Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers

Super Street Fighter 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' Turbo: Hyper Fighting. In addition to refining and balancing the existing character roster from the previous versions, 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 in previous versions of Street Fighter II.

Super Street Fighter II was followed by Super Street Fighter II Turbo, a fifth version of Street Fighter II released the following year, 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/Unused 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 frames of animation), while Chun-Li now has a new animation for her Kikoken projectile. 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.

An alternate version of Super Street Fighter II features eight-player single-elimination tournament gameplay. Super Street Fighter II: The Tournament Battle requires 4 networked arcade cabinets. This edition of the game 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.

The endings for most of the returning characters have been left intact from previous releases, although some of the art assets (such as Guile's wife and daughter in his ending) have been redrawn. The only exceptions are Chun-Li and the four Grand Masters, who were each given a new ending sequence. In Chun-Li's ending, the player is given a choice to have her continue her career as a policewoman or become a regular civilian.

All twelve characters from the previous Street Fighter II games returned, with many having their basic and special techniques refined to adjust the overall balance. Some of the characters received new special techniques such as Ryu's Fire Hadōken (renamed Shakunetsu Hadōken in the Street Fighter Alpha series), a flaming Shoryuken for Ken, Zangief's Atomic Buster, and M. Bison's Devil Reverse.

Four new characters were also introduced to the game in addition to the returning roster, expanding the number of playable characters to sixteen. The new characters include T. Hawk, an indigenous warrior from Mexico whose ancestral homeland was taken from him by Shadaloo; Cammy, a 19-year-old female special forces agent from England with a mysterious past tied to M. Bison; Fei Long, a Hong Kong movie star who wishes to test his martial arts against real opponents; and Dee Jay, a kickboxing musician from Jamaica seeking inspiration for his next song.

Despite the addition of four new characters, the number of matches against the computer in the single-player mode remained unchanged at 12. Eight opponents are chosen at random, followed by the four Grand Masters (Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison).

The Super NES version of Super Street Fighter II, released on June 25, 1994 in Japan, and during the same month in North America and Europe, was the third Street Fighter game released for the console, following the original Street Fighter II and Street Fighter II Turbo (a port of Hyper Fighting). It was released on a 32 Megabit cartridge and featured support for the XBAND online network. The SNES port featured several new game modes such as Group Battle and Time Challenge, as well as the eight-player Tournament mode from the arcade version, in addition to the previous games' Arcade and Versus modes. Due to hardware limitations, certain music and sound effects were replaced with different renditions. Like in the SNES version of Turbo, the background music stops playing between rounds, and as a result the music restarts from the beginning at the start of each round. Unlike the Genesis version, the SNES port has the blood for the character's beat up portraits removed or replaced with sweat (most likely due to Nintendo's strict censorship policy at the time). The world record for the Super NES version of Super Street Fighter II is currently held by Andrew Schramm of San Jose, California, who achieved a score of 899,900 points in May 2011.