Street Fighter II

Porting an arcade hit that defined an entire fighting genre onto a small gray handheld sounds like a crazy idea. Yet Street Fighter II made its way to the Game Boy and became proof of how far you could push eight-bit hardware. Anyone who experienced Street Fighter II in the arcades knew what to expect, and the handheld version tried to cram that experience into the palm of your hand.

The basic equation remains untouched. You pick a fighter from a gallery of world warriors such as Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, or Guile, and in one-on-one duels you try to drain your opponent's health before time runs out. Special moves like the legendary Hadoken or Shoryuken are input with directional-pad motions and buttons, so here too it holds that knowing the commands turns a button-masher into a game of strategy.

The Game Boy's limitations are of course noticeable. The monochrome screen, fewer buttons, and lower frame rate give the game a different cadence than the colorful originals on the big consoles. Even so, the developers managed to preserve character readability and the feel of combos, which was a solid technical feat on such modest hardware.

Street Fighter II is generally regarded as the game that, in its day, sparked the fighting-game craze and launched an era of tournaments and endless variants. Capcom rewrote the rules of the genre with it and created characters who became pop-culture icons. The handheld version thus let players take a piece of this revolution with them anywhere.

For Game Boy owners, it was a way to relive the matches away from the arcades and home consoles. From today's vantage point, it stands mainly as an interesting testament to just how far the ambition reached to port big arcade blockbusters onto the smallest available hardware of the era.

Why play: A handheld take on the fighting game that defined the genre, for reliving its iconic warriors and their special moves anywhere you go.