I swear I am still the only person who knows about this. I actually paid the $5 for the VIP membership.
You can still download Game Vindicator, by the way.
Story time, kids!
Long ago, in a time where I was but a young lad that didn’t know anything about fighting games, online gaming was all the rage among my friends. I had “outgrown that silly RuneScape” unlike the rest of my friends, and I happened across Street Fighter Online while trawling through one of those Flash game websites that were filled to the brim with stick-figure action games and the like.
A brief history lesson — Street Fighter Online once existed as “X-Men vs Street Fighter Online”. I wasn’t around for this period of time, but apparently it garnered enough attention that someone (presumably Marvel) was all like “you can’t use that name we’re suing”, so XvSFO disappeared. And then it came back as Street Fighter Online, because apparently it’s okay without the “X-Men” part. Or maybe it’s because it disappeared to a corner of the internet that no one really cares about.
In any case, the game was essentially X-Men vs Street Fighter with an online multiplayer lobby system, all built into Adobe Shockwave Flash. I don’t know if GGPO was in existence around this time period, but if it was, I envy anyone that was playing the real XvSF, because this game was nothing like it.
SFO did a couple things differently from XvSF. The character roster was both decently-sized and incredibly limited, because while the entire XvSF cast was there (plus a few more if my memory serves me well), the game seemed to just lock out characters at random, and no one was worth using if they weren’t Ken or Ryu. Aside from that, the game had a lobby system with poorly-made netcode, and a metagame that was based around donations, suspicious anti-cheating software and every Shinkuu Hadouken you could muster.
Matches were played in the same tag-team format that XvSF uses, though most of the time you had four players in one match, similar to the 2v2 format for Street Fighter X Tekken. You also had access to Marvel vs Capcom 1 assists. They saw some use, but most of the game was picking Ryu or Ken, throwing your fireballs until you get meter, spending your meter on whatever variation of Shinkuu Hadouken your character had, and then doing the whole thing all over again.
Let’s just assume that Ryu and Ken were the only playable characters, since they were the only ones anyone ever cared about. Off the bat, you had Ryu and Ken, mostly as they were in XvSF. These guys sucked. But you had ways to make them better!
By donating $5 to the developers, you could upgrade your account to “VIP” status. This would turn Ryu and Ken into superpowered versions of them for your account. Ryu became Evil Ryu, and Ken became… I don’t even know what he was, he just had a black gi and his super fireball was like a swirly flame thingy with lots of hits.
But what if you don’t wanna spend money? Well, truth be told, you may as well just quit while you’re ahead, but you always have the option of “Vindicating” your characters. Street Fighter Online gave players the option to download an anti-cheating program known as “Game Vindicator”.
This piece of software was absolutely useless.
First off, Game Vindicator only worked with Street Fighter Online. It literally did not work with any other game. On top of that, while most anti-cheating programs built into games detect cheating by monitoring game sessions for signs of packet manipulation, Game Vindicator worked by detecting open processes on the user’s computer. This meant two things — one, that it didn’t protect the user from cheats, it only stopped the user from cheating; and two, Game Vindicator was literally spyware. But hey, you made Ryu suck marginally less! That’s totally a good trade-off.
Spend $5 and give the Game Vindicator and Street Fighter Online developers total access to your computer process and browsing habits, and you got Vindicated Evil Ryu! Wow! I can’t wait until they add him to Ultra Street Fighter IV: WonderSwan Edition.