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 redrawn. 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 projectile 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).

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 techniques such as Ryu's Fire Hadoken, a Flaming Dragon Punch for Ken, Zangief's Atomic Buster, and M. Bison's Devil Reverse.

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

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 initial opponents, followed by the Four Devas (Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison). Because of this, not all the character featured in the game would be fought by the player. The bonus rounds from previous versions were still featured in the game.

Other new features
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.

Each character now have available eight color schemes, depending on which 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.

The faster game speed introduced in Hyper Fighting was removed and the gameplay was reduced back to the same speed level from Champion Edition.

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
Super Street Fighter II was released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis in 1994. The 16-bit console versions included additional game modes such as Group Battle, Tournament Battle and Time Challenge, as well as adjustable game speed. The game was also released for DOS in North America, the Amiga in Europe, and the X68000 and FM Towns in Japan.

Street Fighter Collection, a compilation that contains Super and Super Street Fighter II Turbo, as well as Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold, was released for the PlayStation and Saturn in 1997.

In 2000, Capcom released Super Street Fighter II X for Matching Service for the Dreamcast in Japan as a mail-order release. The Dreamcast features an online versus mode, as well as other features such as selectable Super Combo gauges and the returning of the bonus rounds from the previous Street Fighter II games.

In 2001, Capcom released Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival for the Game Boy Advance. This portable version features a simplified control configuration (due to the reduced amount of buttons in the GBA), new stages for some of the characters (some taken from the Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter III games) and revised endings and localization for all the characters.

An emulation of the arcade version of Super Street Fighter II Turbo is included in the 2006 compilation Capcom Classics Collection Volume 2 for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox.

Capcom is currently producing a downloadable online multiplayer version titled Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix for the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, featuring high definition graphics.