In the early nineties, Capcom released Street Fighter II in arcades all over the world. The game was an immediate success and became the undisputed king of the 2D fighting genre. To commemorate the 15th anniversary of its release, Capcom developed and published the “Street Fighter Anniversary Collection” for both Xbox and PlayStation 2.

The anniversary release features two games, a new Street Fighter II edition dubbed “Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition” and the arcade port of “Street Fighter III: Third Strike”. The Anniversary edition is an amalgamation of the five different versions of Street Fighter II that were released throughout the 1990s. Still, gamers who are looking for a little nostalgia will be disappointed to find out that the original “Street Fighter II” video game isn’t included in the package, and neither is the first game in the series.

In Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition, you can choose to play any of the characters featured in the five variations of the game. In essence, this means a classic character like Chun-Li will have five different versions of herself with various attributes from all of the game’s iterations. It’s quite interesting to compare a first generation character to a fifth generation counterpart. The older version of the character will be slower and limited in his abilities, while the more recent version will be faster and will have a better arsenal of moves, but won’t be as powerful as his original incarnation.

One of the most disappointing aspects of Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition is that you’ll only be able to square-off against fifth-generation characters (from the “Super Street Fighter II Turbo” game) in single player mode. Thanks to Capcom’s swell thinking, this can make the single-player game quite unbalanced as the fifth-generation A.I. can be unforgiving and extremely difficult at times. Newcomers will more than likely be overwhelmed by the game’s difficulty level. Read more…

The “For the Gamer” column is a weekly article that I write for [here] magazine based out of New Brunswick, Canada.