In 1992, Street Fighter II came to to the Super Nintendo. Nintendo knew they had the game everyone wanted, and made sure to rub it in SEGA owner's faces. There were rumors of a SEGA version, and in early 1993 it was finally revealed: a port of Street Fighter II' Champion Edition. This version was never released, despite being close to completion, due to Capcom not being happy with its quality. Some prototypes of this version have been released, which the above screens are from, and I'd advise reading this article on Hidden Palace about them.

All was thankfully not lost for SEGA owners, as Capcom came back with a new edition of the game: Special Champion Edition. It includes two games: a version of Hyper Fighting and a version of Champion Edition. This version came on a 24 megabyte cartridge, making it one of the largest 16-bit games around at the time. In Japan, it is known as Street Fighter II' Plus. A 6 button joypad was released around the same time as this game, whilst the game is playable with the regular 3 button pad, you're much better off playing it with a 6 button one -using a 3 button pad requires you to press start to change between punches and kicks!

The Genesis version looks really good, all the characters are present and all of the special moves and stages are there. The same kind of cuts made to the SNES version apply here, with the unique backwards walking animation removed and the danger music gone. But it does have the full intro from the arcade version, along with some unique content -there was a group battle mode which let 2 players pick teams of fighters and take each other on in match play or elimination. You could also turn off character's special moves if you wanted, and some cheats included letting you only use special moves!

The most glaring fault of this version is the sound. Whilst the music sounds great, and is much closer to the arcade than the SNES version, it's the character speech which is the main problem. It sounds absolutely horrible... shorhugen... spiggin burd jick... and is really grating to listen to. Whilst many are quick to blame the Genesis hardware for being the reason why the speech is so bad, it's not actually the case -hackers have managed to make it sound much better, check this video for more details.

Aside from the character speech, this was everything SEGA owners could have hoped for and it is one of the best games on the system. It was also later made available as a downloadable game for the Wii's Virtual Console, but it's no longer possible to get it on there. It saw a release on Radica's plug and play console, which also included the Genesis version of Ghouls 'n Ghosts. Finally, it's one of the games included on the SEGA Genesis Mini.