Street Fighter II: Champion Edition

The Good
As a programmer, the amount of number crunching done to bring this to a console that has less RAM that the NES is amazing, and if you have a Master Gear converter for your Game Gear, enjoy this game on the go, more so than the just-as-excellent Game Boy version. Even better, if you can get ahold of Tec Toy's very rare six-button controller (or two), you'll be allowed to do all of the moves in the arcade. The cart size is as large as the Master System can take, and it's one of the finest Master System games to come about towards the end of the console's life.

The Bad
All negatives of this game are drawn of the Master System. At first, you'd think that the game sucks, but then you're drawn into it, and start learning how to play the game. Ignoring the extreme limitations of 1985 hardware (1987 for us in the US), pulling this off can be tricky, and perhaps some nitpickers wouldn't like the simplified backgrounds or the digitized sounds, but considering Capcom did the development themselves, this isn't all that bad, and after awhile, you'll start to get used to it and it won't even bother you at all. A major drawback is using the Master System's two-button controller (default standard) and how tiny the characters appear when using the game with the Game Gear via the Master Gear converter.

The Bottom Line
Don't own a Genesis, PC Engine, TurboExpress, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, 1.5 GHz x86 CPU'd PC or the very rare Sega Nomad, then this version is really good for the Game Gear via the Master Gear converter. And if you some reason the Master System is your only game system and you're using a Macintosh or other alternative means to get online to read this review, then this game's the best you're going to get for fighting game goodness on the Master System. I suggest that anyone who wants to complete their Master System collection ought have this game in their libraries. It is the essential paradigm of programming excellence for a console that just can't cut it, and "cut it" it did.

The Good
It's funny, yes, maybe the funniest Street Fighter 2 i have ever seen, just hearing the voice of the announcer sounding like a retard made me laugh, but well, let's be serious, Master System never had that digitalized sound, it's not a great conversion, but for being master system is ok. Sprites were ok, well animated and all that, some of the artwork in the game (the fighter's faces) was taken from Super Street Fighter 2, as you will surely notice. The music is the same as always, you will enjoy kicking some butt in master system with Ryu's theme sounding in the background.

The Bad
It has a few bad points, starting by gameplay, it just suxxx, trying to do some special movements may be a real pain. The AI maybe was AD (artificial dumbness) the cpu fighters start hitting in the air without any kind of criteria or strategy. And we came to the backgrounds, for fuck's sake, couldn't they have done some decent backgrounds? i know the Master System can't manage with much detail, but that's just awful, take a look at some screens and you will know what i talk about, the China street for example looks really odd (like if you were fighting in a butchery), and Sagat background is real shitty (maybe adding a little palm tree would have hurted?)

The Bottom Line
It's curious, if you are a SF fan (or a Master System fan too) and haven't seen this yet, you are missing something you will surely find interesting, if you aren't or are just looking for a nice-looking fighting game, just look other way, there's nothing here for you.