2001 saw a new version of Street Fighter II, this time released for Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. Called Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival, this version features all new artwork, several new stages, the ability to play as two different versions of Akuma and a lot more. It looked like it was going to be a great version.

But then you actually play it, and you realize it's awful. Clearly it was not tested properly, as the U.S. and European versions feature a game destroying bug. If you meet the requirements to fight Akuma, you will get that middle screen above featuring a glitchy picture of him. All you can do is restart the game, at which point you will see that all of your time attack and survival mode data will be permanently glitched up. There are many other stupid bugs in all regional variants of this title.

There was also some other really slack things, such as three of the four bosses having the wrong win quotes, or the fact that Akuma has his separate animation for walking backwards as well as forwards, whilst all the other characters are using their SNES sprites with less animation. The game may look nice in stills, but it suffers from slow down -Ken's fierce dragon punch will always make the game lag if it hits the opponent. The new stages are hit and miss, such as the new stages for Bison, Ken and Ryu not featuring any background animation at all. I also don't really get why some stages were changed to backgrounds from other games -for example, Chun-Li's stage now looks like her stage from SF Alpha 2, whilst Ryu's stage now resembles his 3rd Strike stage, just set at night instead of day. This is meant to be SFII.

In addition to the arcade mode, there is a versus mode that can be played via linking up two GBA consoles together (both players will each need a copy of the game). There's also a training mode, along with survival and time attack modes. Survival has you fight various numbers of opponents, whilst time attack lets you take on the bonus games, or defeat a certain number of CPU opponents as quickly as possible. This version also features an alternate control scheme, which makes special and super moves much easier to perform. Press select to toggle it on or off. When the easier controls are on, you can do things like Ryu's hadouken by pressing forward and punch, or Bison's psycho crusher by pressing back, forward punch (no need to charge). All super moves can be done by pressing the A and B buttons together.

I have particular hatred for Revival, since I wasted a lot of money on it back in the day and none of the magazines I read mentioned anything about how glitchy this version was. Instead, everyone seemed to shower it with glowing reviews and Capcom really got lucky thanks to that, because this thing should have been recalled as far as I'm concerned. In addition to the original Game Boy Advance version, you can also get it on the Wii U's virtual console -one good thing about this version is the Akuma fight glitch was fixed, and he can be fought without any issues.