Capcom was an earnest Nintendo licensee from the get-go, not jumping ship till well into the life of the Super Nintendo, later than many other gaming companies. They did license out some of their arcade games though, rather than releasing them on competing hardware themselves (something Konami didn’t do for years). Most of these licensed out to Sega games were also programmed by Sega which was probably due to some contractual agreement with Nintendo. Final Fight CD on the Sega CD was just one more title in a line of these “ports” which includes Strider and Ghouls n Ghosts (featured head to head against the SNES version in the first issue of RGM).
Capcom’s Final Fight was edited quite a bit on the Super Nintendo, stages were left out, characters were changed and audio samples were no longer present. Sega aimed to fix these problems with their version of Final Fight on their fledgling Sega CD platform. Why this was not released on cartridge I will never understand- this SHOULD have been a cartridge release, even without the voices, cut scenes and arranged music. Bad play Sega.
The actual game is, as usual, great. Fans will love it and enjoy it and cherish it. The Sega CD features all of the missing stuff that SNES gamers missed out on (and it better since it required a heftily priced add-on to enjoy). The missing level, Industrial Area Stage, ability to play as any of the three original characters and the girls have returned (though slightly edited).
Poison and Roxy are in the Sega CD version but not like they were in the arcade original. Rather than wearing booty shorts and a short shirt, they now wear spandex shorts and a much longer shirt that covers more and is less revealing.
Another addition Sega added in was a time attack mode- much like in other games, here you take on a load of enemies and simply see how long you can survive with one man. Unfortunately in the Sega CD version, there are not as many enemies on screen as there are in the arcade- some may welcome the lack of an enemy or two on screen, others won’t.
Sega did an admirable job with Final Fight CD, now if they had only released this on cartridge also like a few other Sega CD games (Sol-Feace/Sol-Deace for instance). By the time Final Fight CD hit it was just a cool game to own on the Sega CD rather than a system seller (the Lunar games were more sought after for good reason).
Final Fight is available on a myriad of systems and platforms including iOS, Game Boy Advance, X68000 (will be covered in issue two of RGM), PSP, PS2, Xbox and the Super Nintendo. US Gold released a version on the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC.