Weekend rental story: Since Street Fighter II was insanely popular in our house, it was often rented and we spent weekends playing it. Along with Fatal Fury, Street Fighter played a large hand in my life-long love of fighting games. When strolling along the video store for games to rent, my brother and I spy Street Fighter 2010...but for the NES. "The Nintendo had a Street Fighter game?". This was no doubt puzzling. Popped it in, was killed immediately, my dad drove it back to the rental store and picked up Road Rash 2 instead.

In the age before the internet, you have zero idea what you're getting into with any given NES or SNES game without a subscription to one of the various game magazine outlets, so game rentals were always an adventure. It says Street Fighter on it, how bad can it be? Well...

Soooo Street Fighter 2010 isn't a one-on-one fighting game, but a side scrolling action platformer with a science fiction theme. What in the name of Don Bohannon does this have to do with Street Fighter!? The answer is practically nothing. It's a futuristic spin-off of the original 1987 Street Fighter, but why even that? The protagonist in the Japanese version is named Kevin Straker, a Galactic policeman assigned to stop super alien criminals called Parasites. 

The goddamn English localization, in an effort to tie it to actual Street Fighter, changed Kevin to "Ken", and it's been 25 years since he's retired from the World Fighting Championship to become a gifted scientist who developed an organic strength augmenting substance called "Cyboplasm" that gives people powers. Powered by bionics, "Ken" is out to find out who killed his friend Troy and stole the precious Cyboplasm. This is the most damaging and confusing way to link a vaguely unrelated game to a franchise, but considering Capcom is the same company that gives sequels completely different games to previous games, I'm partially terrified someone on their executive board might've thought it was a good idea. And "The Final Fight" is tacked on just to make things even more confusing.

Its ties to Street Fighter being a frustrating mess, how does the game itself fare? It's quite a fascinating action game that plays unlike any other side-scroller I've experienced on the NES. Some stages are pretty linear, reach the end of the level and fight a boss. Some stages take place in an enclosed environment and it's structured like a 1v1 encounter with a boss enemy that simply require you to defeat them. 

If Castlevania's intentionally stiff controls drove gamers nuts as kids and made them too difficult, Street Fighter 2010 might redefine the standard for overly intricate and mechanical. I think the it plays pretty well, it just takes an awfully long time to get used to since there's a surprising amount of abilities Kevin is capable of. Functions like wall clinging and attacking certainly work the way it's intended, but require such a high demand of precision that it demands you be dialed in at all times while playing. Kevin's primary weapon starts off as a short-ranged punch projectile that can be powered up to five levels. You can fire straight ahead of you and above your head, as well as a diagonal kick that kind of aims at a 45 degree angle upwards, and it seems like this quite efficient for taking out enemies. Yet somehow, flying tiny spaceships, dangerous laser-shooting bracelets, or boney alien fish will always chip damage off of you if you hope standing and becoming a powered-up energy fist turret will keep you safe. It doesn't help that a lot of targets will pursue you through walls and obstacles and they respawn almost immediately.

It's crucial to sit and get a read on what the attacks do, because there's points where it will feel crippling. Like if you hold the direction you're walking while attacking, it launches a completely different attack that's stronger, but has a slow start-up and leaves Kevin stuck in place for about a third of a second. Jumping and firing in the air, you only can get off a single shot, regardless of your power-ups. It get more demoralizing that if you fire in mid-air, you can't wall grab. I feel like this game is more intuitive than it has gotten credit from the retro reviewers over the years, it just has an incredibly high skill curve, and patience with it certainly pays off.

Street Fighter 2010 visually doesn't look too bad. There's a bit of slowdown and graphical flickering in a lot of areas, but the stages all have a very different flair to them and the use of hues is interesting, along with a lot of detail in the sprites. There's certainly a rustic cyberpunk vibe to it that's a pretty sharp contrast to much more colorful Mega Man games.

There is some personal shortcomings. For as cool as the environments are, many of the bosses and enemies just lack appeal, like scraping the bottom of the basement of expressionless NES baddies. I cut it a little bit of slack, there's a strong chance that a player will be so focused on finding a way around the situation, it's barely a matter to focus on.

The game has some pretty cool OST, the music definitely has that pretty catchy, blood-pumping tunes that almost motivate me to keep playing. Old Capcom games really have a knack for their soundtracks becoming very synonymous for the mood I feel when engaging in any respective level. There aren't a wide array of sound effects, but nailing enemies comes off pretty satisfying. Quite the opposite of satisfying, however, is when you defeat a boss and the stage is technically over, a countdown begins (roughly ten seconds) and Kevin still has to reach a portal to properly clear the stage. This is very stress inducing and dying because you weren't able to exit the portal is the stuff that could cause a controller to be thrown into a wall.

Street Fighter 2010 is a pretty hard game for a variety of reasons, but it teeters more into the category of being a real adequate challenge instead of just being brutally unfair. It doesn't have that merciless sense of dread I get any time I tried to play Battletoads or Ninja Gaiden III. Mostly because this game has infinite lives, and once I get far enough, have a proper grasp of the controls, and seem to improve every time I gave it a try, the sense of burnout doesn't quite kick in as fast as some other tough NES titles. Street Fighter 2010 teaches you how to search for ways to thread that needle and find the solution. 

I don't know if it ultimately makes this game good for casual play, it isn't beginner friendly, but I find it very unique. The difficulty curve hits immediately and that alone might turn people off, and it never lightens up. Auto-scroll stages test your patience because the pacing is ripped completely out of your hands. My best bet is emulate the hell out of this game and abuse those save states. Get it on the Wii U Virtual Console and ensure to make save points very often. The final boss rush alone expects you to beat nearly five of the previous bosses, on top of the final boss, with one health bar and just over 3 and a half minutes. What's scary is IT'S POSSIBLE, and it almost dares one to try it. Overall, it's above average, but can be entertaining to indulge in. They really should have named it Future Strike or Double Steve III: The ReStevening, anything is a better name than calling it Street Fighter.