You can thank the helpful old dears at the charity shop in town for this article – if they hadn’t put this book in their shop window then we wouldn’t have popped in and bought it.
Ostensibly ‘Where’s Wally?’ with the Street Fighter II crew, this hardback from 1994 has to be the oddest piece of merchandise released back when Street Fighter II was the talk of the playground.
Well, perhaps not as odd as the GI Joe-inspired action figure line – which featured an armoured assault vehicle of all things – but certainly more than a little odd.
Look and Find Street Fighter II takes us on a tour of the World Warrior’s homesteads, and even those who haven’t played Street Fighter II since release will easily spot that more than a few liberties were taken.
Zangief’s scene is a good example here – it’s set in a Russian factory, as per the game, but it’s a factory full of robots. Amazingly, this is an officially licensed product.
Blanka’s scene is just as bizarre – as well as the green-hued beast, readers are also tasked with finding his fishing gear, including a pair of hip waders and a fishing creel. Surely Blanka would only have to get in the water and unleash his electricity attack to bag a big haul?
E. Honda’s diorama meanwhile is set in an aquarium and requests readers to look out for the sumo wrestler’s rubber duck, bubble bath, snorkel and squirt gun. We’re pretty sure E. Honda’s backdrop was a bathhouse and not an aquarium. Actually, we’re 100 percent sure on that.
Like the ‘Where’s Wally?’ books visual metaphors are frequent, such as a ‘card shark’ seen in Balrog’s Las Vegas scene. It’s a shark playing cards, obviously.
The quality of the art-work is sketchy at best, but every inch of every page has something to catch your eye.
Characters from Super Street Fighter II feature as well, including Cammy. And what’s Cammy up to? Why, she’s fighting Frankenstein.
We think it’s fair to say that this book was £3 well spent.