21. Street Fighter: The Movie (arcade, 1995)

So wait, this digitized disaster of an arcade game based on the damn Van Damme flick somehow ranks above the very first Street Fighter? Well, yeah. Because while it’s certainly a mess, it’s actually fun to play, which people have been picking up on in recent years.

Make no mistake, Incredible Technologies’ Street Fighter: The Movie is a kusoge through and through, a low-tier fighting game enjoyed mainly for its strangeness and jank. But such strangeness, such jank! This thing played like some mutant combination of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, and was far more open to juggling and other combo bullshit than either. Anything goes here—it’s full of infinites, incidentally—so why not juggle them with four dragon punches or spam flash kicks like they’re nearly safe on block (I think they are?). Incidentally, this is the first Street Fighter game in which characters had more than one super move.

While it’s gaudy as hell, Street Fighter: The Movie le arcade also has a lot more colors and like three times the animation frames of Capcom’s more staid home adaptation of the film, making it nicer to watch, too. Good game? Not really! But it’s just the ticket if you wanna zone out to some wack-ass, alt-universe Street Fighter madness. — Alexandra Hall