Street FIghter II: The World Warrior on the VC lets younger gamers experience a true pioneer of modern gaming.
GAMEPLAY
The players will have eight characters available for matches: Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Guile, Zangief, Blanka, E. Honda, and Dhalsim; each fighter offers a unique fighting style and a handful of special attacks that they can call their own. Regardless of which fighter you choose the arcade mode asks you to defeat the other seven. Once you beat them, you will be allowed to fight the top four warriors of Shadowloo: Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and their leader, M. Bison. If you have any experience in Street Fighter then most of the arcade mode should be a cake walk aside from Bison. The gameplay is pretty fun, but I can't help but feeling it is lacking a lot thanks to modern fighting games; what it had as revolutionary back in the day is seen as pretty basic by today's standards. Don't get me wrong it's an great game, but it is nowhere near the likes of later SF games like Alpha 3 and 3rd Strike.
GRAPHICS/SOUND
The graphics are mind-boggling for their era; huge, detailed character sprites and the luscious backdrops for each character add to the mood of the game. Just looking back at the steel cage in Vega's castle and the industrial park in Zangief's homeland of Russia make you really appreciate the amount of work that goes into the artwork of the average fighting game. World Warrior's soundtrack captured the personality and traits of each fighter, and above all they rock hard (especially give Ryu's and Chun-Li's stages a good listen). The SNES's superior sound capabilities over other consoles at the time were as close to the arcades as you could come in those times.
VALUE/CONCLUSION
At 800 points, World Warrior is a reasonable buy, but to get the best experience out of it you should go pick up a Classic Controller or two; the GC controller just won't cut it here. Unfortunately this game has been made virtually obsolete on the VC with the release of Hyper Fighting this past week, and now with a superior Street Fighter game available I doubt many people outside the hardcore fighter crowd will consider a purchase of it. Street FIghter II: The World Warrior on the VC lets younger gamers experience a true pioneer of modern gaming. It's a nice trip down memory lane, but with later SF iterations on the way to the Wii most gamers will likely miss out on this classic.