Street Fighter II: Champion Edition

The Good
Despite it's unforgiving difficulty, how could you stay away from this game? This is actually a updated version of the original Street Fighter II. If you played that I've no need to explain the concept of the whole game. What's new is the hyper mode. It's insanely fast and even MORE difficult than the regular mode. I didn't last two rounds. But I'm not that good at Street Fighter games, so it's no surprise. It's able to play this fast because of the Genesis has a faster CPU than the Super Nintendo. That's good for those who want a fast and furious fight. The graphics are great by Genesis standards. Lots of little lights and crowd animations really bring it to life. The sound is pretty good, but the Genesis was never known for it's abilities in the sound department. And there are new characters. I can't remember who, but it must have been Bison. Overall a good package.

The Bad
Don't get me started.

The difficulty is the absolute worst I've ever played in a fighting game! It literally took me over 100 something tries to finish the game! And don't say just lower the difficulty, because when you finish the game it says "why not try it on a higher difficulty wimp!" or something to that effect. No story ending ! And some of those combos are hard (impossible) to pull off when things get heated.

The Bottom Line
If you love your games nice and frontal lobe melting difficult, then this is the game for you. If you want a good fighter, try it once and if the difficulty scares you off, run, run to the hills!

The Good
SCE. Special. Well, this wasn't the first time I'd played Street Fighter before. I had played the original arcade and eventually, the version of Street Fighter 2 on the SNES. However, this was far superior. Smoother gameplay, greater depth and more characters. It still plays like a dream today. I wish that more games were of this ilk. Yet, few are.

My favourite character was always Ken. Not sure why, perhaps because he was similar to Ryu but wore red. Plus, my mate was always Ryu so couldn't be him. However, my favourite music was and still is Ryu's stage. Most of the music was good, but that stood out for me.

Heck this game is still a great leveller. You got something to settle. Stick SF2: SCE on and slug it out. No problem. It still works.

It's still thought of as a benchmark title, which is some accomplishment after 12 or so years. 2D beat-em-ups don't get much better than this & will not last as long as this.

The Bad
There are some lame characters but heck that's not the point.

The Bottom Line
If you've not played it yet, get a copy. Challenge your mates, play single player mode, just play it.

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.