Just at the point when I was beginning to think that the art of the promo was almost stone-cold dead, just when I was near giving up hope that a game could get a cool little freebie to either coerce people into or thank people for buying it, just at the point when I thought the best idea anyone could come up with was a soundtrack (nice to listen to but not so hot for a pictorial), Capcom comes along and tosses us a nice little UFO catcher bust of Ryu to go with the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection. True, he'll have a hard time throwing a fireball or doing a Dragon Punch without any arms, but his glaring skills are off the charts.

He's a small guy, only about 2" tall and a bit less wide (and there's a cheap joke about "Ryu's little bust" that's not going to be made here), but there's a good amount of detail and fine paint work on the whole figure. The paint on his tattered gi doesn't run onto his arms (McFarlane Toys take note) and he's even got tiny dots of red in his eyes to highlight that burning stare. The bust is made of a fairly decent plastic, which is probably the only reason the trailing ends of Ryu's headband stay in one piece.

There may have been other models given out for the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection but Ryu is the only one I've seen. It's probably not much more than a model made for a Japanese UFO claw game, so the odds of there being different characters out there are pretty high. Even so, it's a nice little figure to go with a classic game.

· · · James Cunningham