Street Fighter II: The World Warrior

Street Fighter 2 is the port of the arcade title that popularized the fighting game genre. The game was developed and published by Capcom and was the first in a long running series of Street Fighter 2 titles and updates. This version of the game was Capcom's best selling title for nearly 16 years. The success caused Nintendo to launch a version of the SNES with Street Fighter 2 as a pack-in title.

The game features 8 playable characters, 7 of which must be beaten before the player can challenge the 4 bosses. Playable characters include: Ryu, Ken, E.Honda, Chun-Li, Blanka, Zangief, Guile, and Dhalsim. The bosses are Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison.

Gameplay consists of a series of best of 3 matches, in which the player tries to knock-out the CPU component. The game uses 3 punch and 3 kick buttons, as well as specific combos and special moves for each character. Holding back will allow the player to block while standing or crouching, and different attacks have different priorities over others, making it a very complex and integrated gameplay experience for it's time. A time limit can also end the match and give the point to the character with the most life remaining. Also, if both players have the same remaining life, or knock each other out at the exact same time, no character will get the point.

The game also features 2 bonus stages after the 3rd and 6th fights. The first is a stage in which the player tries to destroy a car within a time limit. This stage is inspired by a similar stage in Final Fight. The second involves the player trying to destroy a brick wall, which is different from the barrels that drop down in the mini game from the arcade version.

The game features an arcade mode with 8 different difficulty levels and 2-player fights.

The game was followed up with many updates, including Street Fighter 2 Turbo and Super Street Fighter for SNES, as well as the Street Fighter Alpha series and several versions of Street Fighter 3 and 4 for later consoles.

This game is available on Wii Virtual Consoles and the arcade version is on the PS2/Xbox title Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 1.