Can you believe that the granddaddy that invented the fighting genre as we know it is already fifteen years old? I still remember running into it the other day, when I was a young 18 years of age, and playing it for the first time, smacking E. Honda around with Blanka before Ryu put me in my place. Well, fifteen years later, the memory of Capcom's Street Fighter II still lives on strongly with many gamers, and now the company is celebrating by bringing the arcade classic to a whole new plateau.

After entertaining audiences in arcades, on the SNES, and in various collections for the PlayStation and other consoles, Street Fighter II is now headed to Xbox Live Arcade, where it is destined to find a whole new audience who have begun picking up the machine and discovering its abundant online capabilities. We recently had a chance to go hands-on with a near-final build of the game, and fighting fanatics are in for a treat.

The game is based on the third version of the Street Fighter II classic, which would be Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting. This means that it not only retains some kind of momentum that fighting fans will be familiar with, but you have access to twelve characters, including the four bosses- Sagat, Vega, Balrog, and M. Bison. Each character has their own special moves that come into play, along with the three punch and kick buttons that can be used strategically for high, low, and jumping attacks. It's basic fighting nature.

The fighting, however, is anything but basic. We ran a few bouts and it felt like getting right back in front of the old arcade machine again, using strategies for blocking and then coming right back with a move to put the opponent in their place. I fought against another journalist who thought he had something special with Guile and his flash kick, but Blanka brought him back down to Earth pretty quickly with a spinning dash, leading into a couple of quick jabs and an electrical charge that left him laid out. I almost felt like gloating around the exhibit hall for good measure, but declined. After all, there's always the possibility this guy would get on Xbox Live the following month and hand me my ass.

The game is emulated perfectly, complete with the line-scrolling floors, the detailed animation, and, most importantly, the fighting momentum, which hasn't lost a step in the game's fifteen-year age. The music is classic Street Fighter, complete with E. Honda's bathhouse groove and Chun Li's exotic background theme. As for the controls, you can actually map out your Xbox 360 controller to your specifics, so you can set up the punches and kicks how you please and really get in there and lay the smack down on your opponents.

Online play appears to be pretty smooth, with only a mild hiccup here and there to interrupt the play. Capcom assured us that the final version will have smooth online play, and will also enable a new feature called "Quarter Mode", where a player can reserve a spot in a fighting match and then step up with their own individual challenge. It's hardly a new feature, but it is a nice one to have.

Street Fighter II should be available for Xbox Live download later on this spring, and we'll be back with a full review and the lowdown on whether it's worth a purchase or not. But I think it's safe to say that, with the inclusion of online play and all the glory of the original arcade game, it'll be worth dropping a few bucks on. Now to practice my Tiger Uppercut...muhaha...