29.Again, if I was doing a list on my top most impactful games, this would be in the top five. As I moved away from beat-em ups in the arcade scene, I happen upon Street Fighter and the 90s arcade revival scene it brought along with it. While I sucked back in the day due to being too dumb and poor to really dedicate myself to it and understand the rules and concepts of the medium; none of that dissuade me from liking the concept and obsessing over it as a kid. So much so that when I learned the games were coming to home console, I immediately wanted to see. I had my dad rent me a Sega Genesis at the time because it was the console I wanted to have after my Nintendo, but trying to play SFII on it with it's limited controller made me realize that the SNES would be a better choice if I wanted to play it and not have to buy an arcade stick to play the game properly. So in essence, this is the game that got me an SNES, which eventually lead to my RPG friends lending me Secret of Mana and FFVI, which eventually lead me to my love of the RPG genre. Go figure. I did learn some interesting tidbits about this game. SFII: Turbo was the direct result of Capcom shutting down a fan mod of Street Fighter II: Champion Editions called Street Fighter II: The Rainbow Edition where the designers heavily modified all of the games specials to ridiculous proportions like homing fireballs, Blanka Rolls that have him loop around the screen, and other shenanigans. The game also had ridiculous speed added to it, so Capcom shut down the game but then incorporated several ideas from it for this edition. The most obvious was boosting the games speed which was a must because the original was slow as hell and I still get kind of pissy when I feel like the game is a bit too slow. It also modified some moves and added new ones for characters. For instance, Chun-Li got a fireball in the fan mod, and Capcom apparently liked it enough to give it to her. Dhalsim also gained his teleport move and as far as I know, Guile's moveset was finalized for this game cause the man has never changed since. It was also nice that this game retained elements from Champion Edition like the ability to play as the bosses. This is probably the SF game I have spent the most time with, I even beat the game with every character and tried to go for the super secret higher difficulty endings, though I did fail on those ones. Sadly, while the SNES controller did offer the ability to use the whole moveset of the characters, that D-Pad still left much to be desired for performing special moves, so I probably wasn't quite at my peak for the series. Still I had an absolute blast with this title and it still remains one of my favorite SNES games.For those wondering, I'm a Shoto guy, but I also play Blanka, E.Honda, and M. Bison though I'm rusty with the last two. I want to get better with Chun-Li but her moveset doesn't mesh well with my style, same with Sagat.
Reminiscing about it, this does remind me that I have some of the later and more popular versions like Super Street Fighter II: Turbo and even Street Fighter III's later versions which I also enjoy, but this is the one I know the best which is why it's here and not them. Despite that, this game isn't my favorite entry in the franchise, but you'll understand that pretty soon.While I do like the fighting game genre, I never really strayed from Street Fighter or Capcom. I've played some Darkstalkers and even dabbled in Mortal Kombat with the second entry, but I've never really found the same kind of hook I got from this series. I think Guilty Gear may have been the closest.