Street Fighter Anniversary Collection

The odd thing about Hyper Street Fighter II is that it answers a question nobody asked in the arcades: what if you could pick Ryu from any of the game's earlier versions and fight him against another one? Capcom built the mode from the sprite sets and balance of the Street Fighter II revisions, letting you choose among the original World Warrior, Champion Edition, Turbo and Super versions of each character. It is a fan's toy, and a clever one.

The second half of the disc is the one with real weight. Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike is the final version of the third game, and it is the entry that eventually earned the reputation its commercial run did not. The parry system is the reason. Tapping forward or down at the instant an attack lands negates it completely, and that turns defense into something you perform rather than endure. It rewards nerve and memorization, and it punishes button-mashing more sharply than almost any other fighter of its time.

The disc also carries the rough edges of its bargain. The Street Fighter II side runs on the old CPS-II arcade hardware's assumptions, so the visuals are sharp but dated, and the roster of the third game is a clean break from the faces most players came for. Some players will find the cast cold on first meeting. The animation, though, is some of the best hand-drawn work Capcom ever put on screen, and it still looks fluid.

As a package it is modest: two games, some extras, and no attempt at a big museum tour of the series. That restraint suits it. You get one of the most dissected fighting systems ever built next to a fond remix of the game that started the genre's boom, and the pairing shows how far Capcom's thinking moved in under a decade. Nothing else on the PS2 makes that argument as plainly.