IN Street Fighter you take control of one of the two young martial arts masters, Ryu and Ken. Extremely confident in your ability, you travel around the world and take on all challengers.

There are 10 different street fighting opponents to take on, two of each from Japan, America, England, China and Thailand. If you defeat both adversaries from each country you are taken into a bonus stage that allows you to earn more money by breaking as many bricks as possible with the traditional macho karate chop.

The Capcom arcade game was hugely successful because the machine had punch pads, which allowed the player to bash the coin-op as hard as he wished. The strength of the hit represented the equivalent force of an attacking strike in the video game.
Without this feature, Street Fighter even in the arcades was a very average karate game. At home awesome graphics do not an arcade game make. When they start to move the incompetence of the programmers is clearly shown.

The animation of the large sprites is so slow that you could make a cup of tea while the computer works out joystick-selected moves. Pathetic sprite animation and an uninspiring soundtrack lost my interest, and although I persevered for the sake of the review I became increasingly bored with this very shoddy and bland attempt.

The game suffers from the leg sweep syndrome, which means that you can progress easily to level five by using one move continuously.

Street Fighter could have been one of the games of the year, but because the programmers were content to take their money for an Amiga version and then simply port the game from the ST, it has finished up as a very poor conversion.

Although Capcom's Street Fighter wasn't nearly as successful as some of its arcade rivals, it was at least enjoyable to play, due to the interesting feature of 'pressure pads' on the console which measured how hard you punched it with your fist, causing an attack to be launched on your on-screen opponent with equal ferocity.

With graphics and sound to match the excellence of the gameplay, it's not surprising that Street Fighter was one of the first games US Gold starting working on when they signed up every Capcom game for the next aeon.

In case you haven't seen the coin-op, or missed the CU review in July (where were you?) I'll give you a brief explanation: You play Ryu, an aspiring young street fighter who wants to become king of the bullboys, so he hops on a plane and travels to far and distant lands to battle it out with the 'ardest men in the world. The countries you can visit include the US, China, Japan and the UK.

Each country has its own distinctive backdrop, for example Japan has a pagoda setting, and each has its own pair of enemies. If you choose to travel to China, you'll come up against Lee and Gen; Retsu and Geki the ninja can be found in Japan. Eagle and Birdie hang out in England and Joe and Mike can be found in the States.

The game is in a very similar vein to the ageing Yie Ar Kung Fu. Control of your fighter is a pretty standard affair, employing the well-worn 'one direction for one technique' method. Each opponent will have his own fighting style, for instance Geki the Ninja has a habit of disappearing in a mystic whirlwind and then reappearing somewhere totally different.

Although Street Fighter's instructions boast all kinds of flashy moves, most of them are difficult and frustrating to execute. Only the standard straight punch and kick were easy to execute. To make things worse, it's possible to beat all your opponents by using just these two moves repeatedly: just keep bashing away and eventually your enemy will collapse. In fact the whole thing is rather suspect where sprite collision is concerned.

Don't be fooled by the attractive screenshots on this page either, they may look nice while they're still but as soon as they start moving it's Jerk City, so much so that the whole program becomes very tiresome to play, and any initial interest will soon wane.

Maybe the reason for the sloppy execution of Street Fighter is that it was programmed by Tiertex, formerly known for converting Rolling Thunder to the Amiga, and writing the below average UK version of Street Fighter on the 64. Looks like they just can't cut it.

Hard is not the word for it. You're harder than very hard, you're even harder than the hardest that ever... erm... was really hard. You're so hard, in fact, that you've decided to prove it to the rest of the world. The meanest, nastiest, vilest street fighters of five different nations have agreed to take you on in one of the dirtiest, most underhand, no-holds-barred street fighting contests in the universe ever.

As Ryu you take on ten well-hard geezers in locations ranging from a railway siding somewhere in America to a pagoda some place in Japan. These are not the sort of guys you'd like to meet on a dark night. Most of them haven't got any more elaborate weapons than their hands and feet but one or two have raided their piggybanks and come equipped with shurikens, bits of lead pipes and even a pair of boxing gloves.

Each opponent is faced separately: whoever gains the best of three bouts is the winner. In two player mode Ryu and Ken (not Barbie's Ken, however) battle it out first to decide which one will take on the rest of the world.

Just to show off even more you can test your reflexes in the bonus levels by attempting to perform a karate chop on a pile of concrete slabs. They're pretty hard as well...