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Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection Review

By Bryan Weatherall | June 3, 2018

The Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection is a collection of classic Street Fighter games, which used to be available to play in arcades and on classic gaming consoles in the 1990’s and late 1980’s. For those who are big fans of the Street Fighter series, they will take great joy in knowing they can now own them all in this one collection.

The Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection includes 12 classic Street Fighter games in total. These include:

Street Fighter
Street Fighter II
Street Fighter II: Champion Edition
Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting
Super Street Fighter II
Super Street Fighter II: Turbo
Street Fighter Alpha
Street Fighter Alpha 2
Street Fighter Alpha 3
Street Fighter III
Street Fighter III: 2nd Impact
Street Fighter III: Third Strike.

Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike are all available for both online and offline play. The rest of the games in the collection however are available for offline play only.

If anything this collection offers gamers this week a chance to take a little nostalgia trip and look back at some games which were once immensely popular and are still thought of quite fondly today. Quite a few games in this collection are ones that I remember seeing around the place when I was much younger as Street Fighter was one of the most well known gaming franchises in the 90’s. Although I never owned a copy myself when I was a kid, I had a good time going through each of the games one by one this week as I never got to do it back then really.

Although old, they do have their desirable attributes. The games in this collection aren’t so easy to complete in just a day, unless you are quite good a fighter. It took me some time to get to know all the moves and really do anything impressive. With a lot of practice it’s possible to become really great at some of these games. This is a big plus for the titles which come with online support.

The problem I encountered with the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection was mainly in the online mode. Every time I went in there during the week it was full of lag. I had a hard time getting any smooth matches with any of the games in the collection. It was a lag filled experience which put me off the online mode completely. Offline didn’t have an issue for me, but online was a bit of a disaster. I am not sure if this is just something one experiences when in Australia, but my internet connection is fast and I play a lot of other online games daily and don’t have lag issues with those at all. Just this one.

I played this collection on the PS4 and you can see a recording of my online experience in the YouTube video below. I am not sure if it is a server issue during launch week or if it will be fixed soon. Also, having only played on the PS4, I don’t know how the game is on other platforms. If you have it, let me know in the comments how it was for you on there.

Apart from the many classic titles you can go and play. The collection comes with a museum section where you can learn quite a bit of interesting facts about each of the games in the series, see some of the early design concepts and read about the many characters. As many of the games don’t really have a story mode, it’s nice to get to know a little bit more about the characters you spend a lot of time with.

Overall I did enjoy my time with the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection. The variety of games that you get to experience in it and the nostalgia feeling I had when seeing them all once again was nice. The offline play mode is pretty great. Unfortunately during all the days I played the game this week, I couldn’t find a single stable online match. I tried my best to go on at different times, but I’ve seen no improvement. If the online mode could maybe be improved, this would be a really great collection to have and possibly a great competitive experience. But at the moment at least for me, it doesn’t seem quite there yet. If you’re a fan of the Street Fighter franchise, this is certainly worth a look at as you’ll get to play a lot of classic games but just keep updated with the community about what’s happening with the online mode, especially for Australia at least.