Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting Review

I’m pretty sure I’ve single-handedly funded a few of Capcom’s founding father’s children through college. I along with the rest of the world dropped way too many quarters into Street Fighter II when it debuted in arcades. For my close circle of friends, it replaced the coin toss, choosing instead to duke it out as martial arts god’s for the timeless argument of who would win in a fight of Mario versus sonic the hedgehog. Although the game was delayed multiple times, the fervor pitch surrounding it’s release could not have been louder as the game has already sold a staggering amount out of the gate. The question that begs to be asked of course is whether or not the game still has any fight left in it?

Street Fighter’s strong point has always been it’s multiplayer component, and this trend continues with the Xbox Live Arcade version of Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting (SFII: HF). Versus friends online, my experience has been rock solid net code while in game with a few connection issues when re-connecting to the lobby. It seems the host needs a very big pipe to host this game, otherwise thing’s can take a nose dive and people will get dropped from the game. I host on a FIOS connection and thus far, I’ve not experienced most of these problems when hosting the game myself. I’ve only encountered it when playing on other people’s connection.

As far as game play is concerned, it’s really the same great game it always has been with no glaring omissions if any. The cries of cheapness are back with the same intensity as before, but really that only makes defeating certain characters all the more worthwhile. Although the game does carry a stark contrast between novices and pro’s as this is not a particularly newbie friendly game. Don’t expect to hand out any serious punishment until each characters move set is crisply ingrained in your mind. Despite the learning curve, most players should adept quite easily.

The single player affair suffers from an extremely aggressive AI that takes counters flawlessly every move you attempt to throw. Whenever I win I never feel like I deserved too, instead I either got lucky or spammed a cheap move to death. It’s really the opposite of fun and only serves a minor distraction to the multiplayer component.

This port is a faithful adaptation of a wonderful classic, easily worth the $10 entry fee. I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed throwing fireballs at my friends. Hadouken!!!

Two Thumbs Straight Up!