SNES Review 111: Super Street Fighter 2 The New Challengers

Well the last review I did was for Mortal Kombat 3 which was the third Mortal Kombat game on the SNES and today I am going to talk about another third fighting game from a series on the SNES , I am talking about Super Street Fighter 2 The New Challengers. Yes the first Street fighter on the SNES was Street fighter 2, the second was Street fighter 2 Turbo and this was the third, they wernt exactly totally new games they were like new enhanced versions. I am not the first one to mention this but back in the day we kind of came to believe that Street Fighter 3 would never happen, after all Capcom just seemed to keep making new version after new version of Street fighter 2 seemingly unable or unwilling to use the number 3, little did I know that years latter I would find myself in the same position with Street Fighter 4 seemingly getting version after version on the Xbox 360 and PS3.

I remember seeing the new characters and hearing about them long before I ever got to play the game the two that particularly excited my friends and me were Fei Long and Cammy, the truth was no one was particularly excited for T-Hawk as none of us tended to use the bigger slower guys and DeeJay just didn't seem appealing, all of us were interested in the introduction of a second female character especially because she would be an actual British character, finally we had a character who came from where we did. We also really liked the idea of pitting what was basically Bruce Lee in all but name against the fireball throwing likes of Ryu and Ken. In honesty once the game arrived I used T-Hawk very little although I did enjoy DeeJay as a character a lot more than I thought I would. We all wanted the same things from the new version and that was more more and even more. When Super Street Fighter 2 hit the arcades and we got to have a bash there was some sense of disappointment with the fact that it ran slower than Turbo and Hyper Fighting's top speeds on the SNES and Mega Drive and the SNES port also ends up not being as fast at its fastest speeds as those games but I don't see this as being an issue now at all, in honesty I think when Turbo and Hyper Fighting are ramped up to there top speeds they actually run so fast that some of the playability is lost and it becomes a bit of a mess, so this is not something that bothers me these days in the slightest. Some people debate the fact that Super Street Fighter 2 is slower on the SNES mentioning the fact that you can increase the speed and claiming its top speed is similar or equal to turbo and although yes you can change the speed and make it faster no it does not become as fast as turbo, if your after raw speed then this is not the Street Fighter 2 for you.

The main mode is your typical arcade mode just like the previous versions of Street Fighter II you pick your warrior and then go on to defeat twelve others in order to see your fighters ending. Now most of you reading this will have realised that I said defeat twelve others when there are sixteen fighters in the game, basically you don't fight every single character, you fight 8 different characters and then you fight the four bosses with Bison being the last one as per usual. Your fights are also broken up with bonus stages you know the one where you get to smash up some poor dudes car (and others) what with the vehicle destruction in both the Street Fighter games and Final Fight I think Capcom really likes giving you the chance to punch auto-mobiles. Along with the four new characters came four new stages one for each of their home countries, this wasnt all though the older characters weren't just left as they were, nope many of them received new moves, new animations and balance related tweaks, the graphics also seem a little brighter and crisper in my honest opinion.

OK so I gave world Warrior 8 out of 10 and then I Gave Turbo 8.5 out of 10 and as I have already said I see The New Challengers as an even better game or at least version of a game so I guess I have backed myself into the corner of giving this game a 9 out of 10. In all honesty this is just about as fine a fighting game as you could get on the SNES hardware, should you buy it though? Well that all depends how much you want to spend, it is on the Virtual Console for around £8 so that is an option, if you want an actual cart though so you can play it on its original hardware then your looking at paying around £30 for a European Cart, if you can play imports you might be able to find a Japanese copy for around £10 to £15 which is what I own. In comparison I recently grabbed Street Fighter 5 for £15, so it all depends on if your wanting to collect it as a retro game or just play some Street Fighter.