Super Street Fighter II Turbo

The Good
Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo is truly the best incarnation and the end of the evolutionary process of the classic Street Fighter 2 series, this is the most balanced, most feature-packed, most intense game in the series (and it'd better be! Capcom went around releasing a new version of SF2 per year!) And the good news is that this time it made the translation to the pc flawlessly.

First let me do a quick run-up for those on the dark about SSF2T: the game is still pretty much the same, but the balance has finaly been tuned to near perfection and the speed of gameplay has been considerably increased (a feature that you can customize at your will in this port). You also get combo recognition and bonuses (here's where we started seeing those "First Strike" or "Excellent!" signs popping up), new moves and graphics (some even hand-drawn, sort of a preview for SFA), a small power bar that when filled allows players to unleash a devastating super-move and of course: 5 new characters to select. These newcomers are Fei Long (the fast Bruce Lee clone); T.Hawk (a mexican wrestler); DeeJay (an easy to use jamaican kickboxer), and Capcom's attempt at following some of SNK's ideas in the form of Cammy, SF2's version of Mai Shinarui complete with skimpy outfit and bouncing boobs (yay! gotta love that fanservice!). The fifth and final character is Akuma, who needs no introduction and is also selectable thru a code in the Turbo edition.

Quite obviously you can bitch at Capcom for taking 142345 releases to come up to that, but you can't deny that they are all good additions to an already established classic game. But the real important thing here is to see how the game fared when ported to the PC, and the news is that it did exceptionally well! This is probably the first really really good conversion of an arcade videogame for the pc and it's easy to see why once you fire it up. The graphics and sounds are crispy clear and absolutely faithful to it's original arcade roots, controls are dead-on, fast and responsive, be it on keyboard or gamepad. The options and game modes are standard Capcom settings like the ones seen on the snes version of the original SF2, but one cannot really complain since they already work... So yeah: lock up the door...swallow the key...Street Fighter 2 is on the pc!

The Bad
I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I always sensed something was... different from the original version when playing it on the pc. Finally I found the answer years later on an official FAQ: the screen is re-sized!! That's why the sprites feel bigger and the stages smaller... well, at least the graphics are still fully detailed, but don't be surprised when you start feeling somewhat cramped up. There are also some missing frames of animation and stuff like that, but for the most part you won't notice them.

I also could have used more game modes, and the AI is pretty crappy.

The Bottom Line
The definitive version of the one true arcade classic, a true masterpiece of one-on-one fighting games that defined the genre and stays playable to this day. And guess what?? This time they didn't botch the conversion and the thing actually plays like in the arcade!!! Hadoken!