87 - Street Fighter Alpha 2 (Saturn)

This is, for me, where the Street Fighter series reached its peak. Midway between the slightly clunky simplicity of the original and the expert-centric Street Fighter III. I mostly played SFII on the SNES in its original conversion, and boy did I play it. I can't think of many games aside from RPGs that I've put so much time into, but SFII was a regular after-school feature hours every night for months.

Since that time I haven't revisited it much (it's so geared towards two-player as are all beat 'em ups), but the time I spent with Alpha 2 on the Saturn convinced me that this was as good as it got. Many would argue for Alpha 3 but I dislike the -isms, and generally found that it was there that the series started to overcomplicate (indeed, SF IIIs counter/combo system does nothing but leave me aching for simpler times).

Nice clean visuals, well animated enough and good old-fashioned, no-nonsense bonecrunching fun.