Undisputed Street Fighter - Steve Hendershot
Categories:
[blog]
Tags:
[video games],
[review],
[book]
Undisputed Street Fighter - Steve Hendershot, 2017 303 pages
In celebration of Street Fighter's 30th anniversary, this large-format hardback 'coffee-table' book covers history, characters, and releases in fairly thorough fashion.
Certainly my favourite portions of this book are the history sections, including interviews with developers and coverage of the nascent tournament scene back in the 90s, before all the e-sports hoopla. Other excellent articles include far less often featured subjects such as custom lego figures, voice actors, comics, toys, animated movies - really a lot of the more 'niche' sides to Street Fighter, and I appreciate that a lot about the book.
There are a handful of extremely obvious mistakes in the book (mixing up the players in Evo Moment 27, some date goofs etc.), which is disappointing and possibly implies the lack of a true Street Fighter nut going over it during the editing process (I don't fault the author, it's incredibly difficult to see errors like this when re-reading your own work), but the general textual content is great in quantity and quality.
As an artbook, unfortunately it often falls into the "slap lots of clipart all over the pages" approach (the character specific pages are especially prone to this), although some pieces get decent page percentage. While personal preference, I honestly feel the post 2009 artwork (Street Fighter 4, 5) really look very out of place next to all the beautiful earlier style art and sprites, especially with the way this book presents them. I guess some people must like the newer style, but it doesn't do anything for me. Also, I have no flippin' idea of the order the characters are presented, they are all over the place.
A neat book for those oldies like me who still like reading anything which mentions names such as "Tomo" or "Duong", or younger fans who are interested in some of the earlier history, what things were like pre-2002.