, turning her physical form on and off like a goddamn light switch.

See? This, amazingly, did not register as a hit despite Ryu's fist - which is bigger than Chun Li's entire head - definitely being in a position that should result in Chun Li losing some health and possibly filing criminal charges. The worst thing is that sometimes this would count as a hit, but SFEX's hitboxes are as ineffable and unknowable as the whims of the jerkiest of trickster gods. This serves to make the game extremely difficult, because while a human player can never truly comprehend what's going to happen from one moment to the next, the CPU always "knows" what's going on. Perform a super move and the computer will have the exact right move ready to counter it, for example, or it'll walk straight through one of your seemingly clean punches and smash you with a Spinning Bird Kick that wipes out half your health. Obviously this makes SFEX a very unfair game, and I was having real trouble getting past Chun Li until I hit upon the One True Strategy: stay as far away as possible, hit them with a few fireballs and wait for the time to run out. They're too dumb to come and get you most of the time, and these tactics are helped by the game clock starting at forty "seconds" rather than the usual ninety-nine - making matches so short that you'd struggle to defeat your opponent before the time ran out even if you could fight properly.

Even in a game as illegally cobbled together as this one, Guile here is looking particularly bootleg-y. I think that's because his sprite is actually based on Charlie / Nash (wait, I think his name is canonically "Charlie Nash" now, right?) from the Street Fighter Alpha series, as evidenced by his ploofier-than-usual trousers and orange vest. They've replaced Charlie's bizarre "Misfits' devilock wrapped around a wire coat hanger" haircut with Guile's marginally less bizarre "mighty desert plateau" 'do, but he still doesn't look all that much like Guile. The lack of Stars and Stripes tattoos on his biceps doesn't help, either.
After some painful research - that is, I played some more of this mess after I finished the arcade mode - I realised I could have made my life easier by playing as Guile. This is because projectile attacks were the main pillar of my combat strategy, and Guile doesn't have to charge up his Sonic Boom like he does in other, actually competent Street Fighter games. Nope, you just tap away, towards and punch to throw a Sonic Boom, which makes Guile feel a bit like a Mortal Kombat character.

Long-time VGJunk readers will know all about my affection for Skullomania, a character introduced into the Street Fighter universe via the first Street Fighter EX game - a tragic figure and balletic fighter who lost his mind after his boss forced him to dress as a skeleton for a work promotion and became a costumed... well, I'm not sure "champion of justice" is exactly correct so let's just call him a puncher of faces. I have long awaited another chance to play as Skullomania, but not like this.

Wow. Just... wow. It's so graceful I can hardly take my eyes off it, a statement which, sadly, is almost true. And here I though the digitised clowns in the background would be the most upsetting part of this fight.

It's Akuma. He's waving at me. Hello, Akuma! I hope you like fireballs.
It turns out Akuma does like fireballs, and he spent the entire fight throwing them at me, including a big super fireball and even his trademark air fireballs. Further testing indicates that his other trademark, the deadly Shun Goku Satsu super combo, is not included in the game. This is hardly surprising, as it would be difficult to input light punch, light punch, forward, light kick, heavy punch when there are only two buttons and they don't even work half the time.

I have no idea what M. Bison is trying to do here. I've been playing this game for so long that everything's started to blur into a dizzying mess of indecipherable bullshit. Bison appears to be performing a hyper-exaggerated "slipping" pose, as a cartoon character who's just trodden on a banana peel might. His poorly-drawn boots make his lower half look like he's wearing blue shorts, tights and black pumps, while a giant slug perches on his shoulder. For his part, Ryu is about to plant a Dragon Punch right into Bison's testicles, which is an apt metaphor for playing this game.

Seriously, I'm really struggling here. Between Sakura's pencil-thin thighs and the statue of a green jelly baby in the background, this SNES version of Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha feels like it pushing me to the edge of either madness or a catastrophic cerebral haemorrhage.

I know it's crude, but I have to ask: are you farting on Sakura, Ryu? Is that what's happening here? Does the answer lie in the fart of battle? Oh god, I'm so sorry. Do you see what this game has reduced me to? I don't think I've ever said "wait, what? What is going on?" so often in such a short span of time, apart from maybe the time I watched Twin Peaks while I had the flu and was dosed up on Night Nurse.

The final bout of the arcade mode is against Hokuto, one of the characters introduced in the Street Fighter EX series. She's a serious shrine maiden type who sometimes becomes a murderous berserker assassin, as you do. The graphics on her portrait picture are messed up, because of course they are.

Here we see why this Street Fighter EX game barely contains any Street Fighter EX characters: because they've never been represented in sprite form before, there was nothing for the developers to rip off and so adding in more EX characters would have taken a lot of extra effort. I think by now now we have a good idea as to the developer's feelings on "effort," and so we're left with a wonky Hokuto sprite with a waist so thin she couldn't possibly eat solid food and a colour scheme that only dogs should be allowed to look at.

Thus the arcade mode ends as it began, with me throwing fireballs and waiting for the clock to run out. Hokuto didn't stand much of a chance, mostly because she kept doing her "perform a counter attack if someone punches me" move and you can't counter-attack a fireball. I mean, I suppose you could but it's fire. Don't punch fire.

The ending sequence, in all it's majesty! I know you think it says "you are number one," but reflect on that for a moment. Don't you think it's more likely it means "you are no-one"? I'm not saying that this game is so bad that it has stripped away all sense of my identity and left me a hollow shell of a man, but that's just because I only played it for a few hours.

In case you didn't read this article and skipped to the end for my admittedly very important final judgement, let me be clear: Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha is an absolutely wretched experience, and one of the worst videogames I've played in a very long time. It gets every single facet of the fighting game experience wrong: blocking doesn't work, hitboxes come and go as they please, controlling your fighter is like trying to play Operation using a JCB and every character jerks around the screen though someone hollowed out their bones and replaced the marrow with angry wasps.

I like to try to say something positive about every game I play, but in this case I'm struggling to come up with anything. The music's pretty good, but that's because all the music is ripped straight from Street Fighter II. It's poorly compressed and doesn't sound quite right, but a bad version of Guile's theme is still Guile's theme. Erm, it has Skullomania in it? Apart from that, the only nice-ish thing I can say about this game is that I have to admire the sheer cheek of the developers. They were determined to cram Street Fighter EX into a SNES cart, and by god they sort-of managed it. Sure, the cramming process absolutely destroyed the game, but these noble fools dared to dream. I just wish their dreams had been in a medium I have no interest in. Street Fighter EX: The Ballroom Dance would have been fine. I could have comfortably ignored that. Unless it had Skullomania in it, of course.

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