Recognized as one of the best games of all time, Street Fighter® II' Hyper Fighting defined the fighting genre. Now on Xbox Live Arcade, it's completely revamped with HDTV support, Achievements, Leaderboards, and multiplayer over Xbox Live. Street Fighter II - The World Warrior (910214 Japan) 6 11 5. Embed Code Add to Favorite. You may be interested in: Start Game. Arkanoid (bootleg.

Ever stood in front of a mirror and performed that classic karate move; the reverse punch? The one where you start with one arm outstretched, the other resting on your hip and then, with an explosion of power, you thrust your back fist forward while withdrawing the other to your waist. If you grew up in the '70s you probably have. While boys in the mid-'8os ran around firing a barrage of bullets from imaginary Uzis at invisible foes a la Arnie, Sly, Dolph, the '70s child's imaginary fight scenario was altogether different. Finding himself surrounded by muscle-bound hoodlums, the preferred method of escape was to leap 40 feet into the air, shout something like 'Haiii-Chaii' at the top of his voice and rotate by 360 degrees with an outstretched leg taking the heads off all and sundry. This was the time when kids turned up to metalwork class with the express purpose of making Kung Fu throwing stars. This was the golden era of martial arts.

In the caring '90s. children's penchant for action movies and games has come under fire from child psychologists who link the growth in violent crime perpetrated by adolescents to a youthful diet of violent film and video games. This debate has been fuelled recently by the complaints over the release of Mortal Kombat, a vicious beat 'em-up where, amongst other things, you can rip the heads off your victims and expose all manner of squidgy internal piping. So what better time for us Gold to bring the black belt of all karate bruisers, Street Fighter 2, to the pc.

Everybody was Kung Fu fighting

Street Fighter II is the definitive in your face, kicking, slashing, slapping, spinning, fingers up nostrils, knee caps knocked down legs fight game. As with any Kung Fu film, it needs a plot to put the violence in some context. Eight of the world's meanest nut jobs have entered a duffin' up tournament to win the chance to take on the baddest dudes ever - the Grand Masters. Why would they want to do this? Because each of these ne'er do wells has a desperate personality disorder that has alienated them from society and left them with a desire to beat the shit out of anything that gets in their way. Complex? Nah. But it's action we want.

And action Is what we get

You choose one of eight characters and. playing in one player mode, travel the world jobbing the other computer-controlled seven on their home turf. Matches are fought over the best of three bouts; if you win, points are awarded according to how quickly you mashed your foe and how few times you took a pounding yourself. Once the seven fighters have been humiliated, you move on to the four Grand Masters and tot up that high score.

Just for kicks

With an average of about 20 different moves per character, frantic wobbling of the joystick and mental button slapping will win most bouts at the easiest levels, but at higher levels a true mastery of your character's abilities is required. This means perfecting the 'special moves' that will cause your opponents obscene amounts of cbh. All characters can perform the karate staple of forward flips, roundhouse kicks, chops and so on but each has a few moves, like Hurricane Kick, Sumo Head Butt and Yoga Flame, that will take the concentration of a buddhist to pull off on your joystick or keyboard.

And here lies the problem with Street Fighter's move from the nes to the pc. Keyboards aren't much cop for a game of this intensity: four bouts and you're virtually arthritic. A joystick is fine for simple operations, but you really need a two button affair to handle some of the special moves, and the calibration on these things is always awkward, so you spend ages attempting a combination of four different movements which results merely in a poxy backward flip. A joypad is the answer, but not that many pc owners have one.

Job your mate

Taking on the computer is necessary to build up skill and mastery of the martial arts. Regardless of all that pap about karate experts being pacifists and only using their skills to channel their physical and mental energies to reach a higher plane of consciousness, it's no use being an expert unless you can you can use your art against a human opponent. So two player mode is the best and most fun option. Players can fight as any one of the eight main characters, and a handicap function allows you to adjust the damage inflicted by punches and kicks, so you can play completely inept friends and not get bored.The backdrop to the brawls can be chosen from ten different settings - the best one being Las Vegas, where all the onlookers look like Starsky's pal Huggy Bear. Sadly, the background is purely decorative, offering no movement or jeering from the crowds. The sound effects are also poor, digitised beeps that make you feel like a Morse code operator. These games need 'Argghhs' and 'Urghhs' from the competitors, and shouts of Go on 'it 'im' and 'Let's 'ave it then' from the crowd.

As far as mindless violence, addictive gameplay and stunning graphics go. Street Fighter II is the genuine article (and though not a masterpiece like the snes version, it's a good representation if you can get hold of a joypad). And we won't be seeing Mortal Kombat on pc for some time. But who needs all that gore anyway; Street Fighter II won't have you swimming in claret and there's no sense of fatality. You can pile driver someone's head into the concrete, launch both knees into their solar plexus, and finish them off with a deft head stomp, but once the fight's over all your opponent will have is a bloody nose.

A game for those of us who dream of walking with an arrogant swagger through the most dangerous urban jungle, in the knowledge that a deft reverse punch and roundhouse kick would put any assailant out for the count. So it's really a game to let us wimps bravely take on merciless killers, and when the going gets tough, just 'Quit to dos' and go to bed.

Ian Rose:

Street Fighter II' Turbo: Hyper Fighting - (1992)

There were a number of games in the marketplace that were arguably copycat versions of Street Fighter 2. And of course, I don't think Street Fighter 2 could have claimed to have completely originated the fighting game per se, but there were a couple of games, and Fighter's History was one of them, that had a lot of very close copying of the joystick movements that translated into character movements and so on. So I think the chairman, [Kenzo] Tsujimoto, was the one who ultimately decided that the company needed to go after somebody to kind of make an example and deter further copying.

Akira Nishitani:

Fighter's History was pretty similar, and during that time a lot of people would come up to people at Capcom, come up to Mr. Tsujimoto, and say, 'Are you sure you're going to let this go? You can't really let this go. This is really bad.'

Ian Rose:

Street Fighter 26

Street Fighter 2 Turbo

This was during a legal era when there were a number of copyright so-called 'look and feel' cases. ... And this was kind of a defining era in terms of what the courts were going to uphold as copyright infringement.