Why Street Fighter 2 Lets You Beat Up Cars

Why Street Fighter 2 Lets You Beat Up Cars

Contents

The car bonus stage from Street Fighter 2 is an iconic piece of gaming, but it’s origins actually date back to an earlier game from Capcom.

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Why Street Fighter 2 Lets You Beat Up Cars

The car destroying bonus stage from Street Fighter II is one of gaming’s most iconic settings. Despite this fact, the origins of the bonus stage stretch further back than the foundational fighter which made it common knowledge. Street Fighter II’s car bonus stage is in fact a reference to a much earlier beat-’em-up by Capcom.

No matter the game, Capcom’s car bonus stage always operates with the same basic principles. Players are tasked with dispatching a quality Japanese sedan with brutally swift efficiency under a certain time limit. Only certain parts of the car are vulnerable at one time, so the trick to beating the stage is in learning the sequence of vulnerable parts and expeditiously dishing out damage as they change. Successfully wrecking the vehicle will award the player with points according to the amount of time left on the clock. This stage has appeared in almost every main Street Fighter title in some form, with one notable exception being Street Fighter V.

Even though the car stage always appears in story-focused sections like arcade mode, the player is given absolutely zero context for why they’re trashing cars left and right. At least one example of the car stage has Ken Masters demolishing his own SUV for seemingly no reason. According to the Street Fighter Wiki, a backstory for the car stage is fleshed out in Street Fighter II Complete File, an artbook and CD collection released in Japan. The idea behind it is that the cars are provided by an unidentified salesman who challenges people to destroy his unsellable inventory for a cash prize. Unfortunately, this is a dubious explanation, as the Complete File is no longer being produced and the wiki’s page for the collection records no such evidence.

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The Connection Between Street Fighter’s And Final Fight’s Bonus Stages

The story behind Street Fighter’s car stage is significantly easier to identify (or at least speculate on) outside of the game’s lore. From a game designer’s perspective, the car stage acts as a relieving pause in the middle of an onslaught of challenge. It may not be natural to imagine that a fighting game’s arcade mode would need pacing, but without the car stage the player gets no emotional downtime at all. It’s nothing more than a torrent of high-intensity bouts without them. Including bonus stages gives players a temporary safe space. They aren’t given a game over for failing, and they’re allowed to experiment with Street Fighter 2’s character’s moves without the risk of being beaten up by a bot. It’s also somewhat of a novelty. Street Fighter 2’s car stage is actually a reference to a near-identical bonus stage from Capcom’s beat-’em-up series, Final Fight.

Final Fight’s original version of the bonus stage follows the same basic idea as its descendants with only a few minor changes. It’s possibly the only example of the car stage that includes a weapon in the environment for the player. It also points out the vulnerable sections of the car, taking away some of the mystery associated with learning the car’s pattern. Lore-wise, the heroes of Final Fight are actually given some loose justification for what they’re doing. Perfectly passing the stage reveals that the car in question belongs to Bred, a member of the game’s antagonist faction.

Unfortunately, there’s no legendary anecdote behind the car stage. After 30 years, Street Fighter II has gained a near-mythical reputation. Other elements of the game are famous for having backstories with a sense of mystery. The combo system, for instance, was supposedly discovered as a happy accident. The ability to cancel a character’s normal move animations with a special attack was not something developers originally intended to be a focal point of the gameplay. Likewise, the arcade legend of “Shen Long” spread rumors throughout ’80’s arcades about a secret character, when in actuality the term came from a mistranslation of Ryu’s “Shoryuken” technique. Still, the rumor resulted in characters like Akuma and Gouken. It may be exciting to believe that everything associated with Street Fighter II carries a similar level of gravitas to these examples, especially when it becomes iconic like the car stage, but the reality is that the stage is simply a fun break to add variety and break up tension.

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Link Source : https://screenrant.com/street-fighter-car-bonus-stage-destruction-easter-eggs/

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