Worst arcade conversion

[Juan F. Ramirez]

And what about Pole Position?

For me, compared to the original, the Spectrum version is bad, the car looks 'static', with no motion. However, it's payable.

[media]https://youtu.be/FFs1Xc82Q0U [/media]
[media]https://youtu.be/76omr-7FDXo [/media]

[5MinuteRetro]

And what about Pole Position?

For me, compared to the original, the Spectrum version is bad, the car looks 'static', with no motion. However, it's payable.

[media]https://youtu.be/FFs1Xc82Q0U [/media]
[media]https://youtu.be/76omr-7FDXo [/media]

I don't think I knew that PP had made it to the Spectrum. From the video it looks like a pretty reasonable stab at a conversion. At least, it has plenty of colour: it'd have been easy for the developer to go for a lazy monochrome job.

[Ralf]

Pole Position on Spectrum looks very all right with lots of colour.

It's an early game and I believe that in early Spectrum days people wanted to do colourful games. It could have colour clash but it had to be colourful. Only later developers went the monochrome path.

It plays worse, the movement feels slow and jerky unfortunately.

But generally it's no shame for me. No classic either. It's one of the games that was very popular on other other platforms (like River Raid or Boulderdash) but not on Speccy.

[Ralf]

Another disappointing conversion is Street Fighter 2.



Yes , there is also Street Fighter 1 and it's nothing special on Spectrum. But it was also nothing special on arcade so no feel of disappointment.

But Street Fighter 2 was an incredible hit and an important game in my life. Me and my mate spent many hours playing the PC version or hanging out at arcade saloons playing SF2 or watching other people playing.

And many years later I learnt that it existed on Spectrum too.

It looks good, actually the sprites are big and detailed.
But it plays terribly. It's very slow but it's not the worst thing.

The bad thing is that original SF2 was controlled with joystick and 6 buttons - light/medium/strong x hand/foot attack.

On Spectrum you have one attack button and you never know what it will do. There are frames drawn for special attacks but you never know how to make these attacks. So it plays like a completely random game.

A lost opportunity unfortunately

[PeteProdge]

There are frames drawn for special attacks but you never know how to make these attacks. So it plays like a completely random game.

This describes the arcade original, in my eyes. Never been a fan of Street Fighter 2 in any version.

[Ralf]

This describes the arcade original, in my eyes. Never been a fan of Street Fighter 2 in any version.

Well, I suppose you didn't play it much then.

SF2 was maybe the first beatemup which introduced combo attacks. Most later solo beatemups followed this path:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combo_(video_gaming)

You know - press left + right + up + middle punch to release some super powerful attack. Because just pressing the attack buttons leaves you with standard weak attack.

It was a great fun to discover these combos and it was actually a social thing as you could learn a lot by watching/talking to more experienced players in the arcade places.

Actually in SF2 instruction for Speccy these combos are described:
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinc ... hterII.txt

The problem is that they... don't work This instruction was written for Amiga/Atari ST I believe. And when you load the game, you can see the message that the game may differ from the manual.. So actually you don't have any working instruction. Very, very lame if you ask me.

As I am a fan of beatemups I even wanted to examine source code of SF2 for Speccy to discover how it actually works. Maybe one day...

[Wall_Axe]

it would be interesting to see sf2 for spectrum with tiny sprites, and the gameplay ported over by someone familiar with the disassembly of the arcade version.
if there is room you could sample ARRYOOOGENNN for dragon punch like the sampled speech the codemasters loved to use

[Bazza H]

Def Kung Fu master