Some guy named M.Bison sets up a tournament for people who like to fight in streets, and eight people all enter. I wonder where you sign up for things like this? Anyway, all the characters have some sort of reason for signing up, Chun Li wants to get money to buy a new skirt, Zangief has these nasty open wounds and needs money for health insurance, Dahlsim wants hair club for men, Ryu and Ken want to learn english (haaa do ken!) etc. etc. The actual plot is somewhat odd as some other-wordly aspects are brought into this one.

This is just a stellar fighting game. There are no bells and whistles, just good gameplay and intense fights. There really isn't much to keep the game new, just different difficulty levels, but the game is fairly hard and once you get bored against the CPU then its time to rack on your friends. This game is great 2P.

One thing I've always wondered about is the 'energy balls' or whatever that Ryu and Ken throw (they basically give everybody some sort of fire/energy ball in the sequels, which is absolutely idiotic in my opinion. The thing that made these things cool was that they were unique... anyway). If you throw a ball of energy that hits your opponent, wouldn't your opponent get really engergetic? I mean seriously, I would love for one of those things to have hit me when I was falling asleep in organic chemistry this semester.