Street Fighter II

"Set the standard for 16 bit arcade fighting port quality."

Ah yes...what a very anticipated game this was. Everyone knew the SNES was capable of bringing this phenomenally famous game home, with it's 16 bit power and it's controller which, at that time, had the most buttons on a console controller ever. When it finally did come home, it did in a record breaking 16 megabit cart, which was needed to hold all of that awesome animation we came to enjoy from SFII.

Story: 8
Nope...nothing's changed here. Same guy trying to take over the world, same people trying to stop him, same people just in it for glory.

Gameplay: 10
This game plays exactly like arcade. All of the moves are here, all of the special moves are here, all of the characters are here and to top it all off everything flows with the same timing of the arcade. This port also has the extra gameplay modes which are standard in most home ports today, such as tournament mode, VS mode and others. To give people a taste of SFII Champion Edition, they put in a special code that let mirror matches take place (i.e. Ken VS Ken).

Graphics: 10
Oh yeah. This is awesome. Capcom managed to keep all of the characters large on screen while still preserving all of their detail and almost all of their animation. You will notice that there are a *few* characters and animations left out of the backgrounds, but most of the commotion going on around the matches is still there. To top it all off, there is almost never any slowdown, which is obviously very nice.

Sound/Music: 6
Sadly, I didn't enjoy the audio much in this first port. Although it was nice that the sound effects themselves (like punches hitting their mark and bodies slamming into the ground) came straight from the arcade The only voice clips that came completely from the arcade were the announcer's clips. Most of the fighter's voice clips were rerecorded by lesser quality voice actors. As for the music, that also isn't taken straight from the arcade. Capcom tried making the music sound better than the arcade by adding guitars and string instruments, but it ended up sounding kind of dumb. Most of the songs sounded significantly lackluster when compared to the arcade. They should have just sampled the notes that the Yamaha synth chip in the arcade machine created and put that in instead. It really is a shame...this game could have preserved the sound of the arcade much better than this. Why did Capcom cut corners here?

Control: 9
Since the SNES controller had the four top buttons and the two shift buttons, this game was completely playable without having to run out and buy a new controller. The shift buttons didn't take much getting used to; most players mapped the middle strength punch and kick buttons here, since they were the least used. The only qualm I had about the control of this game is that moves that required rapid button pressing to execute were more difficult to pull off here than in the arcade; you had to press way faster. Other than that, the controls are as responsive and seamless as the arcade.

Replay Value: 8
Like almost all fighters, you can see all of the endings, then kick the crap out of your human rivals. To add to the replay value even more, if you beat the game at a higher difficulty level, you got a better ending. You also get a crappy ending if you beat it at too easy a level. :P

Bottom Line?
Capcom proved that powerful arcade fighting games could be accurately downsized and played right in your own home. Street Fighter II arcade machines for once got to take a breather when this finally hit stores (that is, until Champion Edition came out). There are way better ports of this game out now, but this was the best first generation port there was, which is why I give it a 9.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 11/07/01, Updated 11/07/01