As a child, this was probably the most anticipated game release I can actually remember and it was met with such insurmountable enthusiasm that finally the Street Fighter franchise was going to be coming out on Sega systems. We’re talking seriously banking of years’ worth of pocket money/birthday money/xmas money to get ready for, what was back in the day, a monolith of a game. Eighteen years later I’ve come back to it from a nostalgia perspective to see if it’s aged at all well, and in all honesty, yes it has and the best part is that it’s exactly how I remember it. The other groundbreaking fact with this version compared to the SNES version was that you could “be” the bosses. Yes you could play as Balrog, Vega, Sagat and M.Bison! SNES subsequently released Street Fighter 2 Turbo, but this was the game all Sega fans were waiting for.

The thing that made SF2 such a world leader in the beat em’ genre was the sheer fluidity of the actual game. It didn’t pretend to be anything more than it was, a game whereby you mercilessly beat the crap out of another fighter. This was also the game that really brought a sense of humanity to button mashing, especially if you were playing as Blanka or Honda. I personally was one of those kids who memorised the moves with lethal precision. The smoothness for the majority of the special moves was of compliment to itself with the exception of that stupid piledriver Zangief had but the real advantage of the Mega Drive version was the 6-button Sega pad. This made it an asset to any Street Fighter fan because even to this day, it’s the best d-pad on any controller I’ve ever played. Shoryukens, Yoga Flames and Hadoukens were a joy to pull off and you didn’t spend the whole time miss hitting specials like some absolute noob. You genuinely felt like you were in complete control of the character, and several iterations later to today, you don’t still have that sense of control.

The difficulty curve was always set pretty high by default and you had to complete the game at least on that to get the characters’ ending. Suffice to say half the characters I never actually managed to complete it with because in all honesty, M.Bison at the end was a bloody pig! He was tough as nails! On harder difficulties there was more evidence from the computer characters of move spamming, for example Bison has hit me with over 14 Psycho Crushers in one round before which I suppose a more mature perspective will cherish that as a challenge. Everyone else like myself just thinks that the computer cheats!

So in summation, this version of SF2 has aged well and certainly plays more fluidly than all the Xbox Live conversions which have arisen in recent years. If your Mega Drive still works, you can get a cheap copy of this game, and I recommend you go and have a bloody good time with it.

SF2:CE...yes you can "be" the bosses!!