Here comes a new challenger!... Nostalgia.

The scene is some point in October 1992. A young boy is taken by his parents to the Comet superstore in Rochester to choose his birthday present. A Super NES, or a Sega Mega Drive. The SNES has got Super Mario World, But his friend down the street has one. The boy makes his decision, and a blue hedgehog gets taken home. (And a mummy called Chuck D Head. Man the 90's were strange.)

Flash forward about a year, and the young boy is loving his Mega Drive, except that cocky sonofova down the street with the SNES and his flaunting of Street Fighter II. The young boy is rubbish when they play, with no way to practice he can only win bouts by playing Guile and mashing hard kick. BUT! All is not lost as for his birthday that year the boy receives the newly released Street Fighter II Champion Edition, a game so awesome Sega had to release a whole new controller for it just to make it playable. A whole SIX buttons. SIX! Wow.

The height of awesomeness circa Sept. '93. About £60's worth of awesome in fact.

Now we're back in the present. And the young boy, who at this point you should have realised is me, is playing Street Fighter IV for the iPhone. The first Street Fighter I've played since the Mega Drive. And you know what? Its actually pretty outstanding. I would not have thought that the controls would work at all, but they really do. I'm assured you can pull of all sorts of super EX hyper revenge combos and special moves. Although, I have no idea how and I'm perfectly happy mashing hard kick and letting off the occasional sonic boom. (I'm sorry but I'm unemployed, my diet is atrocious... BOOM TISH!)

But this isn't a review, this is an opinion piece. Here's to the point. An early commentator (who shall remain anonymous) on the iPhone game had this to say. "I don't like the look of it. The graphics are very 16 bit. I'm not paying £6 for a port of a SNES game, as good as that SNES game was."

Now by all means, you can not want to spend £6 on whatever you want, But please internets, (and I see this a lot in iPhone app discussion and reviews) don't try and justify that cheapness with a bullshit excuse like that. Quality deserves quality prices.

If he honestly believes that statement though, 'looks 16 bit'. Well, I would love to get a hold of the goggles the dude is wearing to make the above, look like the below. If the SNES or Mega Drive had been capable of this I'm pretty sure we'd be playing video games with the power of our minds now, and the PS3 would be rapid prototyping triple breasted hookers for our amusement while the games installed.

I do love my old console games. Really fond memories of Sonic, Streets of Rage 2, Bubsy the Bobcat*, and Ayrton Senna's Super Monaco GP II. But compared to what today's phones can dish out, graphically, they were rubbish. There's no comparison. iPhone games created in less than 72 hours have better graphics than my Mega Drive did, and smoother scrolling to boot. (Damn you SNES and your Mode 7.)
I'm sorry internets but no amount of rose tinting will change that...

See?! It still looks way better!

*I have a friend who can still recall the password for one level in BtB having been tasked to remember it as a child. You know who you are ;)