Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers

Thoughts by Tapuak (22 Feb 2001) – SNES

Definitely a true classic – it’s the one and only fighting game. I decided to review this part of the series because somehow it brought the 2D-fighting game to perfection. Some years after the quite amateurish slot-machine game Streetfighter the second part appeared for every existing computer system, even for the then already aged C64. After a short time the Turbo-version came out and also the Super Street Fighter II-version, which I’m going to review here.

As the name implies it’s more an expansion of the regular second part. All available fighters and scenery appear and they are supplemented by more so now you have a total of 16 characters to choose from. Commonly spread clichés have been faithfully converted implemented: The Asian is small, the ‘American’ cool and the Russian a big, bad guy. Everyone who wants to find some support for his prejudices will be happy with this game.

You can easily guess in which points the respective fighters are different because there aren’t too many variations possible. It’s the well known mix of fat and strong characters and the small and quick fighters, represented by typical figures like the Sumo wrestler Honda and the Kung-Fu master Fei Long. Then there are the Jack-of-all-trades like the ‘Army’ soldier Guile. There’s not much else in between and so the true abilities depend on the applicability of the actions and the available Special Moves of a fighter – the fireballs, electro shocks and human rockets make the difference.

However, you shouldn’t overestimate these Special Moves as in the first place the various standard attacks like the jump kick or the throws are important in fights because actually they are more effective and much easier to do.

This game earns the right to be called SUPER Streetfighter by its numerous playing modes. Besides the normal mode where you fight all opponents in a row you can even play tournaments with up to 8 human contenders and other variations.

Super Streetfighter II is well playable for everyone as you can set different difficulty levels and handicaps. Only the controls are somewhat difficult at the start; so first you should stick with one fighter and learn all his moves. A positive aspect is that most standard moves require the same actions with all fighters so you don’t have to start all over again when you choose another one.

All in all I daresay that the digital ‘cockfighting’ has reached perfection – I can hardly imagine any improvements.

Thoughts by Mr Creosote (21 Apr 2017) – Amiga (AGA)

Getting arcade ports to home computers right has always been hard. The hardware is usually fundamentally different and conventions are as well. The more customized the arcade machine is, the harder the port. The original Street Fighter II Amiga port had been widely criticized for lack of speed (and controls with a standard joystick, of course). At least, it had retained the large sprites, however.

Super Street Fighter II, as it is commonly known, is the same game all over again, with a couple of completely new fighters added to the mix and original bosses having become playable characters. It originally used a widescreen aspect ratio. Which, surprisingly enough has been retained in the Amiga port. Which comes at the expense of the screen estate which is actually used being tiny: large black bars grace the top and bottom of the screen. Which implicitly makes the sprites quite small as well.

So maybe this was done to address the common criticism and indeed, the action is somewhat more fluid than in the first port. Favouring playability over presentation, what’s not to appreciate? Indeed; if it were like this.

As far as scaling down controls using many buttons to few, Super Street Fighter II goes a different way than previously established. Instead of overloading joystick directional movement and button pressing to trigger all moves, it uses the shift key on the keyboard to switch between kicks and punches. Which means when playing with a regular joystick, you need to have your left hand on the keyboard the whole time and can only use the right one for actual control. Newsflash: joysticks are usually unusable one-handed. What could still work would be simply sacrificing half of the moves and decide to go for either kicks or punches – if the kick/punch mode didn’t switch around at random! In summary, without a two-button joystick, this game is unplayable.

It is only appropriate that sound is a total joke. Hardly anything can be heard at all, and if it is, you will wish that it went away again. Playing from floppies is also only possible in theory, as switching and loading times get totally out of hand. Graphics aren’t just small, but don’t even use the available colours and backgrounds lost their animations. Sorry, this is a really shoddy port of an originally good game!