While it feels like Street Fighter II has been released on every platform ever, that’s not true, as Capcom never blessed Nintendo’s doomed Virtual Boy with the classic fighter. That’s where fans come the rescue, as Hyper Fighting has introduced Street Fighter II to wildly outdated 3D.
Homebrew games have existed in the still-active Virtual Boy community for a while now, and someone finally took a shot at making Street Fighter II. The project has been floating around for a few years, but only recently came to fruition and into the hands of a few lucky collectors.
Planet Virtual Boy has been collecting details on everyone with copies:
“Apparently, complete-in-box copies of Mr. Anon’s and MK’s incredibly well-crafted homebrew game “Hyper Fighting” are now out there in the wild, as impressions of the game are starting to pop up here and there. At the time of writing, we have no further info from the team behind this, but it seems that the game won’t see a public release due to the obvious copyright dilemma. For now, we can only gaze in awe at the imagery lucky owners of the few existing copies share with the world.”
We’re not talking ROMs either. These are custom-printed cartridges. Vectrex Roli got one.
Only a few copies are out there, sadly, because actively selling Hyper Fighting could raise the attention of Capcom and bring the nifty fan project to a halt. Plenty of companies are fine to let fans mess around with their games, but the moment money becomes involved, it’s different.
This means only a select few Virtual Boy fans have access to playable Hyper Fighting cartridges, but they have been filming their experiences:
The game footage looks a little cleaner in this video, thankfully.
In a nutshell, it looks pretty good! I mean, as good as Street Fighter II can look on a Virtual Boy. It’s more impressive as a clever feat of engineering than something you’d want to spend much time playing, but as with Quake running on an oscilloscope, fans can pull of basically anything.
Comments
2 responses to “Street Fighter II Has Somehow Been Ported To Virtual Boy”
Oh damn, I remember seeing some test stuff of this ages ago but completely forgot about it. I think I need one 😛
Actually, I wonder if they’ve got multiplayer going on it. Then I might need two >.>
Best looking VB game ever. Astonishing!
BTW, why did they choose red instead of B&W for the virtual boy screens?
Simply because it was the cheapest.
Nintendo has always used the cheapest hardware available, same reason the Game Boy had their green LCDs and no backlight. When things succeed it means they made huge profits on hardware (gameboy, SNES, Wii etc.) but sometimes it bites them in the ass pretty heavy too.