The five SFII games in one is dubbed Hyper Street Fighter II. It pulls SFII, Champion’s Edition, Turbo, Super, and Super Turbo in one game to let players mix and match fighters from each edition to fight it out. It’s interesting to see how the SF characters evolved with subtle, new movements, like Chun Li’s powerpuff fireball in Turbo or Ken’s slap kicks in Super. A nice touch is that the character voices change from old to new between original and Super games, along with their character portraits at the selection screen.

The control in the Hyper five pack has stayed the same. Fighting works okay on the Dual Shock 2 pad, though the lack of diagonals seem to deny certain moves at times. Of course, it’s not the most fair to use the normal character against a Turbo or Super character with an updated move set, but it’s a nice way to throw it in someone’s face if they do get beat with the lesser character.

The graphics are a little washed out in Hyper SFII. The characters aren’t that sharp and look a bit muddled. Some sprites are taken from the SNES translation of the SFII games, which aren’t arcade exact. A few nice extras include the intro to each of the five SFII games, plus the entire SFII anime movie. Besides the Arcade, Versus, and Training Modes, there’s nothing extraordinary in gameplay settings.

Street Fighter III: Third Impact finally makes it over to the states in the Anniversary Collection. Third Impact was Capcom’s third attempt at the SFIII series and it’s become known as one of the best playing SF games of all time.

One of the coolest features in the home edition of Third Impact is the option to adjust every part of the game in Direction Mode. Players can customize parrying [ground/air], guard damage, dash, throws, and super arts. There are seven pages of customization to give hardcore fans the exact gameplay settings they want to fight in.

The gameplay is dead on in Third Impact. It’s one of the most well handling fighting games produced, with every move coming across to the screen at the same split second rate as player input it into the control. Parrying works beautifully, and players can have arcade perfect controls if they invest in an arcade joystick for the game.

Third Impact is one of the most gorgeously animated games and it comes off without a hitch on PS2. The visuals aren’t as sharp as the Dreamcast version, but they animate very well and don’t look like pixilated sprites that are blown up. The sounds are beefy and every combo hit is loud and clear.

Street Fighter Anniversary Collection is a great combo pack for fans. It may have been a long wait to have all the SF games in one pack, but late is better than never for the classic fighters.