Do you remember when we used to go to Putt-Putt on Saturday afternoons and hang out, spending quarter after quarter of our hard-earned allowances in the form of tokens? Final Fight ate the majority of those false coins, no question about it. Despite the myriad temptations of Gauntlet and Rampart, Ninja Warriors and Darius, X-Men and The Simpsons, nothing satisfied quite so much as teaming up and beating the living daylights out of the goons who populated Metro City and dared abduct the mayor’s lovely daughter. Well, nothing until Street Fighter came along. But that’s a story for another time.
“consoles lived and died by their ability to bring arcade-quality graphics and content home, a compromised port was downright crimial”
Yeah, I kinda take issue with this. How many other games, especially in 1991 (1990 in Japan), were as accurate as this? This was before Street Fighter, remember. Some content was censored or cut altogether, but that’s par for the course. It still looked and played remarkably close to its arcade counterpart for a game released in 1990, lack of multiplayer being the only key missing aspect.
On another note, Sodom got his justice, when he kept his original name in Street Fighter Alpha on the same system a few years later.
Strider and Ghouls & Ghosts, to name two by the same publisher.
Final Fight was just… so slow. You moved slow, you fought slow, it just never clicked with me. And on the home consoles, I preferred the Streets of Rage series. Even the lesser graphics of the first one made for more fun than Final Fight for me.