I did end up getting the game with a gift card from Christmas.
As I mentioned early in the thread I've played Street Fighter II enough to have been at a high competition level before the distractions of having responsibilities, a job, life. I own a lot of copies of this game and its derivatives.
Street Fighter II SNES
Street Fighter II Turbo SNES
Super Street Fighter II SNES
Super Street Fighter II SNES/Famicom Variant
Street Fighter II Super Famicom
Street Fighter II Championship ED Sega Genesis
Super Street Fighter II Sega Genesis
Super Street Fighter II CPS 2 Board
Capcom Coin-OP Classics Series 1 PC
Capcom Classics Collection XBOX
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Xbox 360
Street Fighter Anniversary Collection
But talking about my history with the game and all the redundant copies I have doesn't really matter. Because Street Fighter II is a game that a whole generation of arcade rats and 16-bit junkies grew up playing. Although the series has been criticized for all its iterations, it has aged fairly well, and the main series has been solid since the original Street Fighter II. Nostalgia had me pull my visa gift card from a box of stuff that I got for Christmas and pre-order Street Fighter V Collectors's Edition off of from Amazon. With the prime discount knocking it down to 79.99 it was not much more than the 69.99 early copy of Street Fighter II that my mom bought me from Sears in 92. Unfortunately a delay would cause the game to arrive a few days late.
Amazon never said how long the delay would be, from reading different reports I was expecting a week or more, so when the game arrived on the 20th, I was pleasantly surprised. Because the shipping box was huge I was expecting the CE to be about the same size inside. However inside the Amazon box was a much smaller Capcom shipping box that said do not open before 2/16/2016. It would take me 3 box openings to get the game I was waiting to play and inside the last box was the top half of my friend Ryu looking back at me.
This was the guy I wanted to be when I grew up, I used to practice his fight moves out in the streets while walking home from the arcade. I would hit my friends with Hadokens in the swimming pool. And although I didn't grow up to be a karate master challenging people around the world. I do have the privilege of taking on other players all around the world online.
The game itself feels like street fighter. If you skipped III and IV the game will feel a little loose this is do in part from using the 3D models on a 2D plane, and having a more varied, flowing, move set. It will likely feel more familiar than not and overall feels like a solid framework for the 5th series. However outside of the characters and the play mechanics. The game feels very empty. Missing is an arcade mode, the store is inactive, and the story mode feels like something tossed together and incomplete. Going further, online play has been so shoddy that I decided to wait a few weeks to hop on after experiencing sluggish then super fast moves, teleporting, and dropped matches. The description of the release of Street Fighter V being a Beta is an accurate one.
I would say that this has left me feeling greatly disappointed but I've become somewhat tempered to playing incomplete and buggy games. This has become a trend for modern gaming. Fortunately there news that arcade mode is being looked into, the store is being added in march, and the kinks of online play should get sorted out. With the gameplay being solid, late adopters should have a respectful entry in the series to play. Us early adopters will just have to rough it out.
