Bootleg fighters...

Doctor DooM

Was talking about this with a friend recently, so went online looking some up.

Everyone knows about rainbow edition and it's ilk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dhBdm9I5SQ

Although what you mightn't know is that several innovations like air tatsus in hyper fighting were directly drawn from these bootlegs.

Anyway, I went looking further, and there's a whole world of dodgy fighting game rip offs out there.

Many of them seem to be for the megadrive, made in china.

Virtua fighter vs "Taken" 2, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrIHYMJ76gc

This looks like it was built around the megadrive release of VF, which wasn't exactly an amazingly fun game.

Here's one for Hound: SF EX plus alpha on SNES.

No really.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr5X-RSEbrM

Look at the state of those sprites!

How about Mortal Kombat 5 for NES?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtJnj8qS5SY

Blood effects ftw

Next there's Top Fighter 2000 which looks like it should be named Ali vs Shaq vs SNK vs Marvel vs Capcom (this one actually looks relatively playable)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUb0QZNf8t8

In a similar vein, here's the long lost KoF99...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9zx73NZkjk

There's loads more, thought people might be interested if they never knew these... things existed!

Dreddybajs

KoF 99 is a real game, obviously that isn't it though. :pac:

On topic, the work-in-progress Koryu style SF4 mod, SF4AE remix, made by Zeipher and anotak (most characters completed now I think):

www.sf4remix.com

Works with copies of AE PC, just dl the zips and replace the files.

K.O.Kiki

These games don't even make much sense while drunk.


I should know, I've had I-don't-know-how-many pints tonight.

Ramza

VF vs Taken 2 looks better than SFxT LOOOOL

Placebo

well rainbow wasnt as bad as the others on this list, it was whacky but not broken, 'sprite' wise. They had it in Pakistan, in my local arcade. I thought it was amazing. SRK = 5 fire balls.
I couldnt find a rom for that exact one. Theres different variations.

Noteable mention is also mugen, everything it created was bootleged whacked out brokeness


also: http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2012/jan/13/crazy-bootleg-version-street-fighter-makes-mario-playable/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0jdf4IkG1E

Doctor DooM

Yeah, so Master Fighter 6 for NES:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR9bG295Z20

Just saw this thread now, sorry for the late post but thanks to the OP. I'm not sure how old many of you guys here are, but i remember all of the street fighter bootlegs like rainbow edition etc and the official streetfighter CPS clones when they were out in the early 90's, a few arcades (and chip shops, bowlers, etc) i used to go to back then had them, and i played most if not all of them, and it was clear to see that in the early days capcom was doing its best to keep up with a game genre that was literally exploding, and was taking ideas from the community and bootleggers alike and adding them to their new releases/revisions to protect their franchise and market share.

New features in some of the early versions, particularly the CPS1 versions were as much derived from unforeseen gameplay in glitched and broken SF2 boards, features of champion edition bootlegs, clones, etc as they were from capcom sitting down and coming up with their own new ideas.

There are numerous examples of this, but looking at Streetfighter 2' Hyper Fighting will give you a good idea of the thinking that was going on at the time. Even the game itself was a direct clone of the official SF2 champion edition board, not a new build. Capcom execs didn't want to waste time and money developing a brand new game from the ground up as they wanted to cash in on the streetfighter craze which (as far as they knew) might end any day, and also didn't want to risk losing market share to some of the clones like rainbow edition by delaying street dates on the third game in the series, so they rushed out an official bootleg, gave it a few palette changes, and built in a load of moves and changes that were popular in the bootlegs and glitched machines of the day, including:

• Faster game speed-The original streetfighter 2 and CE were becoming painfully slow to players who had spent the last 2 years mastering them at levels beyond what the designers had anticipated, and the faster speed of the bootlegged versions and hacked official boards was proving more and more popular. Capcom made Hyper fighting significantly faster as a direct result of this.
  
• Air Hurricane Kick, spinning bird kick, etc.-Lifted directly from Bootlegged versions that allowed you to perform many moves in the air. Mid-air moves was pretty much unheard of at the time, but has since become a staple of the genre.
  
• Dhalsim's teleport-This was based on a glitched move in a specific version of the SF2 board that allowed players to "disappear" with dhalsim (make one of the sprite layers switch off due to memory issues). It was one of many command glitches like the handcuffs, reset glitch, walk forward flashkick, and more, caused by memory limitations on the original boards, which had made their way into high level play when advanced players figured them out and begun using them against opponents, but it's the only actual glitch i can think of that capcom rebalanced and built in officially, with the possible exception of mirror matches, which may have been a glitch/exploit in the original SF2.
  
• Honda's moveable hundred hand Slap. Again, based on a version of the move in one of the heavily bootlegged champion edition boards that allowed honda to move left or right fairly quickly, and cover large distances while doing the move. This was implemented in Hyper fighting, but was much less powerful and more properly balanced, giving him only the ability to move slightly to the left or right slowly during the move to combat the "sitting duck" issue with the previous version.

Despite much of this coming originally from a "cash in" mentality from capcom, a lot of it has stuck within the series ever since, many would argue improving it immensely. Indeed, many players still cite Hyper Fighting as their favourite street fighter game of all time. There are lots of other (probably less balanced) innovations in other fighters from around then which didn't make it in to street fighter official versions, but whose concept was first seen in the bootlegs from around that time. Mortal Kombat 2 (1993) was the first official game i remember having an option to change characters mid fight in. Shang tsung, a boss from MK1 and a playable character in MK2 could morph into any other character, including the ability to do all of that character's moves, specials and fatalities, at will. However, earlier that year many of the streetfighter bootlegs allowed you to do this just by pressing the start button.