As expected, Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting was released this morning. Oh, this is just what I need as I wait to waste all my time on Madden later this month.

The game is true to the original, which is perhaps my biggest complaint with all of these retro titles. I guess it's debatable whether they should keep the original graphics. Purists would probably prefer that, but I personally think it would have been nice to see them brush them up a la the VGA remakes of EGA games back in the day. What bothers me most is the use of screen real estate. Frogger and Galaga, both of which had the vertical positioning of the old arcade boxes, waste a LOT of space, particularly on HDTV. It's especially bad for me because my primary HDTV which I play this on is 4:3 so I'm already letterboxed. Since the Xbox doesn't do variable output modes, I end up playing the game in a tiny little square in the middle of my 36" HDTV. (By contrast, my DVR box outputs 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i depending on the channel). I haven't hooked up the system to my widescreen 26" LCD, but I imagine it suffers from the same problem.

The game is fun, of course, but then it's just SFII! I played two quick "quarter mode" games online, but unfortunately after my first win the next two lagged out. Hopefully this was an isolated incident and not evidence of a lag problem in yet another Xbox 360 title.

What do you think? Should it be a straight port or should they have added some graphic polish?