In 1990 I frequented a crummy sandwich bar in my high street. It was an awful place to eat but it always had a steady rotation of the latest arcade games. It had all the hot games: Chase H.Q, Golden Axe, the four-player ninja turtles, but the one game I played more than any other was Street Fighter 2 (SF2). Because it came out so long ago it’s easy to forget how this game redefined the genre. The best fighting game until then was Pit Fighter, and that was rubbish! Every fighting game that we have now wouldn’t exist without SF2. But getting action figures over the years have been hit and miss. There was the G.I. Joe figures which were mixed in terms of quality; the super articulated SOTA Toys were excellent but ended too soon, leaving more popular characters to exchange hands for ridiculous prices on the secondary market; the exhaustive Jazzwares line which...well, it happened, let’s just leave at that. Now a new challenger arrives in the form of Storm Collectables, who have been making figures based on several fighting games for a few years now, but recently have produced figures based on the classic SF2 (or Ultra Street Fighter 2 to be precise) designs. And the first SF figure I’ve got from them is the king of muay thai, the giant lieutenant of shadaloo, Sagat. But will their efforts be top tier or a scrub?
