Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers (スーパーストリートファイターII THE NEW CHALLENGERS) is an update to Street Fighter II, and was originally released in arcades in 1993. It is the fourth arcade release of Street Fighter II, following the original Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, and Street Fighter II (Turbo): Hyper Fighting. It was brought to the Sega Mega Drive in 1994.
Improvements
Unlike previous entries in the series the arcade Super Street Fighter II runs on the more powerful Capcom CPS-2 hardware (as opposed to the CPS-1 which previous entries in the series used), which means that although the core gameplay is the same, many refinements to the graphics and audio were made. It also introduces four new characters; T. Hawk, Cammy, Fei-Long and Dee Jay. All additions from Champion Edition and Hyper Fighting remain intact.
Mega Drive Version
Super Street Fighter II was the second Street Fighter II game to be released for the Sega Mega Drive, following from the Mega Drive-only release of Street Fighter II': Special Champion Edition (effectively a tweaked version of Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting with alterations more suited to the Mega Drive's hardware). Unlike the arcade lineage, however, Super Street Fighter II was rebuilt almost completely from scratch, so although derives from the same base as Special Champion Edition, borrows very few assets from that earlier release.
Super Street Fighter II uses a different sound driver than Special Champion Edition, and the majority of graphics have been re-drawn and improved. It also re-introduces missing elements from the older release such as the announcer's voice.
However, this comes at a cost — the game ROM is 5MB (40 Megabits) in size, while the Mega Drive console can only safely access 4MB (you can theoretically go up to 10MB but the Sega CD and 32X will clobber you). Capcom created a special bank switching mapper unit to get around this problem, with Super Street Fighter II being the only officially licensed game on the Mega Drive to use such technology (others opt for an SRAM mapper). The custom hardware and larger ROM, however, drove the game's price to ¥10,900 in Japan, with similar inflated prices across the world. The only other licensed Mega Drive games originally priced at more than ¥10,000 were Koei's various titles, but those were deliberately sold at those prices.
Capcom also released a Super Nintendo version of Super Street Fighter II at around the same period, which shares assets with this Mega Drive version. The SNES code (and by extension, likely this Mega Drive version's code) derives from two older SNES releases; a port of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1992) and a retooled version of Hyper Fighting, Street Fighter II Turbo (1993).
Sequels and Re-releases
In the arcades, Super Street Fighter II would be followed up by yet another update, Super Street Fighter II Turbo (known as Super Street Fighter II X in Japan). This would avoid the Mega Drive (and SNES) in favour of the 3DO, Amiga, Amiga CD32 and IBM PC, however a would eventually make its way to the Sega Dreamcast in a tweaked form, Super Street Fighter II X for Matching Service.
Arcade ports of both Super Street Fighter II and Super Street Fighter II Turbo would be included in the Sega Saturn release of Street Fighter Collection. This Mega Drive version of Super Street Fighter II has also since been brought over to the Wii's Virtual Console in Japan (and listed on Sega's main site for some reason).
Physical Scans
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90
|
Sega Retro Average
|
| Based on 6 reviews
|
| Publication
|
Score
|
Source
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| Consoles +
|
92
|
№34, p116/117
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| Computer & Video Games
|
88
|
№153
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| Joypad
|
80
|
№33, p122/123/124/125
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| Mean Machines Sega
|
92
|
№23, p60/61/62/63/64/65
|
| Sega Power
|
96
|
№57
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| Sega Pro
|
90
|
№35, p44/45
|
|
| Mega Drive, US
|
Cover
|
 Cart |
| Mega Drive, EU
|
Cover
|
|
|
| Mega Drive, JP
|
Cover
|
|
|
| Mega Drive, BR
|
Cover
|
|
|
| Mega Drive, KR
|
|
|
 Cart |
| Mega Drive, Asia
|
Cover
|
|
|
