Street Fighter II Turbo

"A Classic Game That's not Perfect"

Street Fighter II is often heralded as the great ancestor of one-on-one fighting games, as well as countless other games named Street Fighter. The Turbo version for SNES is one of the closest offspring of the original. It adds two major differences: the ability to play as any boss (also found in Champion Edition) and the ability to speed up the game by four different degrees.

Neither of these changes is really significant enough to put SSF2 Turbo in a class apart from SSF2. The speed increase simply adds a new level of challenge to one's hand-eye coordination, and the champion fighters have just as many weaknesses as the original eight characters. However, extra features never hurt a game, so conversely there is really no reason to prefer the original Street Fighter II over the Turbo edition.

For anyone who has not visited an arcade or a friend's house in the past 10 years, Street Fighter II is a single-screen, three-round battle game to the point of knockout. The characters are distinctly different, and they are impressive graphically. The special moves are not difficult to pull off, and are often not even necessary if the player is good enough. The music and sound is also varied enough to blend well with the game, and the scenery (what little there is) is animated and interesting.

Few games surpass Street Fighter II's potential for decimating one's friend in a glorious challenge of who's the better man. However, the one-player mode is an entirely different story. The desire to improve often hits the brick wall of frustration due to weak computer intelligence and cheap tricks.

These problems exhibit themselves more and more as the player progresses through the eight difficulty settings of the game. The least correctable factor is raw strength: on level 8, the computerized opponent may attack with almost three times the damage of the human player. To make this worse, many of the computer's fighters do nothing except fire special moves during the entire battle. One may argue that the human could play the same type of dirty pool, but this is actually not true. The moves which require the player to ''...hold left for 2 seconds...'', for example, can occur at any instant (and as many times in a row) as the computer desires for its own fighter. In short, the computer breaks the rules of the game.

Despite this poor training mode, SSF2 and its Turbo successor were very well-made games for their time. Regardless of whether this series of games has gotten worse or better, these original titles provide a sense of nostalgia and entertainment that will never disappear.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/04/02, Updated 10/04/02