Get ready to punch, kick and battle your way across the galaxy with Capcom’s Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight! The year is 2010 and a strange substance is transforming ordinary people into strange supernaturally powerful creatures
Created by Ken and his fellow scientist/friend Troy, the substance affects various radical changes on its victims. It’s a sort of basic “sci-fi plot device that makes crazy stuff happen for no rhyme or reason” type of game.
The game doesn’t pull any punches from the start, immediately throwing Ken into a dystopian version of New York City (complete with a damaged and deformed Statue of Liberty in the background) battling a giant airborne scorpion monster. Subsequent levels lead to predominantly boss battles with an array of cool designs and varying difficulties. Surprisingly enough, the first boss fight is among the more difficult battles Ken faces on the first planet. There are several more planets that take Ken across various landscapes in a mix of skirmishes and the occasional scrolling adventure.
Graphics provide an amazing demonstration of what the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System can do. The backgrounds and environments are detailed with each invoking the environment of each planet in interesting ways. Planet one, a dystopian version of Earth, takes Ken through Manhattan into a bar (complete with a background pinball machine), across destroyed city streets and into a power plant to face off against an electricity-wielding mutant. What follows is a nicely rendered cut scene advancing the story. Planet two takes the action to a plant world. And it kind of just gets crazier from there.
It’s worth a playthrough just to see what zaniness awaits. Although the graphics and sound are pretty good (it’s Capcom, you know!) the game’s controls have a bit of a learning curve.
It can also be incredibly difficult to the point of frustration at times, so learning the controls and practicing is really the only way to go for this title.
Final thoughts …
Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight is one of those games you either love or hate. Some will love it for its challenge, cool boss fights and unique locales. Some will dislike it for its extreme difficulty, but no matter how you slice it, this game is a fun diversion among many other NES titles.
This 1990 NES game came along about halfway through the system’s respectable life cycle and was only shoehorned into the Street Fighter franchise by way of localization (it had different characters in Japan, a la Super Mario Bros. 2) and some savvy marketing.
Where to play the game today …
If you want to play Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight today, you’ll need an original NES cartridge of the game and a NES console or compatible alternative hardware, a Nintendo 3DS with the game already purchased because the eShop is now shut down, or an emulator of questionable legality …
