Capcom's Street Fighter II is now 35 years old, and to celebrate that fact, developer ZXPresh has released a new port for the ZX Spectrum.
Those of you old enough to have lived through the early '90s will recall that not all Street Fighter II ports were created equal. While the SNES, Mega Drive and PC Engine received decent conversions, home computers like the Commodore Amiga, C64 and Spectrum were subjected to pretty terrible ports.
In the case of the Spectrum, it perhaps shouldn't come as a massive shock to learn that the 1992 port of Capcom's one-on-one fighter is pretty terrible. Developed by Tiertex Design Studio (a company with a spotty track record, to put it mildly), the game pretty much abandoned any of the flair seen in the original coin-op in favour of offering a button-mashing mess that looked vaguely similar.
I'm not saying that ZXPresh's Sweet Fightin' +2 is an arcade-perfect copy of the arcade version, but, as you can see from the footage above, it gets a lot closer to achieving that goal than Tiertex's version does.
"Choose from 12 legendary fighters and battle your way across the world in a series of one-on-one, best-of-three fights to achieve the glory and title of Sweet Fightin' Champion... or go head to head with your friends in 2-player mode," says the developer. "Unofficial homage for the ZX Spectrum 128K, celebrating 35 years of the two-player fighting game which shaped the genre!"
You can check out the game here, and it works on original hardware and under emulation.