Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers

Super Street Fighter II - The New Challengers (スーパーストリートファイターⅡ) is a fighting game produced by Capcom originally released as an arcade game in 1993. It is the fourth arcade version of Street Fighter II produced, following the original Street Fighter II, Street Fighter II': Champion Edition, and Street Fighter II': Hyper Fighting. It was also Capcom's first game for the CP System II hardware, allowing for the inclusion of new graphics and audio over the previous versions. In addition to refining and balancing the existing character roster from the previous installments, Super Street Fighter II also introduced four new characters.

Super Street Fighter II was followed by Super Street Fighter II Turbo, a fifth version of Street Fighter II released in 1994, which further refined the balance between characters and introduced additional new features.

Graphics and sounds
Most of the graphics from the previous Street Fighter II games were either redrawn or recolored. All of the stages, face artwork, and the HUD feature all new graphics. The original opening sequence which featured two generic martial artists fighting in front of a crowd was replaced by a new opening featuring Ryu launching a Hadoken towards the screen.

New animation frames were drawn for all the characters for their basic and special moves, as well as new victory poses. For example, all four boss characters now have new animation frames for basic attacks (Vega and Sagat did not have jumping punches in the previous games), while Chun-Li now has a new animation for her Kikoken projectile technique. The music and sound effects were also remade and new voice samples were recorded for some of the characters (i.e: Ryu and Ken were given different voices).

Each character had available eight color schemes, depending on which button was pushed to select the character. Players could choose between a character's original color scheme, their color schemes from Champion Edition and Hyper Fighting, or one of five new color schemes featured in the game.

Characters
All twelve characters from the previous Street Fighter II games returned, with many them having their basic and special techniques refined in order to adjust the overall balance. Some of the characters received new special attacks and animations, such as Ryu's Shakunetsu Hadoken, Ken's flaming heavy Shoryuken for Ken, and M. Bison's Devil Reverse.

Four new characters (T. Hawk, Cammy, Fei-Long, and Dee Jay) were introduced to the game in addition to the returning roster, expanding the number of playable characters to sixteen.

The number of opponents fought in the single-player mode against the computer remained unchanged. As in the previous game, the player fought against eight random initial opponents, followed by the four bosses (Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison). Because of this, not all the characters featured in the game would be fought by the player. The bonus rounds from previous versions were still featured in the game, though their order was altered due to the increased number of foes faced.

Gameplay
Super Street Fighter II features a new scoring system which kept track of combos, first attacks, reversals and recoveries made by the player and awards the player with bonus points by performing such deeds.

Another improvement from previous games was the reversal, allowing quick recovery into an attack after landing on the ground or blocking, thus negating the opportunity in previous incarnations of "ticking" one's opponent (i.e., hitting an opponent with a light attack and immediately throwing during their block animation. This was notable against large character such as E. Honda).

The faster game speed introduced in Hyper Fighting was removed and the gameplay is tweakable by pushing the control stick left or right at the title screen, between 1 to 4 stars, with four being the fastest.

New Dizzy animations were also added (such as angels and reapers). Grim Reapers signified a dizzy that would be difficult to recover from, stars or birds represented a standard recovery time dizzy, and angels represented a dizzy that could be escaped from quickly.

Other subtle changes took place with most of the characters: new moves were added and parameters of the moves were altered, generally making the game more balanced than its previous iterations.

The number of "re-dizzy" combos were greatly reduced. Such combos involve executing an unblockable combination on a dizzied character that results in the target character becoming dizzy again.

Tournament Battle
In addition to the standard single and two-player game modes, Super Street Fighter II also feature an exclusive eight-player single-elimination tournament mode dubbed Tournament Battle. This mode is only available when four Super Street Fighter II arcade game cabinets are connected together and all of them configured to "Tournament" mode. The Tournament Mode consists of three sets of four simultaneous matches: the initial eliminations, the semifinals and the finals. After the first set is over, the players are re-arranged accordingly based on their position: the winning players sent to either of the first two cabinets, whereas losing players sent to one of the other two. In the finals, the players competing for first place are sent to the first cabinet, the third-place players to the second cabinet, and so on.

Ports
Unlike most other fighting games that were also originally released in arcades, then ported to home consoles with significant changes and missing some features due to hardware limitations, the home ports of the Street Fighter II games usually retained a lot of the same content the original arcade versions had. However, these ports still had differences in comparison to the original, and depending on the version, some are near arcade perfect (good examples being the CD ports) while others have different looking graphics and different sound effects (the 16-bit versions).


 * Sega Genesis - This version included Super Battle (Arcade Mode), Versus Battle, Time Challenge, Tournament Battle and Group Battle. On this port, the character portraits in the continue screen lack any animation, being still images. All the sounds from the arcade game are here, but are a lot quiet sounding when compared to other versions. Also, the voice samples in this port are more chunkier sounding than in the others. A feature exclusive to this port is the option to select the number of characters faced in Super Battle Mode: Normal (12 opponents including the bosses, and bonus stages) and Expert (all 16 opponents and no bonus stages).


 * Super Nintendo - This version is a lot like the Genesis version, only with a few differences. This port features the same exact modes, amd the options menu is the same as well, with the exception of the option to choose between Stereo and Mono output, which is exclusive to this version. The music plays faster than in the Genesis and, along with the voice samples, sounds better and clearer. The man and woman that were missing on Guile's stage in previous SNES versions of SFII are included in this one. Another interesting note about this port is the characters' loss portraits: while mostly the same as the original arcade edition, the blood is recolored to a greyish/white color, due to Nintendo's strict non-violence policy during the early 90's.


 * Dreamcast - In Japan only, Capcom released Super Street Fighter II X for Matching Service in 2000. It was released as a mail order release on Dreamcast Direct. This version featured an online versus mode, as well as other features such as selectable Super Combo gauges and the return of the bonus rounds from the original Street Fighter II games.


 * PlayStation - This version was included on a game compilation titled Street Fighter Collection, along with Super Street Fighter II Turbo and Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold. On this edition, the only thing that makes this version different from the arcade are the loading times.


 * Game Boy Advance - In 2001 Capcom released Street Fighter II Turbo Revival. Because of the number of buttons on the handheld system, this version features a simplified control scheme configuration. Some stages were redrawn, and some were taken from the Street Fighter III and Street Fighter Alpha games. The endings for all characters were also redone, too.


 * Playstation 2/XBOX - 2006 saw the release of Capcom Classics Collection 2, another compilation of Capcom games which contains an emulated version of the arcade version.