Super Street Fighter II Turbo

1994, an arcade in the basement of a shopping mall. A queue at one machine, while five others stand empty next to it. The busy one is running Street Fighter II. I'm standing behind a kid playing Ken, throwing him at Blanka, and wondering if I have enough left at home for the bus. A year later, I was playing the same thing at home, on PC, with a Logitech joystick that would slide across the table under pressure.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo came out in 1994 on arcade machines, and the MS-DOS port arrived in 1995. Capcom was churning out iterations of Street Fighter II with a tenacity that would make today's seasonal pass publishers blush. The original Street Fighter II gradually grew through Champion Edition, Hyper Fighting, Super, and Super Turbo — each version added characters, rebalanced mechanics, and tweaked the graphics slightly. Turbo brought Akumu difficulty to the series, which is almost sadistic, and the character Akuma — then a half-hidden boss whispered about among classmates like a state secret.

The PC port is functional, but with an asterisk. Keyboard controls are a nightmare — six-button fighting games and four directions on the numeric keypad don't mix by nature. With a gamepad or joystick it gets better, but even then it's not arcade-perfect. Special moves land roughly half the time, which wasn't unusual for console ports of that era, but it stings here because the rest of the game is otherwise solid. Graphics and sound are surprisingly decent for a 1995 PC port — noticeably below the SNES version, but recognizable.

What still works about this game is its backbone. Fifteen characters, each with a different fighting style, no two interchangeable. Zangief plays nothing like Dhalsim, Guile plays nothing like Blanka — back when a lot of the competition offered reskinned clones with the same moves. Turbo mode, which sped up the entire game, brought different combat dynamics than the slower Super version. What aged poorly is what was a problem even back then: the AI opponents cheat in ways that aren't a challenge, they're just annoying. M. Bison in the tournament's fourth round reads inputs in a way that deserves its own folk legend.

These days you'll play this version mainly out of curiosity or nostalgia — the SNES or Saturn port offers a better experience, or grab one of the later HD remastered editions. But if you grew up on PC versions or want to see how Capcom ported its arcade gold to DOS, it has its place. As a document of its time, it's interesting. As a fighting game to play today — your fingers will get chewed up on the keyboard, and that's not metaphorical.