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Although Capcom's Street Fighter wasn't nearly as successful as some of its arcade rivals, it was at least as enjoyable to play, due to the interesting feature of 'pressure pads' on the console which measured how hard you punched it with your fist, causing an attack to be launched on your on-screen opponent with equal ferocity. With graphics and sound to match the excellence of the gameplay, it's not surprising that Street Fighter was one of the first games US Gold started working on when they signed up every Capcom game for the next aeon.

In case you haven't seen the coin-op, or missed the CU review in July (Where were you?!) I'll give you a brief game explanation: You play Ryu, an aspiring young street fighter who wants to become king of the bullyboys, so he hops on a plane and travels to far and distant lands to battle it out with the 'ardest men in the world. The countries you can visit include the US, China, Japan and the UK.

Each country has its own distinctive backdrop, for example Japan has a pagoda setting, and each has its own pair of enemies. If you choose to travel to China, you'll come up against Lee and Gen; Retsu and Geki the ninja can be found in Japan. Eagle and Birdie hang out in England and Joe and Mike can be found in the States.

The game is in a very similar vein to the aging Yie-Ar Kung Fu. Control of your fighter is a pretty standard affair, employing the well-worn 'one direction for one technique' method. Each opponent will have his own fighting style, for instance Geki the Ninja has a habit of disappearing in a mystic whirlwind and then reappearing somewhere totally different.

Although Street Fighter's instructions boast all kinds of flashy moves, most of them are difficult to execute. Only the standard straight punch and kick were easy to execute. To make this worse, it's possible to beat all your opponents by using just these moves repeatedly: just keep bashing away and eventually your enemy will collapse. In fact, the whole thing is rather suspect where sprite collision is concerned.

Don't be fooled by the attractive screenshots either, they may look nice while they're still but as soon as they start moving it's Jerk City, so much so that the whole program becomes very tiresome to play, and any initial interest will soon wane. Maybe the reason for the sloppy execution of Street Fighter is that it was programmed by Tiertex, formerly known for converting Rolling Thunder to the Amiga, and writing the below-average UK version of Street Fighter on the C64. Looks like they just can't cut it.