Street
Fighter 2010 helpfully begins with a segment titled "A Little Background."
After
winning in the first Street Fighter championship, rich playboy/industrialist/movie
star Ken Masters and his closest friend Troy, whom nobody ever heard
of, became scientists. All was going well on their experimental 'stuff
that makes other stuff stronger' project, until THE KILLER showed up,
and reduced them to goo and made off with the 'cyboplasm.' In spite
of being left "a pile of jelly" and being 25 years out of
practice, Ken is then cyborged-up and shot into space (by someone who
may or may not be his seldom-seen wife Eliza) to do battle with THE
KILLER who thoughtfully left a very obvious trail of mutants in his
wake.
Even
the opening monologue smacks of half-assed cashing in. Street Fighter
wasn't even a big name when the game first came out. The connections
to its source are tenuous at best since the game is a sort of a crappy
attempt at a platformer.
In
the 25 years that passed since Street Fighter I, Ken's fighting ability
has logically developed into nothing but Hadokens of varying power in
various directions. And seeing the popularity of the blastathon Mavel
vs. Capcom, I'm really not suprised. Unfortunately, they lack in range
and power, as you'll find out while battling the various indistinct
enemies. The very first enemies you'll encounter, little rocket-powered
something or others, move slowly but deliberately in random directions.
And thanks to Ken's slowly recuperating central nervous system, these
stop-and-go flyers are pretty damn hard to dodge when you get backed
into a corner by crappy level design. You see, Ken seems to have obsessive-compulsive
dexterity- if he detects a pillar or something remotely climbable, he
climbs. This happens mostly when he tries to aim upwards. Hitting left
and right only makes him change sides of the pole.
Basically,
your goal in each level is to kill a given monster, steal its energy
to power your teleporter, and get zapped to the next world. The format
of a given level is a big open space, usually with a crappy background
stolen right out of the Total Recall NES game. It took me a while to
figure out that the recurring design element over the doors in the ruined
New York City first stage were actually neon signs with girls as opposed
to hi-tech bulkheads with exposed wiring. (Strike one: If you can present
a female figure in a manner that doesn't suggest a female at all to
a male mind... then I can't finish that sentence in a suitably
witty manner.) You hop around a post apocalyptic scene of some sort
or another, dodging a horde of slow moving, easy to kill enemies, while
trying to kill a boss monster. Kind of like the rainforest stage in
Zen: Intergalactic Ninja with terribly drawn robots trying to kill you
instead of you having to periodically save the flowers by hitting them
with a stick. And it makes about as much sense.
After
besting a giant scorpion-fly thing, Ken has a few seconds to find and
enter the next time portal to go to the next stage. I didn't play past
Planet One when I realized that if I kept playing, they'd only keep
throwing more levels at me. For you see, Street Fighter 2010, or what
I could stand to try of it, manages to incorporate every thing I loathe
about platformers in a platformer. There's even a Megaman boss battle-esque
fight with a random mutant wielding a grappling ball and chain. Avoiding
it as it swings from the ceiling is like trying to put in eyedrops on
a roller coaster. Then, in one of the most pointless stage ever, Ken
emerges from a portal in a dimension not of sight or sound, but of fiberglass
insulation as the next opens. Then you make him jump in then other portal.
To an autoscroll stage, complete with the Zigzag Part. Beautiful. You
know what I'm talking about, a random S-shaped junction you have to
negotiate tut suite or risk being crushed by the autoscroll.
Let's
face it, the whole idea was poison from the beginning. A futuristic
spinoff on Street Fighter, sans Ryu, who (to everyone who isn't American,)
is the hero. Future spinoffs almost never do well. The only one I can
really think of offhand was Batman Beyond, thanks to an interesting
art style and interesting storylines. Even the obligatory 'classic villain
comes back in spite of being in his 80s' episodes were at least made
different. But that's Batman. The contemporary setting is about as much
of an element to SF as the fighting itself. Mark of the Wolves was a
good "...in the FUTURE" scenario, then again it didn't involve
much cyberware, flying cars, and aliens.
Seriously.
It's 2003. Unless we make a lotta progress real fast, I doubt we'll
have personal teleporters, alien bars, cyboplasm, whatever the hell
that is, and the medical technology to reconstruct liquified human beings
in seven years. Of course, it's Nintendo; check your disbelief at the
door.
This
probably wasn't even intended as a real Street Fighter title. I'm guessing
Capcom just had some untitled finished game and decided to use the name
from a less-than-stellar arcade game... bam.