Tech: Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix

The first "Street Fighter" game I ever played regularly was a dilapidated "Street Fighter II: Championship Edition" cabinet in "The Palace" roller skating rink's arcade. I had dabbled with the original version of "Street Fighter II" in arcades before, but I had never seen an a machine with such obscenely high traffic. Some years later, I picked up the original SFII cartridge for the SNES, but it just wasn't the same:



It's now 16 years later, and the latest, final version of SFII is upon us - "Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix" for the XBLA and the PSN:



This is pretty much the ultimate version of "Street Fighter II." It's old-school 2D fighting - no parries, no air blocking, just good old down-and-dirty SFII action. The game's been rebalanced by tournament player David Sirlin (check this page out for all the changes). Some characters have received fairly significant upgrades (T. Hawk actually works now, sorta), but everybody's been tweaked at least a little bit.


Then there's the window dressing. New HD sprites and backgrounds, remixed music and voices (Guile sounds a lot better in particular), and even a up-rezzed interface demonstrate that the makers of SS2THDR weren't just throwing out a lackluster port. The new graphics might not be to everyone's taste (they have a little bit of the anime/Alpha sensibility courtesy of UDON Entertainment, the producers of the SFII comic books), but the game as a whole looks great.


The real miracle, though, is the netcode. For the most part, online matches in SSF2THDR don't suffer from significant input lag or random drops. You can easily sit down for an hour and play two dozen matches in a row against two dozen different opponents - something that only happened in a very crowded arcade back in the '90s.

The only thing holding the package back a bit is the lack of new features - all that's included for your $15 download is a basic single player arcade mode, a training mode, and local/Xbox Live matches. Some "making-of" stuff or bonus game modes (car-smashing minigame, anyone?) would have rounded out the package. There's also the awful Xbox 360 d-pad to contend with, but that's not the game's fault.

Rating: 92/100