Street Fighter II was one of those games you just knew was special when you first saw it. I distinctly remember watching a pair of adults discuss the game while feeding the machine quarters and clearing it with Dhalsim all the way back in 1991.

Super Street Fighter II, which was released in the arcades in 1993 and ported to the SFC and MD in 1994, represented the very height of Street Fighter Mania in the mid nineties. 1994 saw the release of this port, the Jean Claude Van Damme film, the anime movie, and the arcade version of what many consider the best Street Fighter game ever made, Super Street Fighter II X.

The MD version of Super Street Fighter is the second released version of the series on the system after Special Champion Edition, but actually the third game developed (a vanilla Champion Edition version was set for release in April 1993, but never saw the light of day for various reasons). The story of this version is actually quite interesting as detailed by Hidden Palace when they released the beta of the intended first version for the MD.

This port is in turn a port of the SFC versions of Street Fighter II and is actually pretty decent as it plays just as well as the arcade version, and thus, is an excellent game by default. It is, of course, not as colourful as its SFC original, but it is one of the better looking fighting games on the system. Visually, when viewed on a CRT, the game still pops but unfortunately, the sound is a complete mess. While the hacks that try to resolve the palettes are inessential, as I feel the hackers are trying to make it look better via emulation and on a LCD, the sound driver fixes go a long way to resolve the poor sample playback. Originally, the game has an extremely quiet, muffled and distorted sound quality - but with this hack, at least the garbled samples are cured of their distortion.

Also of note is that this is the largest MD cartridge released officially at 40Mb (5 MegaBytes), which means that is used bank switching as the MD was only ever designed to address 32Mb ROMs. So, it has that extra novelty factor going for it :).

What is fun also about the import MD version is that it comes with a lot of cool inserts promoting additional joysticks as well as the anime movie. Please enjoy these shots as well as a few CRT/PVM pics.