Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo DOS

Guess how many FPS your 486 got running Street Fighter on DOS. The answer was always the same: just enough to be playable, not enough to be smooth. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo on PC was that slice of gaming that made you feel justified keeping a computer in your living room instead of a three-piece suite, and it felt like downloading an arcade cabinet update straight to your hard drive.

It's a port of the original arcade fighter from the Street Fighter lineage that rewrote the rules of fighting games in the nineties. You play as one of twelve fighters with different techniques and styles, facing off eight times against the toughest opponents in the tournament. Movement, punches, kicks, special attacks — it's all here, but surprisingly lightweight and without pretending to match the original arcade.

The graphics are a pixelated carbon copy of the arcade, just smaller and less detailed — a painful loss, but you got used to it well enough. You can tell the characters apart, the arenas have the right color palette, but when a fighter moves, you feel like several frames are missing from each animation. Sound is decent — hits thud, special attacks have personality, the music respects the original soundtrack, just sounds a hundred hertz lower. Controls work without fuss, but you're relying purely on reflexes when you've got one button for punch and one for kick instead of three levels of strength.

It was pioneering audacity — squeezing one of gaming's biggest hits onto a computer that everyone had sitting around at home. Looking back, you realize it was a compromise everyone respected. On DOS in the mid-nineties, there was nothing better you could throw at your screen with six buttons and the ambition to play a fighter without lag and delay.

Today it's more of a reminder than a game you'd lose sleep over. The mechanics are simple, the AI isn't particularly devious, and the character control lacks that final polish. If you want to recall what people played in households back when polygons were the future and sprite art made up the real world, it's a playable memorial. Fire it up in an emulator in your browser, play for a minute, and then some modern fighting game with fifty more mechanics will pull you back in — the one that promised everything Street Fighter 2 did.