I have to admit, when I first stumbled across Street Fighter 2 on the Game Boy, I wasn't aware that it ever got released. I was dubious at first as having played a few of the Mortal Kombat games for the same system realized this port might turn out to be a bit of a let down like they were. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of turning a Game Boy on to play a Mortal Kombat game right now knows exactly what i’m talking about I was still intrigued and really wanted to see a hadouken performed on my Game Boy, so it was bought.
 
As you load up the game the first screen you get is the original Capcom logo with the exact same sound, followed by the title screen with the same tune. This is worth the money already, I can tell!! Now I'm all geared up after listening to the full track and transformed into street fighter mood, I have 3 modes and an options to choose from. The modes are Normal (Story Mode), Versus (Link play) and Survival so already this is great because you would expect almost everything to be cut to fit it onto a handheld console also making sure the 2 player option survived the transfer to the smaller screen is another plus because most of the best stuff for Street Fighter is experienced with two players.

On the character select screen you can choose any one of 9 Street Fighters. Which means as you guessed it you SF2 buff you, that some have been dropped for the handheld port. Sadly Vega, Dhalsim and E.Honda didn't survive the cut and this means I can't use E.Honda's turbo hand slap to chase people around the screen. But can maybe understand why E.Honda got cut, because the big guy would have been difficult to squeeze into the tiny, little game boy cart. I also imagine that Vega was cut because of his fast movement and that zipping around the screen that fast would have been nearly impossible for the little old black & white screen to handle, after all the Gameboy did suffer from quite horrid screen blur’s when things scrolled. The version which I'm playing is the Japanese edition and Balrog is called M.Bison and M.Bison is called Balrog, which is just pure wrong and confusing, it really annoys me! (Sarcasm, natch. -Ed.) Any how...
 
Now it's fight time and all I can say is WOW, the detail on the level backgrounds are fantastic and look very much like the 16 bit ports do, accompanied by each characters individual music per stage playing in the background whilst you bout. The on screen fighters can be made out and look very much how they should with fine detail and animations. The game plays smoothly and after a fight or two you get used to the slightly slower pace than the higher powered port versions. You only use the A & B buttons along with the D pad on this, to get your different punches/kicks you just have to hold down the A or B button for a slightly longer time.