Play Street Fighter 2 Champ. Edition Online

I first played Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition on the Super Nintendo in 1992, a port of the arcade game by Capcom. It was a big deal at the time, one of those games that felt like a genuine event, a direct link to the noisy arcade cabinets that were still everywhere. The SNES version was the one you could actually own, the one you didn't need a pocketful of quarters for, and it became the centerpiece of my living room for a good long while.

You pick one of the original eight World Warriors or, for the first time, one of the four boss characters, and then you fight through a series of one-on-one matches. The main goal is to beat everyone and become the world warrior, but the real objective was always to beat your friend sitting next to you on the couch. The signature mechanics are the special moves, like throwing a Hadouken fireball or performing a Shoryuken uppercut, which require precise joystick motions and button presses. The pacing is fast and the difficulty is sharp, especially against the computer, which can feel brutally cheap on higher settings. It feels like a test of both your reflexes and your ability to read an opponent, a constant back-and-forth of feints and reactions.