5. Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting (1992)

These days we tend to call this game Hyper Fighting, because everyone associates the word “Turbo” with Super Turbo. But this was the original sped-up Street Fighter game, and it changed the course of the series forever.

The funny thing is, it only came about because of pirates creating countless bootleg versions of Champion Edition that let you perform specials in mid-air, switch characters on the fly, and/or that ran at ridiculously fast speeds. Sick of losing money to pirates, Capcom USA convinced Capcom Japan to make its own spicy update, adding the first-ever new special moves, rebalancing the characters, recoloring everything again, and cranking the play speed some 15 percent faster.

Consider the bounty of blessings Hyper Fighting bestowed. In part:

Chun-Li got her first fireball

Blanka got his up-ball, E. Honda got his down-splash

Ryu and Ken’s hurricane kicks went airborne

Dhalsim got his teleport

These were all iconic additions that lasted the test of time, as was, most importantly, the much faster game speed. Once that genie was out of the bottle there was no going back to the days of more modestly paced fisticuffs*. Capcom itself experienced a rude awakening on this front when it shipped the slow-again, wanly received Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers the following year.

Alongside Super Turbo, Hyper Fighting is my favorite edition of Street Fighter II because the new special moves tend to feel essential and character-completing, the cranked-up speed keeps it exciting, it has that solid CPS-1 feel, and it’s one of the better balanced in the series. Some of the character-specific tweaks are really nice, too. Blanka and Zangief in particular really enjoyed a day in the sun, and have seldom been so fun to play. (This is the last version of Gief without a 360 throw whiff; it’s all downhill for our Russian pal from here.)

Pity that dictator got nerfed to hell, but you can’t make a Turbomelete without breaking some eggs. — Alexandra Hall

*Unless you’re a CE stan, of course.