The 1994 FM Towns version of Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers is a port of the popular Capcom arcade fighting game of 1993. It is the fourth game in the Street Fighter II sub-series, with four new fighters, adding to the existing roster of twelve characters from The World Warrior.

The twelve existing fighters from The World Warrior are: Balrog, Blanka, Chun Li, Dhalsim, E. Honda, Guile, Ken, M. Bison, Ryu, Sagat, Vega and Zangief, and the four “New Challengers” are: T. Hawk – a Native American warrior from Mexico; Fei Long – a Hong Kong movie star and martial arts expert (ie. a Bruce Lee clone); Dee Jay – a kickboxing musician from Jamaica; and Cammy – a 19-year-old special forces agent from England with a mysterious past tied to M. Bison. It’s worth noting that the names of M. Bison, Balrog and Vega are the Japanese versions and not the Western versions, which might confuse those who don’t know they were changed.

The FM Towns version of Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers features four game modes: Super Battle, Vs Battle, Tournament, and Trace Battle. The first, “Super Battle”, is basically the same as a regular tournament in The World Warrior, with one or two players fighting in a match of best-of-three rounds, with the winner staying in the game and proceeding to face computer-controlled versions of all the other fighters until they’re beaten. The second, “Vs Battle”, is a simple two-player versus match where you can set a handicap for human players, or even watch two computer-controlled fighters duke it out. The third, “Tournament”, is a competition where you select eight fighters who then compete in a series of one-round knockout matches in order to determine their ranking. The fighter placed first is crowned the champion. The fourth and final game mode is “Trace Battle”, which allows one or two players to set up custom matches that are recorded by the game and can be played back as replays. These replays can even be saved to disk and re-loaded later. I guess it’s a good way to study your fights, or just admire your own skills… It’s an interesting addition to the game, whatever it’s meant to be used for.

Super Street Fighter II refines and balances the existing character roster from previous versions of the game (introducing a few new moves for certain characters), and also features a new scoring system that tracks combos, first attacks, reversals, and recoveries, and awards bonus points accordingly. As you play you’ll see on-screen messages that indicate when you pull these off.

In the “Set Up” menu you can adjust the difficulty level and speed of games; the display mode, and there’s also a cool colour editing tool that you can use to customize all the fighters and save them to floppy disk for later re-loading.

Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers on the FM Towns features fantastic graphics, sound and gameplay. All the fighters are identical to the arcade version and move around perfectly smoothly, and the controls are responsive and pretty much faultless. The only thing missing from the arcade version is the parallax scrolling of the backgrounds, but it’s not something you’d notice without studying both versions side by side.

Overall, this is a superb conversion of the arcade game and yet another excellent iteration of the classic Street Fighter II.

More: Super Street Fighter II on Wikipedia