Xbox Live Arcade roundup

Street Fighter 2

For those that owned a SNES, playing Street Fighter 2: Hiper Fighting was perhaps the pinnacle of gaming nirvana on that system. Whilst perhaps not quite as comprehensive a title as the rival SF2: Special Championship Edition on the Megadrive, the SNES pad lended itself well to the various combos required to beat the CPU opponents. The version of SF2 to appear on Live is, indeed, this SNES classic, although all is not quite as it should be.

The 360 pad is not ideally suited to fighters, since the D-Pad is a little, well, clunky. Pulling off Ryu's fireballs and dragon punches can be a little bit more difficult than it should be, and this isn't helped by the fact that the CPU opponents are absolute, total cheating bastards. OK, so the AI in SF2 has never exactly been known to be the fairest of opponents, but seriously, these guys are hard. The disadvantage of a wireless controller, wev'e found, is that you can throw it further. This is a problem, as the wall behind our TV has found out.

The real SF2 experience has always been about multiplayer, whether it's down the arcade with a wadge of 10ps or in a living room connected to a TV from 1980. The Live version takes this a step further and offers full Xbox Live play, with both a ranked leaderboard system for those wanting to play competitively and a quick match functionality for people just looking for a quick game. These both work well, although the fact that quick match is literally just three rounds before dumping you back to the menu screen is a bit aggravating. If you've found an opponent you enjoy playing against, it would be good to have the option to play on and stay a few more rounds.

The music and the graphics are present and correct, in the now slightly hilarious pixel-o-vision. The retro bent is surely appealing, and you'll get a few hours of fun (or frustration, take your pick) out of this. But, unlike Doom which drags you back in all over again, you won't find yourself spending a whole lot of time with Street Fighter 2, especially not when you can lust after Virtua Fighter 5.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Oh dear. If SF2 wasn't quite everything we were hoping it would be, in retrospect, this conversion of the 1989 arcade game is absolutely hopeless.

For starters, it's made us realise that, for all its hype at the time, the original game was pretty crap. It's a side-scrolling beat-em-up, in which you play one of the four Turtles - each with his own weapon, obviously - taking on the Foot ninja and various other minions of Shredder. The graphics, at the time, looked great - but age has not been kind to them, and today the animation is noticeably jerky.

The game's appearance on Live Arcade has recieved a lot of hype, possibly because there's a new film out at the moment. But none of it is well deserved. The game is ludicrously hard, and not in a fun way. Much of the time, you will die for no reason other than the fact there is no way to beat the enemies presented to you on screen without death. Boss fights are stupidly difficult, and will use up life after life after life. Thankfully, you've got unlimited credits here, rather than having to stick in the coins in an arcade, but this just makes the process tiresome.

Each Turtle has slightly different fighting styles, although you'll be hard pressed to fine any semblance of refinement in any of them. It's a button masher in the worst sense of the word, without even any fun to add to the mashing.

So whilst the Turtles themselves are undoubtedly super-cool, this iteration of their digital selves is not even worth spunking the few quid on. You'll play it through, miserably, in less than an hour, we suspect, and there's no online multiplayer to speak of. You can play co-op, locally, but your mate is likely to give you a real beating afterwards for just wasting an hour of his or her life.

Stay away, there's plenty better on the service.