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 a head-to-head fighting game produced by Capcom originally released as a coin-operated arcade game in 1993. It is the fourth game in the Street Fighter II sub-series of Street Fighter games, following Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting. In addition to refining and balancing the existing character roster from the previous installments, Super Street Fighter II also introduced four new characters. It was also the first game to be developed on Capcom's CP System II hardware, which permitted more sophisticated graphics and audio over the original CP System hardware, used by the previous versions of Street Fighter II.
The Sega Genesis version was released simultaneously with the SNES counterpart on all three regions. Although there are many differences between the SNES and Genesis ports, the two versions are almost identical in terms of content. Like its SNES counterpart, the Genesis port supported the XBAND network as well (although, only for its North American release). The Genesis version was released on a 40 Megabit cartridge, which allowed the inclusions of voice clips of the game's announcer stating the names of the countries before each match, although the audio quality is not of the same level as the original arcade game. In the Options menu, the player can choose to play the Super Battle mode on "Normal" or "Expert" modes. The latter increases the number of opponents from the arcade version's 12 to all 16 characters. This version has been re-released on the Wii Virtual Console in Japan on November 8, 2011, the PAL region on April 12, 2012 and in North America on April 26, 2012.
Super Street Fighter II was followed by Super Street Fighter II Turbo, a fifth version of Street Fighter II released during the following year 1994, which further refined the balance between characters and introduced additional new features.
All of the stages, character portraits and even the HUD feature all new graphics. The original opening sequence which featured two generic characters fighting in front of a crowd was replaced by a new opening featuring lead character Ryu launching a Hadoken projectile towards the screen. New animation frames were drawn for all the characters for their basic and special moves, as well as new victory poses. For example, all four boss characters now have new animation frames for basic attacks (Vega and Sagat did not have jumping punches in the previous games, while many of their standing and crouching attacks shared the same animation), while Chun-Li now has a new animation for her Kikoken projectile technique. The music and sound effects were also remade and a new announcer was introduced, who also recorded new voice samples for some of the characters (Ken, Guile and Sagat).
Super Street Fighter II features a new scoring system which kept track of combos, first attacks, reversals and recoveries made by the player and awards the player with bonus points by performing such deeds.
Each character now has available eight color schemes, depending on which button is pressed to select the character. Players could choose between a character's original color scheme, their color schemes from Champion Edition and Hyper Fighting, or one of five new color schemes featured in the game.
The faster game speed introduced in Hyper Fighting was reduced back to the same speed level as Champion Edition. The faster game speed would return in Super Turbo.
In addition to the standard single and two-player game modes, Super Street Fighter II also feature an exclusive eight-player single-elimination tournament mode dubbed Tournament Battle. This mode is only available when four Super Street Fighter II arcade game cabinets are connected together and all of them configured to "Tournament" mode. The Tournament Mode consists of three sets of four simultaneous matches: the initial eliminations, the semifinals and the finals. After the first set is over, the players are re-arranged accordingly based on their position: the winning players sent to either of the first two cabinets, whereas losing players sent to one of the other two. In the finals, the players competing for first place are sent to the first cabinet, the third-place players to the second cabinet, and so on.
