Street Fighter II

The Good
The graphics are pretty good for the Super Nintendo, I especially like the very detailed backgrounds that have actual animations. The fighters look pretty good as well and you can clearly who and what they are (except for Blanka, I have no idea what he is supposed to be).

The game requires a certain amount of strategy and you have to understand all the different moves the characters can perform. I know so because I played it and I sucked horribly. I am new to the Super Nintendo, so my first reaction was to tap random buttons like a monkey in a space simulator. Randomly tapping buttons or spamming the few attacks you do know will get you so far, but it won't help you beat the entire game.

The settings in which you fight are all very nice and varied even though Japan shows up quite a lot, the same goes for the fighter although (oddly enough) there aren't any Japanese in the roster. Who would you like to play as; the Indian guy with elastic arms, the schoolgirl with upper legs you can only get from bicycle pumps, the overconfident sumo wrestler/torpedo or the Green Goblin? There are roughly a dozen characters you can play as and every single one of them has his or her own map.

This game is a guaranteed favorite on parties (although the guy who plays as Dhalsim is going to end up with so many feet up his ass that he'll be coughing up shoelaces for three months), it's fast, it's chaotic and it's a lot of memorable fun. There is also a lot of satisfaction to be found in pulling off one of the special moves and making everybody go "wow".

There is an options menu where you can change quite a lot of the settings, even the difficulty can be changed (you can even put it on zero).

The Bad
I just really suck at fighting games, Super Smash Bros. aside, I just can't figure out how to play them. Each character has his or her own moves and you have to study all these special moves, people keep recommending me to use a joystick which is even more confusing then the normal SNES controller and that schoolgirl keeps kicking my butt. The only way I managed to make it as far as I did was to take Dhalsim and stick to the corners where I just spammed punches and kicks.

The game is all about travelling around the world and challenging fighters, but the design of the map and the locations of all the countries is completely cocked up. Here is a quick geography lesson; Brazil isn't located in Australia, There is only one Japan and America isn't an island in the sea above Japan.

The Bottom Line
This review is very hard for me to write because I just don't know what a good fighting game is supposed to look like. My only experience with them is from playing Super Smash Bros. which is so unique in it's gameplay that you can't use it as a proper comparison. I had fun with Street Fighter II, so the average gamer might have the same. Fans of the genre will sadly have to find their consumer advice somewhere else.